The French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created the first sound recording in history in 1857. It was a rendition of the folksong "Au clair de la lune," captured by Scott's trademark invention—the phonautograph. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound.
Thomas Edison's phonograph was the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal which was temporarily wrapped around a grooved cylinder.
The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative and the oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. In 1931, RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long-playing record.
Below you’ll find some examples from our collection.
Edison Blue Amberol Record Cylinder. (2014.005.078.A-F)
The Blue Amberol was introduced in 1912 and would be the last incarnation of the cylinder line for the Edison Company. Edison Blue Amberols had a playing time of around four minutes and were marketed as a more durable alternative to wax.
The cylinders featured everything from popular music and band selections to concert and operatic music. This cylinder contains lessons on dictation elocution.
Bubble Book (97.8.37)
Created in 1917,” the “Bubble Book” was one of the first products to combine the world of book publishing with the new recording industry.
Three of the book’s pages doubled as record sleeves and each of these sleeves contained a miniaturized record, which sang aloud the printed nursery rhymes.
Resources
Eastside Heritage Center Archives
Dumas, Pierre Stephane. “A Brief History of Recorded Music - Part 1.” Medium, The Serenader Project, 8 Jan. 2022, https://medium.com/the-serenader-project/a-brief-history-of-recorded-music-c1b782daac79.
O'Dell, Cary. The First “Bubble Book” (1917) - Library of Congress. 2003, https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/BUBBLE%20BOOK.pdf.
“Phonograph.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Dec. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph.
University of California, Santa Barbara. Library. Department of Special Collections. “Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.” Index, University of California, Santa Barbara. Library. Department of Special Collections., 16 Nov. 2005, https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-blueamberol.php.
