Emile Berliner's Fix: Flatten the Cylinder to a Disc 

A huge antiques place I visited had over a hundred cylinders. I was surprised that 95% of each cylinder package was taken up with Edison's name and a PORTRAIT of him. The actual artist/song information was tiny text written on the edge of the cylinder and the end cap of the package. Even the serial number was bigger than the song title. It was basically impossible to find a specific cylinder from a collection of them. The guy seemed to have no respect for the content, like he thought the entire value of music to consumers was them basking in his genius. Imagine all the album art in iTunes was just a picture of Steve Jobs with "STEVE JOBS" written over it in giant text, with the actual song name and artist written in tiny text across the bottom under a copyright notice.

Ok I am convinced! I will buy a disk instead of a cylinder. Thank for the great review

How albums of discs stored much more compactly than cylinders reminds me of how books eventually replaced scrolls.

My piano teacher, back in 1963, had a disc recorder. She used it to record students so they could listen to themselves. It looked like a regular phonograph, except it had a cutting head on a worm gear. She'd put a blank plastic (vinyl, I presume) disc on the turntable and fire it up. As it recorded, black detritus would emerge from where the cutter touched the disc, which she continuously swept away with a small paintbrush. You could then take the disc home and play it on your regular record player. So, consumer disc recorders did exist, but I imagine they were fairly rare. Hers was the only one I had ever seen in the wild, as it were. I did see one in the film, "The King's Speech.," decades later.

This brings back old memories. When I was a kid in the late '40s and early '50s my grandfolks had a Victrola talking machine very much like the one you show in this video, and I spent many a happy hour cranking that thing up to sing along with the old records. Thank you for this and all your videos on technology. They are wonderfully well written, edited, and produced and full of interesting information. It's obvious that you put a huge amount of effort and dedication into making them.

"Pi, about 3.14" That's a suspiciously high precision for an engineer

That Victrola is just gorgeous.

18:57 Edison has his name three time on the label including his picture. Humble fellow!

80's kids: "Only 80's kids will understand format wars." Thomas Edison: Hold my mandrel.

The issue of frequency response which Edison at first recognised as the advantage cylinders had over discs, did raise it's ugly head again once sound quality improved with the introduction of polyvinyl acetate 33⅓ rpm discs. Luckily this was solved with some clever mechanical engineering at the pressing plant, and the use of Compressor Limiters in the Mastering stage - but it did occasionally produce headaches for record producers nonetheless, thanks to the idiosyncrasies of musicians and producers who insisted on a certain play-order of songs. Famous examples include early pressings of Led Zeppelin 1, which would cause the needle to jump out of the groove on record players with cheap or poorly balanced tone arms. Despite that sound engineers who understood this problem did try to encourage artists and record producers to sequence the order of songs with high dynamic range towards the start of Side One and Two on the outer edge of the disk, some musicians ignored this advice and found out the hard way that physics pays no respect to artistic choices. For example, Barbra Streisand famously ignored her engineer's advice not to place 'Somewhere' from her Broadway Album at the end of Side Two - which resulted in early pressings of the award winning album being basically unplayable on all but the most high-end of domestic record players, thanks to the explosive finale coming so close to the centre of the disk. The record company later re-issued the album with a re-mastered version of 'Somewhere' with a whole 5dB cut from the low-end at the mastering plant - leaving the recording feeling much flatter than it was intended to sound. Indeed this was cited as a specific example in industry journals of the time, as being one of the biggest advantages which the fledgling Compact Disc format had over vinyl, since digital mastering merely required that the maximum peak level was within a -3dBV to 0dBV threshold across the whole programme - regardless of where in the play-order those peaks were physically located on the disc's surface.

When my brother and I were kids, we recorded on a Victrola by putting a disk with a blank back side on, one of us guiding the needle slowly toward the center while the other yelled into the horn. The recording could be played back on the same machine, and was clearly heard! Our dad mentioned that this could be done.

The sound out of that machine is absolutely amazing for having no electronics. Imagine one using modern materials, still 100% mechanical, I would love to own something like that.

Damn those 1920s millenials, they destroyed the wax cylinder industry!

Get to 9:20 or so. "...soooooo that's why they're called aaaaaaaalbums." Man. Learning new things every day.

What do you mean, my compact cylinders and digital versatile cylinders are the wrong shape?

Edison's main problem was always his arrogance. He thought he knew what people would want to listen to, no one recorded with Edison without his permission and his tastes in music where, well a bit behind in the times. Other companies like Columbia came along and made cylinder machines and records, then promptly got sued by Edison. The Berliner machines had issues until Eldridge R Johnson took the ideas improved them mad the disc system sound almost as good as the Edison system, made a cheap reliable machine and sold it, eventually settling on the Victor Talking Machine name (some say after winning a series of lawsuits). Johnson unlike Edison was happy to let the artists become the stars Enrico Caruso and Nelly Melba for example and he had no problem with recording "New Music".

i'm willing to bet they discovered that surface noise reduction by accident

Alec, you are a magnificent human. I say this, because at 2:39 you pull out a massive, 3D printed representation of the two different grooves, and my mind literally explodes! (or should that be "figuratively explodes, literally"?) Thank you sincerely for making SUCH an amazing effort,and going to such length, to provide us with not just understandable ways of understanding complex technical phenomena, but making it impossible not to understand what's going on. You have a genuine talent for what you do, and it is my pleasure to watch your documentaries one after another.

The fact that something Edison invented ended up profiting others and not him is some class A Karmic Justice.

"Edison kept locking himself down into proprietary formats..." So he was the Apple Computer of his day.

I am a veteran collector, and just have to compliment you on how well you simplified your explanations for those encountering this wonderful old technology for the first time. You are terrific!

I recall when TVs and record players looked like furniture.

such consistent content for so many years, what a legend

I'm really surprised that closing the lid of the Victrola makes such a huge improvement in the sound quality.

I just came across this video and loved it! A couple years ago I came across a Victrola in a small shop nearby. It was working and they only wanted something like $150 for it, and it came with records, so I picked it right up. They even put me in contact with the man who put it on consignment and he gave me a few hundred more records he had in his basement. I actually found a company that restores the reproducer, so I sent that in. And the company sells new needles (which, surprisingly, are still being made), so I got a stash of those. I love popping an old record onto those. One of my favorites is Caruso singing the aria from The Pearl Fishers. My fully-grown nephews were AMAZED that a mechanical device could reproduce sound, and reproducer it so loudly! I love having that piece of the past in my sitting room. They did make it to look like furniture, and it's a welcome addition to my room.

I bet it has a wonderful smell when you opened it at 14:13 like old dust and even older wood an ancient idk woody smell... My uncle collected alot of these machines when i was a kid and would restore them he had a vast collection of victrolla records... I remember staying up to all hours of the night listening to them with my grandfather ahhhh good memories. Thank you for sharing

He reminds me of an American techmoan. Smarty dressed articulate and knowledgable. Great channel

"Wobbles per Inch" deserves a T-Shirt!! I discovered you half a year ago, and today I went back into the archive and found these episodes. Dude, were you born this good? I expected an "awww" moment to see how far you had come. Nope: fluid, confident, funny, just slightly different looks. I am even more in awe of your skills now! Right, onwards with the archive research ;)

I've been watching you videos for a couple of years now. I never went back to you "early years". This was charming to watch and your analysis was still spot on on the subject. Since this video is years old I doubt you'll ever see this but thanks for making it way back then.

So RU-vid is recommending this video now... look at how young he looked!

I've been a vinyl collector since the late 80's. I clicked on this video to learn about the cylinder to disc history... but I learned SO MUCH more. Thank you!

18:50 , with auto-generated captions on, "Edison formally admitted defeat back in 1912 by introducing bees" like 'yeah, okay, cylinders suck, but take THIS!!' XD

God, i wish you had hour long in-depth documentaries. You not only look like my boyfriend, but you cover such interesting vintage tech topics, i could watch this stuff for days on end.

It's wild to see how much the production quality has increased in the years of your videos, but you've always been informative as hell. Love your work

I love seeing old videos of yours and seeing how far you come, thank you for the amazing jorney

Just remembered. In the late 1950's, a friend of mine had a wax cylinder recorder, and we recorded a play on it. Amazingly, this video was on the side list of recommended videos.

Edison was very much the forerunner of the RIAA and MPAA.

A while back I saw an absolutely beautiful Victrola machine in an antique shop. I spent some time dithering about whether it would be worth the money and where I would put it in my living room, but before I could act the shop burned to the ground. :-(

Watched a few of your videos now. What you're doing is very important. You explore the absolute, definitive Point A of technology and break it down in terms you can imagine. What you actually talk about is the technology of the human body and how it is we perceive each other.

my fiance and i were mesmerized every second of this video.. thank you so much, it clearly took a lot of time to create.

Side note: the doors in front of the horn on the Victrola may be partially closed for volume control. Yes, the old Victrolas can play surprisingly loud.

Fun fact: the "Victrola" name is also responsible for the nickname for a particular form of "pay-to-play" corruption; to wit, "payola".

Holy crap dude. Your production value, writing, editing, and hair have improved a hundred fold since this video

Wow, simply brilliant. I think I learned more audio history from this than any other YT video ever!

Wow! Closing the lid makes a huge difference! I'll have to remember to do that the next time I'm listening to my parents' record player. :)

excellent production and good research.

Ran into this video accidentally. I thought I knew what there was to know about cylinders and disks, but this presentation (like so many) gives the"story behind the story." I do remember wire recorder/players and we had a home disk recorder that I remember spewing out a thin thread of the removed surface. Thank you, YOUNG MAN!

I wish I discovered this channel sooner, it's one of the better ones. Very interesting topics that are presented in an understandable way and that keeps me interested throughout. Great job!

Great explanation of "Frequency Response". I learned about rotational differences on the "Merry-Go-Round" in elementary school... seriously. I did not yet know it was science :)

Emile Berliner established the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellshaft(German Gramophone Company) around the mid-to-late 1870s. His initial trademark on single-sided discs was the Aufnahmende Engerl(Recording Angel) embossed on the unrecorded side of the disc. Within a decade he'd travelled to England where he established a British division called The Gramophone Company Of England Ltd. and it was through the British division that Berliner first acquired the painting that was to provide the new trademark, it was of a Jack Russell Terrier listening to "his master's voice" on, initially a cylinder-based phonograph, but on request, the artist painted over the cylinder machine with a disc-playing gramophone, thus the trademark "His Master's Voice" was born. Ownership of the trademark would be held by Berliner but control of the trademark, and licencing its use would be vested in the British division of Berliner's empire. In the 1890s, Berliner travelled to the USA and set up the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey. The new entity would licence the trademark from the British division. This arrangement lasted until the outbreak of WW1. After that war, Berliner lost control of his British and US companies. The Gramophone Company of England assumed TOTAL ownership and control of "Nipper" as the dog was named in the trademark, and Berliner's DGG had to licence the trademark it once owned, a bitter pill to swallow. DGG could only use the HMV trademark in Germany under the translation: "Die Stimme Seines Herrens", for export, they had to create a new brand, Polydor. In the meantime, Victor in the USA was using the HMV trademark, licencing same from The Gramophone Co. in England. Until 1929 when some reps from RCA came sniffing around the Victor plant, looking for somewhere bigger than what they had, so they could build more radios. RCA started as a division of General Electric but soon took on autonomy after getting hold of the Victor plant and brand-name, but that's all they should've got, no more. The HMV trademark licencing should've ended the minute the ink was dry on the deed of sale of the Victor plant and name to RCA and the Dog & Gramophone should not have been seen in America or Canada again until 1955. WW2 came and went, just prior to that war, The Gramophone Company had merged with Columbia Graphophone Company(a surviving remnant of a failed US venture) to form Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.[EMI], the year was 1938. The merger also brought the Parlophone brand into the mix as Columbia had gained this former Dutch-owned trademark as war booty from WW1. After the 2nd war, EMI expanded into Europe, its new German division, Electrola GmbH taking over control of the HMV trademark, leaving DGG having to use Polydor now for domestic as ell as export markets. Berliner himself was spared the ignominy of seeing all this as he was in his grave by then. Siemens bought out DGG. In America a new label, Capitol was launched just after the war, the new entity struggling to find its feet. A decade on and Capitol would become the infant member of the expanding EMI group. Infant, because EMI bought an established label rather than EMI setting the company up from scratch. EMI owned almost 95% of Capitol, the remaining 5-and-a-bit% held by Capitol's founder. It's here that EMI should've brought in the HMV brand, reappearing in the USA to carry the EMI British roster into the American market, particularly in the 1960s: The Beatles, Cliff Richard & The Shadows, Herman's Hermits, Manfred Mann, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas etc., drawn from EMI's HMV, Columbia and Parlophone labels, all together on HMV in the USA instead of scattered around the non-EMI labels like they were.

Revisiting these videos. Man they're top notch. Informative and fun.

Just started following you recently, and I gotta say, even this older video is fantastic! Keep it up.

Edison was wrong about DC vs AC electricity grid too

Early disc records weren't all "78" RPM. Many Victor discs were cut at slower speeds, around 72, and some were cut at higher speeds. One I bought years ago has "SPEED 82" printed on the label. 78.26 was the standard set when electric motors got into the act.

A great video! So informative and entertaining at the same time! Thanks for making and posting this.

I was always so confused how they worked, this was very clear and entertaining. Good video.

19:58 Only an authorized jobber can sell an Edison wax cylinder for less than thirty-five cents. $0.35 in 1906 = Nine Dollars in 2018

12:23 Is this what John Fogerty is talking about when he sings "dinosaur victrola, listenin' to Buck Owens" in the song _Lookin' Out My Back Door_ ?

Greetings, I own a collection of antique phonographs and have restored several. I presently own a 1905 2/4 minute Edison Standard cylinder machine and 3 Berliner type disc machines - 1918 Victor XVI Victrola, 1912 Victor the First horn phonograph, and a 1922 Victor suitcase portable. Fun machines to play or show off. I very much enjoyed your most comprehensive history of the two recording systems and how the phonograph war was won. A lot of research went into your presentation. Especially the little realized lid open or closed effect on sound quality. You almost missed it. ;-) I gave you extra points for knowing the one needle a side rule too. I also enjoyed your excellent presentation on the vacuum tube. Keep up the great work on your RU-vid site.

Really well made videos, both content and production quality. Thanx for your hard work. Harry

Another excellent video. Very nearly as good as "the engineer guy" videos - high praise indeed!

17:42 "Put the needle on the record" Someone should remix that.

This is like a home-made Crash Course Recording. You're doing such a great job, Alec!

"So let's have a look inside and see how it works." The gravitas and clear joy you took in that moment to lift the lid... for some reason RU-vid started recommending your extremely old videos to me. :-)

3:08 legit got ASMR from that.

You had an intro? :O

6 year old vid & still a banger of a video. Love this channel.

These are good videos. I like the mix of information and wit. Keep it up.

Can you imagine if the concept of a disk hadn't been invented and Sony released the CC (compact cylinder) in the early 1980's? Can you imagine loading up the Sony PlayStation with a digital cylinder for gameplay?

I would love to get an old record player and some old records. I really like that early 20th century style music. Even with the quality loss, it adds to it I think.

Excellent video. This is the best of yours I have seen (so far) :)

Amazing!! Thank you so much. You're making RU-vid a better place!

Really interesting, thanks. But, please, take those cassettes away from the speaker...

in Brazil, vinyl record players were still known as "vitrolas" up until late 80s...

Finally! someone who has good music in their vid, and actually gives you easy access to it! This man really thinks of his viewers! :)

Look at how young you were! RU-vid is a rough occupation to volunteer for, so thankful you've stuck with it!

"Then we just release the brake and put the needle on the record..." "....put the needle on the record, put the needle on the record, put the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this!...."

Old school format wars...I love it!

Great video. It's great watching how far you've come in your videos but still a ton of research and work I can tell, guess into these. Thanks again.

First class as always! A very informative and well balanced view. Many thanks!

Edison was the Apple of his day. He made a lot of products and they were all very flashy. But, they were all inferior, more expensive, used his own proprietary formats, and were very strictly controlled.

that Motorola origin, wowza

Excellent video. Very informative and well presenting. That Victrola machine is a thing of beauty too.

Brilliant description. Thank you very much!!!

I had a Grafonola and you use the doors in front of the horn to adjust the volume

Come a long way in 7 years.

Just found your channel in 2017! Well done. I've been looking for a lesson/history series on audio and electronics! Thank you!

Oh man, that opening is a banger! I've never seen you're old stuff. I dig it! Thank you for never stopping! EDIT: The more I watch the more I'm convinced that this should be on PBS.

wasn't there a time people did record their voice on disc too? in fact, there were small booths called Voice-O-Graph in some places you stepped into, closed the door to reduce outside noise, put a coin into a special machine and you got your voice recorded ('scratched') on a disc, weren't there? there's even a revival of that thing in recent times: bandwidth.wamu.org/the-latest-vintage-craze-in-music-isnt-vinyl-its-these-old-fashioned-recording-booths/

"You're doing it wrong, Edison." That's what Tesla said.

And yet another outstanding video! ~ Thank you!

17:37 "We put the needle on the record" Suddenly I got a blast from the past!

You're doing it right man! extremely interesting stuff! Can I have some requests? Please make the sound louder and clearer. And more helpers like the 3d print of grooves! macro pics! animations! photos! it will be great! Edit: I watched till the end. Good animations and pics! :)

a cassette tape on top of a speaker is a bad idea lol

Wow, RU-vid just recommended an old video of yours, how cool🤣 I've been watching you for a year, now, but nothing this old🤣 and yes, I'm going to watch it all. Good to know you've got such a back catalog.

Holy shit, your channel has grown so far. I'm like honestly proud of you. Top notch stuff man. top notch.

So, the first format war, interesting.

no wonder my Edison records sound so rough on my player, the groves are different xD also the ones i have he actually stamped the logo into the wax

An excellent and informative piece on early recorded sound!

12:50 I wonder if that's where crapola came from :D