Music is a big part of many people’s lives. Personally, I love to have music playing in the background throughout my home. Nowadays, music is mostly played using streaming services. Not long ago, it was on CDs, before that cassette taps, before that vinyl records. But the first commercially available medium for recorded music is one that most people have never heard of — Edison phonograph cylinders.
Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the phonograph in 1877, at first using tin foil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. That proved the concept, but wasn’t sufficient for commercial production of recorded music. In 1889, Edison refined and began to market wax cylinders containing professionally recorded 2-minute songs. Made of soft wax, these cylinders would wear out after just a few plays (but then could be reused).
In 1908, Edison introduced Amberol cylinders, now made with a new, harder wax that could hold 4-minute recordings. These in general were able to hold up better than earlier cylinders, but were more fragile and prone to breaking and cracking. In 1912, Edison introduced Blue Amberol cylinders, which offered better audio quality and were less fragile. But in the 1910s, consumers began to prefer disc records and cylinders fell into decline.
This particular cylinder is a 1910 recording of the song “Come Back to Erin”, on a 4-minute Amberol (not “blue”) cylinder. This is an Irish love song, released as part of Edison’s “British series” of recordings, performed by Ernest Pike (1871 – 1936) and Peter Dawson (1882 – 1961), who were both very popular and prolific singers during the early era of recorded music.
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