United States Phonograph Company Flyer (Brown-Wax Cylinders, c. 1898)

This rare United States Phonograph Company four-panel flyer advertises selections from Sousa’s comic opera, The Bride-Elect, in this case played not by Sousa’s band, but by Edward Issler’s. The flyer most likely dates to 1898. The Bride-Elect opened at the Knickerbocker Theatre (New York) on April 11, 1898, closed in June after 64 performances, then had a  brief return engagement at the Harlem Opera House in October of that year.
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The flyer is from Bill Bryant’s archive, which also includes a complete 32-page United States Phonograph Company cylinder catalog and related materials. We’ll be scanning and posting the full catalog on the Mainspring Press website later this month, as part of our new American Cylinder Record Project.

UPDATE: Harms, Kaiser & Hagen Cylinder Catalog Has Been Posted on the Mainspring Website

There was such an extraordinary response to our Harms, Kaiser & Hagen catalog posting this morning that we’ve gone ahead and posted scans of the complete list on the Mainspring Press Website (click ARTICLES on the homepage). Harms didn’t include their name in the spoken announcements, so if you have some “mystery” brown wax cylinders, maybe you’ll find a clue here. Enjoy!

Excerpts from the Harms, Kaiser & Hagen Cylinder Catalog (with more to come soon)

From the Bill Bryant archive, three pages from the very rare Harms, Kaiser & Hagen cylinder catalog, c. 1898. We’ll be posting the complete catalog with all of the cylinder listings on the Mainspring website soon, as part of our American Cylinder Record Project — stay tuned!
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Books in the American Cylinder Record Project series so far include Edison Blue Amberols: The Complete Cylinderography (US and Foreign Issues), and Indestructible & U-S Everlasting Cylinders: An Illustrated History and Discography. Currently in the works are The Brown Wax Cylinder Index: A Catalog Compendium (1891–1901) and The Complete Edison Gold-Moulded Cylinder Index: U.S. and Foreign Issues.

Edison’s Brown-Wax Cylinder Duplicating Equipment

These rare photos show Edison’s cylinder-duplicating setup in the early 1900s, just before the Gold Moulded process was introduced. Most later brown-wax cylinders weren’t true “original” (direct) recordings. Rather, they were dubbed by various methods from master cylinders.

Multiple masters were recorded simultaneously, on a bank of machines like those shown above in the Edison studio. The masters were then copied to produce sub-masters or the brown-wax cylinders that were sold to the public, using a pantograph like the Edison example shown below. Once all the original masters and sub-masters became too worn for further duplication, the performers had to return to cut another set, and on, and on…

It was a laborious, time-consuming process that produced inconsistent results. But it was still faster than the original “round” method by which a title was recorded repeatedly, directly to “originals,” until the quota was filled.

By the time these photos were published in 1903, the equipment pictured was obsolete. Both Edison and Columbia had already converted to mass-molding processes that required only a single master.

Details of early cylinder-duplicating processes, and the switch to “Gold Moulding” in the early 1900s, can be found in A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry (1900-1919), published by Mainspring Press.