Mondo Knows Facts
Flat discs beat cylinders
Emile Berliner's gramophone made records cheap to press and stack A disc could be stamped in quantity from one master, while a cylinder had to be copied one at a time. Berliner's flat record also stored neatly on a shelf. By the early twentieth century the disc had won the market. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Wax cylinders lost the first format warEdison backed cylinders while rivals pushed discs that could be stampedThe first recording was played back on tinfoilEdison's phonograph cut sound into a sheet wrapped round a spinning cylinderEarly records turned at about 78 revolutions a minuteThe figure was never exact, and it varied between companiesThe long playing record arrived in 1948Columbia's microgroove LP turned at 33 and a third and held about 22 minutes a sideThe cassette was meant for dictationPhilips introduced it in 1963 as a compact, cheap recording mediumEight track cartridges rolled the tape in one loopThe end of the tape simply joined the start, so it played for ever
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Tags: recording, formats, history
Flat discs beat cylinders: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Emile Berliner's gramophone made records cheap to press and stack. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.