- Preservation Home
- About
- Collections Care
- Conservation
- Digital Preservation
- Emergency Management
- En Español
- FAQ
- Preservation Science
- Resources
- Outreach & Training Opportunities
- Have a preservation question?
Ask-a-Librarian
Related Links
Cylinder Recordings and the Library of Congress
{
subscribe_url: '/share/sites/Bapu4ruC/preservation.php'
}
Background Information and Cylinder Collections at the Library
Cylinder recordings, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, were the first successful form for recording and reproducing sound. Made first of tin foil, then wax, and later celluloid, the cylinder was used until the late 1940's.
Cylinders, like early disc recordings, were recorded acoustically: sound was picked up by a recording horn (an inverted megaphone), causing a membrane placed in the small end of the horn to vibrate. A recording stylus attached to the membrane etched or embossed the sound vibrations into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc. The stylus used to playback such recordings could be made from a wide range of materials, including cactus thorns, precious and semi-precious stones, and steel.
The Library of Congress has about 50,000 wax and celluloid cylinder recordings, the largest collection in the world. These recordings are of such rarity and fragility that they are played only to make preservation transfers and user access copies.
The content of the cylinders in the Library's collection is highly diverse. It includes anthropological field recordings, music, and speeches, such as by William Jennings Bryant, Theodore Roosevelt, and spoken greetings to the American people from Kaiser Wilhelm II (the first sound recording acquired by the Library).
Annotated Bibliography
Cylinder Audio Recordings: an Annotated Bibliography [PDF: 3 MB / 42 pp.] grew out of a search for information on replacement equipment for the cylinder recordings in the Library's collections. “The project rapidly expanded to include all information we could locate on cylinder recordings. It quickly became obvious that the sources were very limited, pulling them together in one place would save time in the future,” said Gerald Gibson, author of the bibliography. Among the topics covered are recording and reproducing, storage and handling, catalogs and cataloging, and repair of damaged items.