Mondo Knows Facts
Wax cylinders lost the first format war
Edison backed cylinders while rivals pushed discs that could be stamped Cylinders were easy to record at home and gave a steady sound, but each one had to be recorded separately. Flat discs could be pressed in thousands from a single master, and engineers learned to fit more playing time into each inch of groove. Edison finally stopped making cylinders in 1929. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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More facts like this
Flat discs beat cylindersEmile Berliner's gramophone made records cheap to press and stackThe 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
Wax cylinders lost the first format war: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Edison backed cylinders while rivals pushed discs that could be stamped. 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.