Edison Disc Record

[1] Edison had previously made only phonograph cylinders but decided to add a disc format to the product line because of the increasingly dominant market share of the shellac disc records (later called 78s because of their typical rotational speed in revolutions per minute) made by competitors such as the Victor Talking Machine Company.

At first, costly wet-cell-powered, electric-motor-driven machines were needed to play them, and the customer base consisted solely of entrepreneurs with money-making nickel-in-the-slot phonographs in arcades, taverns, and other public places.

At the same time, the Berliner Gramophone Company was marketing the first crude disc records, which were simpler and cheaper to manufacture, less bulky to store, much less fragile, and could play louder than contemporary wax cylinders, although they were of markedly inferior sound quality.

At that time, with the notable exception of Pathé Records, which used yet another incompatible format, a disc's groove was normally of constant depth and modulated laterally, side-to-side.

The vertical format demanded a perfectly flat surface for best results, so Edison made his Diamond Discs almost one-quarter of an inch (6 mm) thick.

They consisted of a thin coating of a phenolic resin virtually identical to Bakelite on a core of compressed wood flour, later also china clay, lampblack for color, all in a rabbit-hide glue binder.

[3] The Brunswick Ultona, the Sonora, and the expensive "Duo-Vox" phonograph made by the piano manufacturer Bush and Lane were the only non-Edison machines that came from the factory equipped to play Diamond Discs as well as Victor and other 'needle-type' records, along with Pathé's sapphire ball stylus hill-and-dale format that used a vertical groove that was U-shaped in cross-section.

As an elderly man who favored old-fashioned "heart" songs and had various idiosyncratic preferences about performance practices, he was increasingly out of touch with most of the record-buying public as the Jazz Age of the 1920s got underway.