Ancient Web: Jean-Paul Agnard's Phonograph Museum Preserved Cylinder Machines

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A collector can spend years searching for one missing record. Jean-Paul Agnard's search for cylinders eventually turned into an entire museum of early sound machines, with photographs and personal notes preserved on a small bilingual website.

Visit the Edison Phonograph Museum page.

Agnard dates his first acquisition to 1970, when he bought an Edison Standard Model D in Québec City for $135. It came with a reproducer and seventeen four-minute Blue Amberol cylinders. He soon discovered that not all cylinders worked on the same machine: early two-minute wax records and different diameters demanded different equipment.

The account follows that education through another acquisition, a Columbia Graphophone, and finds made during visits to antique dealers in France. He says the collection grew to more than 200 different cylinder phonographs. That number is the collector's own report, not an independently audited museum inventory.

Machines that sounded before the record player

The page is more than a list of names. A selection of captioned photographs describes a tinfoil phonograph attributed, with an explicit caveat, to Emile Berliner; a Multiphone jukebox holding twenty-four cylinders; and an 1889 Edison talking doll with a hand-cranked miniature phonograph inside.

One particularly unusual item is an 1896 hand-operated machine with ten listening tubes, apparently designed so paying visitors could hear recordings. Another is an Edison Windsor coin-operated model whose oak cabinet included elaborate carved feet. The collection connects mechanical ingenuity to the businesses that once sold access to recorded sound.

Agnard also describes the materials that made these objects troublesome to maintain. A talking doll's wax cylinders could break as parts expanded, and different cylinder formats were frustratingly incompatible.

The site's main index offers scans or references to Pathé catalogues from 1898, 1900, 1903 and 1906, as well as pages about phonograph needles and historic recordings. It is a useful way to move from one collector's machines into the commercial history around them.

The page includes copyright dates beginning in 1995 and notes a February 2020 modification. Its old contact details and appointment instructions should not be treated as verified current museum hours.

Explore Agnard's collection and the period catalogue index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.