Early Brown Wax Cylinders

[klinkmi]

Is there any type of price guide out there on early cylinders? I have several that I had purchased many years ago. Many are in containers with no lables only paper slips identifing the song. Others are Edison and Columbia with paper slips with #'s as low as 28 and one Edison is almost pure white in color.

[matty]

As far as I know there's no price guides available. Those white cylinders are very rare & probably worth a mint!
Something I've done is build my own price guide with machines, by copying ebay pictures with the sale price into my computer. I guess you could do the same with cylinders. Problem is of course finding the same titles in the same condition as you have, but it might give you a general idea, but then you can't always rely on the sale price of just one example of a given cylinder.

[klinkmi]

Thanks, I have been looking on E-bay and in five years have only located 1 . As for the White one it is the only one out of 40 that has some damage there are a few needle digs, my guess is that the machine was converted to a Diamond mod B someone had put this older record by mistake. By the way the title is "Olcotts Old Fashioned Mother" #1571 By Mr Napus ,I will try to post a pic. one of these days. Also does anyone no the year when they started putting Edison/ Columbia lables on the cases?

[klinkmi]

i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr113/klinkmi/edisonwax.jpg?t=1228195299 Here is the pic of the cylinder

[MordEth]

Nice image! I cannot say that I have gotten to see one of these before.

For the convenience of anyone viewing this thread, here is a cropped inline version of that image:

Thanks for posting this!

— MordEth

[maroongem]

Dec 1, 2008 19:56:11 GMT -5 klinkmi said:

Thanks, I have been looking on E-bay and in five years have only located 1 . As for the White one it is the only one out of 40 that has some damage there are a few needle digs, my guess is that the machine was converted to a Diamond mod B someone had put this older record by mistake. By the way the title is "Olcotts Old Fashioned Mother" #1571 By Mr Napus ,I will try to post a pic. one of these days. Also does anyone no the year when they started putting Edison/ Columbia lables on the cases?

Edison began putting labels on his boxes in 1899, shortly after the Columbia Phonograph Co. Prior boxes were plain paste board with record slips sometimes glued to the outside. From what I can see of your box, you have the 1st style label.
Needle digs were usually caused by ham-handed operators carelessly dropping the stylus on the record surface.
According to your record slip, the recording artist was George J. Gaskin but you mention Joe Natus who was an early recording artist for Edison. His Edison cylinders start in the 7000 series.
Have you listened to this particular cylinder? There should be an announcement at the beginning with title & artist mentioned.
You will have to slow your machine down to perhaps 140 RPM or thereabouts as these were recorded at varying speeds prior 1901.

Bill

[klinkmi]

I have only played this once or twice since I don't have a B or Automatic reproducer. However it is Natus that is the singer. There are a # of these that have the original artist crossed off on the slips with another artist either typed of written in. I'm guessing that the store may have had unused lables or something. In the lot there were many home recordings (some really good) with titles, dates and artists typed on paper. It was a find even 25 years ago at .65 cents each.

[borrilabs]

First of all that is a beautiful cylinder!!!! Second, color has no bearing on the age of the record, but it is rare to get a white batch of compound. The batches of wax for making "brown" wax blanks started out with 408 lbs of stearic acid. This record is NOT made with the 1888 pre metallic soap formula it was only used to November 1888 and the classic brown wax came about in around October 1889. Edison cylinders used a uniform formula starting in the fall of 1889, and used for brown wax with no preceptible changes in ingredients until the demise of there use for home recording, somewhere around 1915??? There were black blanks for awhile but they did switch back to a brown wax for 4 minute recoriding. (does anyone know when Edison stopped making blanks, I have not found any information on when he stopped.) What I found interesting is how fast the batch saponifies, sets the batch color, that is the compound goes from foamy when all the hydrated alumina and carbonate are added to when the compound is clear, and not foaming and how long it is cooked after that when the softening agent is added such as Ceresine, Paraffin,cocinic acid. Most batches of the time contained scrap wax, that is shavings, cut off ends, broken and defective records, this usually makes the batch at least a medium brown color, perhaps sometimes they had very little scrap wax to add to the compound, and lighter records issued. (I hear the guys on hear muttering, you don't know what you are talking about you misguided hobbyist!!!!) I have personally made a little over a ton of this compound, and can tell you from experience that anything from bright white to dark brown, even jet black can come to fruition from the exact same amount of ingredients, and the same ingredients. Sometimes heating the stearic acid to a very high temperature and adding the saponification solution as fast as it will take without foaming over, or the temperature going down too fast will cause the batch to finish a little fast than if a lower temperature is used and this too can result in a white batch of wax. I have included a run of the last 2 months of my own blank making (yes these are all made at Borri Audio Laboratories. The formula is very close on all of these, less than 1 gram difference per batch, notice that they vary from white to very dark brown. Notice the very light colored Columbia Grand record, that I photographed at Union this year.