The internet is a glad bag of treasure. You can dig from one end to other and find all this interesting stuff. That is a cool part of blogging about historical artifacts. An offshoot of that is being able to bring them to the attention of other historical writers like myself. The specific items might not be of particular interest to many of you, but they will find the attention of that person who needs the information and that is why I bother to write about things like Digitized Wax Cylinders. These are things that you need to know about, the little things, that make your writing so much more authentic.
So what are these wax cylinders, you ask? If you scroll down to peep at the picture and the article from Boing Boing, you’ll see that they’re Edison Recordings. The herculean digitization of these recording has been undertaken by the library at The University of California at Santa Barbara. Thank you, UCSB, quite seriously for preserving these treasures for generations to come.
Now digitization isn’t perfect, as in it’s not permanent. We all have stories of our mother boards dying or CD recordings getting damaged, so some of these sound artifacts could still be lost. That said—digital is way more trustworthy than wax of any grade.
Anywho, I’ll let Boing Boing take it from here…they have the link up to the downloads on their site…
