Wax Cylinders And You

[too_much_in_the_sun]

Sorry for being gone so long. I'm still figuring out the precise work/life balance where I can have time to write posts when I'm at home, not just come home and fall asleep.

I wrote this post for my Tumblr late last year, and just never got around to crossposting it.

Without further ado: a quick course in wax cylinders.

How did people actually talk, way back in the 1910s? How can we find out?

Well, there's one answer: we can listen to them.

UC Santa Barbara has a terrific online archive of wax cylinders, the earliest commercial sound recording medium (most popular from about 1898 to 1915). Most relevant here is their sub-collection of home recordings on cylinders. Some of these were made to be played for family members elsewhere, and some were just made for fun, but they contain something important: ordinary people screwing around with recorded sound, talking in their everyday voices.

Once you listen to a few of these, I bet you'll have a question: why do all the normal people sound like they're yelling?

Well, they kind of are. Recording to a wax cylinder wasn't easy. Glenn Sage shares a little about the professional recording process on his site here. The recording instrument wasn't very sensitive and couldn't easily pick up some kinds of sound. And it took practice to learn how to record good sound to a cylinder. So if you've ever tried to Facetime a family member, or watch old home movies, that's approximately what you're getting here in terms of experience with the medium.

Anyway. Here's some recordings I've selected. I've tried to choose recordings that are relatively good in quality, but I'm very sorry to say that for the home recordings especially, there don't seem to be transcripts for more than a few short snippets of audio.

First, let's hear some commercially-produced cylinders by well-known people:

Thomas Edison, "Let Us Not Forget", December 1918.

Teddy Roosevelt, "The farmer and the business man", 1919.

William Jennings Bryan, "Immortality", 1908.

William Howard Taft, "Jury trial in contempt cases", 1908.

(Why do all these guys sound kind of the same? They were taught to. This Wikipedia article about the Mid-Atlantic accent is a little muddled and disorganized, but contains some decent information. In short: it used to be you'd learn elocution in fancy schools, and that's where you learn to talk like that.)

Now, let's move to the reason I made this post: home recordings. The UCSB archive has about 750 entries in this category on their site; go here and scroll down to "Home recordings" on the left.

Ralph Sunderland (with Roy Sunderland), letter to Ralph's father, 1907. If you listen to just one home recording, make it this one -- because Ralph, the first speaker, sounds exactly like my grandfather, who was born in 1936.

Halsey H. Moses, a story about a bass viol player in 19th century Ohio, 1908 - 1911.

Doctor Nelson, after-dinner remarks at Grace Methodist Church, 1905.

Unknown man, discussing a party the night before, 23 January 1901.

Frank Embree, humorously leaving his graphophone in the care of a friend for the winter, 1898.

W. H. Greenhow and family, recording at a family gathering, 16 November 1901.

Unknown man, two ghost stories, 1908 - 1911.

So there you go! People talking, more than a hundred years ago.