And so some of the projects I've work on, they're now cutting those up into words, into phrases to use in the classrooms there on the reservations and such. Nick Bergh.īERGH: Native American recordings are very rewarding to work on because a lot of times, those communities are relearning their language and such. Or they were recorded by other people, like ethnographers. VANASCO: She's hoping we'll hear a birthday party or something that tells us more about the social history at the time, even someone shouting their name and explaining they're testing the machine, which is a pretty common thing to hear on these recordings - because the important thing about wax cylinders is not just that they played the earliest recordings of commercial music and comedy sketches, it's that for the first time, people were able to record themselves. I just know that the big wooden box that I found, on the inside of the lid, it said, gift of Mary Dana to the New York Public Library in 1935. JESSICA WOOD: The music division did not keep very careful acquisitions records back in the 1930s. One of the first recordings he's going to try to digitize was found by curator Jessica Wood in 2016.
VANASCO: He flew here from Burbank, Calif., with his machine and a trunk full of tools. VANASCO: That's Nick Bergh, the inventor of the endpoint.īERGH: There's a laser in the back of here. So you get a priceless thing next to something that's just a common cylinder. NICHOLAS BERGH: No label space to write a nice label. And a lot of times, no one even knows what's on these cylinders. And we're going to hear audio that no one else has heard likely since around the turn of the last century. It's called the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine. It has two screens, an intimidating number of buttons and dials, a laser and an arm holding a stylus, like the kind of needle that plays records on a turntable. JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: Deep in the basement of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, there's a new machine about the size of a small suitcase. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco was in Manhattan when a machine arrived to play recordings that may not have been heard for a century.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Today is June the 24th, a day before Roy's (ph) birthday.ĭETROW: Thousands of these recordings live in public collections. It was also a way you could record yourself. By the late 1890s, sliding a wax cylinder onto a Thomas Edison phonograph was the way you listened to commercial music. Before audio playlists, before CDs, before cassette tapes, even before vinyl, there were wax cylinders.