The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I have read (I do that occasionally) that certain talking machine patents held by the major manufacturers (Edison, et al.) expired around the end of WWI and that this led to an explosion of small manufacturers getting into the business of making for the most part cheap or cheaper machines. They flooded the market, and most went out of business after a few years. I have one of these machines by the Domestic Talking Machine Corp. It has a 10" turntable. Unfortunately no governor.

Question: Did any of these small operations make cylinder players or were they all disk machines?

By the end of WW1, what remained of the cylinder trade was largely in the hands of Edison. Almost everyone else had decided that the future lay with the disc.

In the UK, Clarion continued to produce cylinders into the 1920's, but finally went out of business after their factory was destroyed by fire.

That's a really good question. There were other companies that made cylinder machines such as the Lakeside but I think they tried to break into the cylinder business before 1915. Really the huge influx of machines after the Great War were disk machines. I bet others can offer more cylinder machine makers other than Edison, Columbia, and Pathé. Companies a long way from Edison's lawyers, Europe for example, were more likely to attempt breaking into the cylinder business. Jerry Blais

I think the few dealers who tried to undercut the cylinder machine market did so by importing cheap German machines- without success.