You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far ...

In 1981, I started making new phonograph cylinders, just as Thomas Edison had done about a century earlier. When was the wax cylinder invented? In 1877, Edison patented a device that would ...

To operate his phonograph, Edison wrapped a sheet of tinfoil around the cylinder and set the needle so that it would etch a spiral groove into the foil as the crank was turned. When the foil was ...

The designers concocted the Edison bottle, a simple glass beer bottle inscribed with music that can be played like a 19th-century phonograph cylinder. Shine's design team came up with the idea ...