CYLINDER CARE
Cylinders as they were commercially produced, were made of wax, which with the exception of some of the very earliest records, was a metallic soap compound, or celluloid, which was one of the names given to an early thermoplastic material obtained by treating nitrocellulose with camphor. Both materials are highly flammable!
Both types of cylinder appreciate the same sort of conditions we humans like to live in, namely; stable, without extremes of heat or cold, and neither too damp, nor too dry. Extremes of temperature can bring about chemical degradation and physical stress resulting in rough cloudy surfaces and fissures, which will eventually cause the record to split. Extremes of humidity promote the growth of mildews, which eat into the record surface, leaving it noisy or even unplayable, and condensation, which can degrade the record chemically. Wax records suffer these reactions more readily than celluloid, but eventually, celluloid records will degrade too, not to mention shrink and split. Encouraged? Read on, it need not happen in your lifetime!
STORAGE AND HANDLING:
It is best to store cylinders, in cartons or cases, free from dust, and standing on their start ends with the lettering, if any, visible on top. Shelves, chests of drawers, industrial shelving with cardboard trays or boxes, or any system, in fact, which allows you access without shuffling through individual records all over the floor. Any space or room away from direct heat or sunlight will do as long as it is comfortable for us to live in.
When you first acquire a cylinder, you will frequently find the inside of the box dusty, if not gritty, especially if the box has been without a lid for a while in the last century. Sometimes you can remove the cotton liner, in which case it can be brushed clean with a clothes brush, and the box can be dusted out with a cloth. If it is very dirty, it pays to use a damp cloth, but be sure to let it dry properly before putting the liner back, because the cotton will hold the damp and then the record will suffer. Boxes or cartons for celluloid cylinders are normally of plain cardboard without a liner, so cleaning these is simple. If a cotton liner cannot be removed, and it appears dirty, you can either brush it or use one of those sticky rollers intended for lint and dust on clothing.
The bottom of a cylinder carton should be checked. The paper holding it in place can have torn or worn, or where end caps are used, the glue has sometimes come loose. The result can be the same; a precious phonographic treasure, 20 years in the finding, in pieces on the floor! A good habit to acquire is to hold a cylinder carton with the little finger underneath the bottom so that such accidents cannot happen.
Having handled thousands of cylinders of almost every kind, I have observed that celluloid cylinders survive best in airtight cartons. Blue amberols in such cartons, even stored in a closed drawer, give off a strong smell of camphor. So even in these good conditions, they are slowly drying out.
Wax records are more variable, but all things equal, cylinders stored in peg boxes or cases where nothing touches the surface and dust and air cannot circulate, seem to have fared the best. Some otherwise well made cylinder cases from the 1890s, have one defect. The line where the lid meets the top edge of the case, here and there has a gap big enough to insert a postcard or a sheet of paper. The records in line with this gap have spots of mildew engendered by dust, which has drifted through the gap and onto the record. The dust traps the damp and so the mildew flourishes. Furthermore, the light coming through the gap has faded that part of these otherwise pristine records.
At this stage, it is worth cautioning against storing cylinders on their sides. While not such an issue with celluloid records, a wax record lying on its side against humidity retaining cotton, together with any dirt and grit there may be, is a recipe for developing mildew, which even at a yet invisible level, will give an audible swish as the record is played.
Handling is straightforward. Hold any standard cylinder with the index and middle finger inside the cylinder from the title end, the fingers spread out to prevent slippage. Intermediate cylinders may be held over the palm of the hand with the thumb preventing it sliding any further. The same method holds good for concert cylinders, and you can even wear it on your forearm!
If you are new to cylinder collecting, you should be reassured that, although wax cylinders are brittle, they were made for the general public to use, and that with ordinary care, they are reasonably tough. If you knock a wax record over on its side, however, it will crack. As a rough guide, the tensile strength of a gold-moulded cylinder is similar to a piece of dark chocolate of the same thickness.
Wax amberols and some Edison 2-minute records of the same period used an especially hard wax compound, which makes these records a law unto themselves. They chip easily if you bash the end against the mandrel, and there is no telling whether they are already fissured or hiding an unopened crack. So handle these records very carefully, avoiding transmitting the heat of your hand if you can, for the heat will cause uneven expansion of the wax, which, of course, stresses the wax. The splitting is a feature of their old age, and these were excellent records when new, and in the right hands.
A point about heat expansion and cold shrinkage, which exercised the minds of owners of wax records when they were new, was to avoid leaving a record on the mandrel overnight. The temperature fluctuations of houses before central heating were considerable, if not extreme. Such an oversight would result in a split cylinder due to shrinkage as the room cooled. It was even recommended to let the tempered steel springs of the phonograph motor acclimatise to the temperature of the room before using in winter. If you use a cylinder from a warm room and play it in a cooler room, or outdoors, leave it out of its carton to adopt the ambient temperature while you play another cylinder, and it should be fine. If it should get stuck, and this can apply to celluloid cylinders as well, wrap a clean piece of cloth or tissue paper round it and use the heat of your hand to warm it to the point that it will release itself. Be aware too, for your own convenience when listening to wax cylinders, that if you bring a record from a cool room into a warmer room, and set it playing, it will expand in the greater ambient heat and begin to slide off the mandrel.
Avoid any skin contact with the surface of the record. Your skin is greasy, often slightly acidic, and the resulting finger mark will etch the surface and promote mildew. The earlier the cylinder, the worse the effect, and even celluloid records can be affected.
You may be a collector whose chief delight is in the phonographs themselves and for whom just a few cylinders are required to bring the machine to life. Fair enough!
However, if you have an interest in the cylinders themselves, an obvious consideration is to minimise damage when playing them. Protect your investment! Check the styli on all the machines you listen to. For occasional use, the originals are fine if undamaged. The 4-minute sapphires designed for wax records on Edison machines are almost always worn, because they have usually played the later celluloid blue amberols. Both diamonds and sapphires are susceptible to wear from celluloid records, and chips from clumsy handling. Wax records seldom damage the sapphire, but clumsy handling can. Avoid using the glass styli found on some premium phonographs, for even wax records can wear these, and they are very often broken or chipped. Wear shows up as a flat on the otherwise rounded contact area. The edges of the flat on the stylus present a sharp edge to the record if the angle at which it meets the record is different from the angle of those that wore it. Off-centre records are very vulnerable to this kind of worn stylus. Both diamond and sapphire styli can be chipped. Such styli can make a hard record look like a ploughed field in one playing, but since many wax records show a little swarf after playing, even with the best styli, it is easy to overlook a stylus with a little chip. When blue amberols turn up looking badly worn, it is highly likely they have been played with a bad diamond rather than that they have given their full quota of the 3000 + playings promised by Edison's laboratory.
So fit a new stylus to be on the safe side! The ones made today are much better for various reasons than the originals and the improvement in reproduction and reduced wear is noticeable. Posterity will bless the outlay for a new stylus, which costs a great deal less than many single cylinders do! Here are the contact details of the best company for these and all other styli:
Expert Stylus Company,
P.O. Box 3,
Ashtead,
Surrey,
KT21 2QD
United Kingdom
Tel: 01372 276 604
Fax: 01372 276 147
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS:
An aspect of record care easily overlooked, is the correct positioning of the phonograph. If it is not set level, the reproducer will pull to one side and there will be undue pressure on one side of the groove wall. Some records, especially 4-minute records, show a watered silk effect like waves in the grooves which is caused by defective tracking of one kind and another. Eventually, the groove walls break down and the stylus hangs.
Lubricate your mainsprings. Chugging of dry springs is not good for the springs, and it makes the stylus jump, which is especially bad for 4-minute records with their greater stylus pressure.
Self evidently, the condition of the reproducer influences record wear. All moving parts should be free and have a tiny trace of oil to keep them that way. If any parts chatter and rattle as the record is played, a tiny drop of axle oil works wonders. The diaphragm may need new rubber gaskets if they have not been replaced already (some were originally of cork with some of the copper diaphragms. The clamp ring should be screwed up only so tight as to make the diaphragm airtight. Check this by blowing gently down the outlet tube. This adjustment gives the best resonance and most importantly for the record, the best compliance (which is the ease with which the stylus can follow the sound waves in the grooves).
Your choice of horn is significant too, and not only for the sound. Listen to any record without the horn. It sounds like a Lilliputian riot, squeaking, chattering and buzzing as it reproduces the record. What is happening, is that the diaphragm, without the damping effect of the column of air in the horn, is reacting to the recorded input by setting up its own reverberation, which then feeds back to the record groove like a little hammer. The bigger the horn, up to a point, the less this occurs. The best horns for phonographs are the Edison cygnet horns, replicas of which are now being made in the States. But any horn bigger than the 14 inch horns the manufacturers supplied will do. To judge by the surviving original horns, 30 inches seems to have been the most useful all round horn size for both sound reproduction and space considerations.
An obvious one but sometimes overlooked: Don't drop the reproducer on the record. Neither stylus nor the record appreciate this, especially on 4 minute records.
CONCLUSION:
Blanch not, gentle reader, at this torrent of observation and advice! Edwardian manufacturers took pride in the simplicity of operation of their machines and the durability and perfection of their records. Advertisements of the period suggest that a child could use their machines, and some French advertising shows families enjoying throwing their indestructible records around the room at each other. This latter theme is a tacit acknowledgement of the fragility of wax records, but the new comer to collecting cylinders will soon realise that common sense and ordinary care is all that is necessary for their handling and storage. I shall finish by quoting James E. Hough's comments on the latest "Ebony" indestructible record produced in 1904 by Edison Bell:
"A Great Boon in the Household and to all phonograph users. These records never wear out and your friends and your children may handle them. No more dread lest they should spoil a favourite selection. They CAN'T DO IT unless by wanton, malicious effort."
It says a lot for the wax records!
Both types of cylinder appreciate the same sort of conditions we humans like to live in, namely; stable, without extremes of heat or cold, and neither too damp, nor too dry. Extremes of temperature can bring about chemical degradation and physical stress resulting in rough cloudy surfaces and fissures, which will eventually cause the record to split. Extremes of humidity promote the growth of mildews, which eat into the record surface, leaving it noisy or even unplayable, and condensation, which can degrade the record chemically. Wax records suffer these reactions more readily than celluloid, but eventually, celluloid records will degrade too, not to mention shrink and split. Encouraged? Read on, it need not happen in your lifetime!
STORAGE AND HANDLING:
It is best to store cylinders, in cartons or cases, free from dust, and standing on their start ends with the lettering, if any, visible on top. Shelves, chests of drawers, industrial shelving with cardboard trays or boxes, or any system, in fact, which allows you access without shuffling through individual records all over the floor. Any space or room away from direct heat or sunlight will do as long as it is comfortable for us to live in.
When you first acquire a cylinder, you will frequently find the inside of the box dusty, if not gritty, especially if the box has been without a lid for a while in the last century. Sometimes you can remove the cotton liner, in which case it can be brushed clean with a clothes brush, and the box can be dusted out with a cloth. If it is very dirty, it pays to use a damp cloth, but be sure to let it dry properly before putting the liner back, because the cotton will hold the damp and then the record will suffer. Boxes or cartons for celluloid cylinders are normally of plain cardboard without a liner, so cleaning these is simple. If a cotton liner cannot be removed, and it appears dirty, you can either brush it or use one of those sticky rollers intended for lint and dust on clothing.
The bottom of a cylinder carton should be checked. The paper holding it in place can have torn or worn, or where end caps are used, the glue has sometimes come loose. The result can be the same; a precious phonographic treasure, 20 years in the finding, in pieces on the floor! A good habit to acquire is to hold a cylinder carton with the little finger underneath the bottom so that such accidents cannot happen.
Having handled thousands of cylinders of almost every kind, I have observed that celluloid cylinders survive best in airtight cartons. Blue amberols in such cartons, even stored in a closed drawer, give off a strong smell of camphor. So even in these good conditions, they are slowly drying out.
Wax records are more variable, but all things equal, cylinders stored in peg boxes or cases where nothing touches the surface and dust and air cannot circulate, seem to have fared the best. Some otherwise well made cylinder cases from the 1890s, have one defect. The line where the lid meets the top edge of the case, here and there has a gap big enough to insert a postcard or a sheet of paper. The records in line with this gap have spots of mildew engendered by dust, which has drifted through the gap and onto the record. The dust traps the damp and so the mildew flourishes. Furthermore, the light coming through the gap has faded that part of these otherwise pristine records.
At this stage, it is worth cautioning against storing cylinders on their sides. While not such an issue with celluloid records, a wax record lying on its side against humidity retaining cotton, together with any dirt and grit there may be, is a recipe for developing mildew, which even at a yet invisible level, will give an audible swish as the record is played.
Handling is straightforward. Hold any standard cylinder with the index and middle finger inside the cylinder from the title end, the fingers spread out to prevent slippage. Intermediate cylinders may be held over the palm of the hand with the thumb preventing it sliding any further. The same method holds good for concert cylinders, and you can even wear it on your forearm!
If you are new to cylinder collecting, you should be reassured that, although wax cylinders are brittle, they were made for the general public to use, and that with ordinary care, they are reasonably tough. If you knock a wax record over on its side, however, it will crack. As a rough guide, the tensile strength of a gold-moulded cylinder is similar to a piece of dark chocolate of the same thickness.
Wax amberols and some Edison 2-minute records of the same period used an especially hard wax compound, which makes these records a law unto themselves. They chip easily if you bash the end against the mandrel, and there is no telling whether they are already fissured or hiding an unopened crack. So handle these records very carefully, avoiding transmitting the heat of your hand if you can, for the heat will cause uneven expansion of the wax, which, of course, stresses the wax. The splitting is a feature of their old age, and these were excellent records when new, and in the right hands.
A point about heat expansion and cold shrinkage, which exercised the minds of owners of wax records when they were new, was to avoid leaving a record on the mandrel overnight. The temperature fluctuations of houses before central heating were considerable, if not extreme. Such an oversight would result in a split cylinder due to shrinkage as the room cooled. It was even recommended to let the tempered steel springs of the phonograph motor acclimatise to the temperature of the room before using in winter. If you use a cylinder from a warm room and play it in a cooler room, or outdoors, leave it out of its carton to adopt the ambient temperature while you play another cylinder, and it should be fine. If it should get stuck, and this can apply to celluloid cylinders as well, wrap a clean piece of cloth or tissue paper round it and use the heat of your hand to warm it to the point that it will release itself. Be aware too, for your own convenience when listening to wax cylinders, that if you bring a record from a cool room into a warmer room, and set it playing, it will expand in the greater ambient heat and begin to slide off the mandrel.
Avoid any skin contact with the surface of the record. Your skin is greasy, often slightly acidic, and the resulting finger mark will etch the surface and promote mildew. The earlier the cylinder, the worse the effect, and even celluloid records can be affected.
You may be a collector whose chief delight is in the phonographs themselves and for whom just a few cylinders are required to bring the machine to life. Fair enough!
However, if you have an interest in the cylinders themselves, an obvious consideration is to minimise damage when playing them. Protect your investment! Check the styli on all the machines you listen to. For occasional use, the originals are fine if undamaged. The 4-minute sapphires designed for wax records on Edison machines are almost always worn, because they have usually played the later celluloid blue amberols. Both diamonds and sapphires are susceptible to wear from celluloid records, and chips from clumsy handling. Wax records seldom damage the sapphire, but clumsy handling can. Avoid using the glass styli found on some premium phonographs, for even wax records can wear these, and they are very often broken or chipped. Wear shows up as a flat on the otherwise rounded contact area. The edges of the flat on the stylus present a sharp edge to the record if the angle at which it meets the record is different from the angle of those that wore it. Off-centre records are very vulnerable to this kind of worn stylus. Both diamond and sapphire styli can be chipped. Such styli can make a hard record look like a ploughed field in one playing, but since many wax records show a little swarf after playing, even with the best styli, it is easy to overlook a stylus with a little chip. When blue amberols turn up looking badly worn, it is highly likely they have been played with a bad diamond rather than that they have given their full quota of the 3000 + playings promised by Edison's laboratory.
So fit a new stylus to be on the safe side! The ones made today are much better for various reasons than the originals and the improvement in reproduction and reduced wear is noticeable. Posterity will bless the outlay for a new stylus, which costs a great deal less than many single cylinders do! Here are the contact details of the best company for these and all other styli:
Expert Stylus Company,
P.O. Box 3,
Ashtead,
Surrey,
KT21 2QD
United Kingdom
Tel: 01372 276 604
Fax: 01372 276 147
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS:
An aspect of record care easily overlooked, is the correct positioning of the phonograph. If it is not set level, the reproducer will pull to one side and there will be undue pressure on one side of the groove wall. Some records, especially 4-minute records, show a watered silk effect like waves in the grooves which is caused by defective tracking of one kind and another. Eventually, the groove walls break down and the stylus hangs.
Lubricate your mainsprings. Chugging of dry springs is not good for the springs, and it makes the stylus jump, which is especially bad for 4-minute records with their greater stylus pressure.
Self evidently, the condition of the reproducer influences record wear. All moving parts should be free and have a tiny trace of oil to keep them that way. If any parts chatter and rattle as the record is played, a tiny drop of axle oil works wonders. The diaphragm may need new rubber gaskets if they have not been replaced already (some were originally of cork with some of the copper diaphragms. The clamp ring should be screwed up only so tight as to make the diaphragm airtight. Check this by blowing gently down the outlet tube. This adjustment gives the best resonance and most importantly for the record, the best compliance (which is the ease with which the stylus can follow the sound waves in the grooves).
Your choice of horn is significant too, and not only for the sound. Listen to any record without the horn. It sounds like a Lilliputian riot, squeaking, chattering and buzzing as it reproduces the record. What is happening, is that the diaphragm, without the damping effect of the column of air in the horn, is reacting to the recorded input by setting up its own reverberation, which then feeds back to the record groove like a little hammer. The bigger the horn, up to a point, the less this occurs. The best horns for phonographs are the Edison cygnet horns, replicas of which are now being made in the States. But any horn bigger than the 14 inch horns the manufacturers supplied will do. To judge by the surviving original horns, 30 inches seems to have been the most useful all round horn size for both sound reproduction and space considerations.
An obvious one but sometimes overlooked: Don't drop the reproducer on the record. Neither stylus nor the record appreciate this, especially on 4 minute records.
CONCLUSION:
Blanch not, gentle reader, at this torrent of observation and advice! Edwardian manufacturers took pride in the simplicity of operation of their machines and the durability and perfection of their records. Advertisements of the period suggest that a child could use their machines, and some French advertising shows families enjoying throwing their indestructible records around the room at each other. This latter theme is a tacit acknowledgement of the fragility of wax records, but the new comer to collecting cylinders will soon realise that common sense and ordinary care is all that is necessary for their handling and storage. I shall finish by quoting James E. Hough's comments on the latest "Ebony" indestructible record produced in 1904 by Edison Bell:
"A Great Boon in the Household and to all phonograph users. These records never wear out and your friends and your children may handle them. No more dread lest they should spoil a favourite selection. They CAN'T DO IT unless by wanton, malicious effort."
It says a lot for the wax records!