Country being one of America's most foundational musical art forms, its earliest recording throws many of the genre's narratives and perception into question.

The first commercial medium for audio recording and playback used a wax cylinder. Similar to the phonograph record that later followed, sound waves were turned into mechanical vibrations that ...

Jim Cartwright has given up his home and garage to a collection of CDs, LPs, 45s, 78s, wax cylinders, phonographs, cylinder players, and other audio equipment we didn't even know existed.

Vasnier performances would have been heard on the wax cylinders installed in coin-operated jukeboxes. Martin’s research found that the Louisiana Phonograph Co. had the most profitable machine in ...

In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the tin foil phonograph – a machine that recorded sound by indenting a sheet of tin foil into a groove in a cylinder. A later wax version was ...

Zoom in: Overseen by digital accessioning archivist Dillon Henry, the collection includes circa 19th-century wax cylinder phonographs created by Thomas Edison. Plus, there's more recent tech like ...

1900: Phonographs play sound recorded on cardboard cylinders coated with wax. Invented in 1885, they replaced Thomas Edison's foil-wrapped metal cylinders. 1901: Emile Berliner invents the ...