Indestructible celluloid cylinder records

The Indestructible Record Company was an American record label that produced plastic cylinder records between 1907 and 1922. The company was established by William Messer, who had worked with Thomas Lambert, the inventor of plastic

celluloid Celluloids are a class of materials produced by mixing nitrocellulose and camphor, often with added dyes and other agents. Once much more common for its use as photographic film before the advent of safer methods, celluloid's common contemporar ...

cylinder records. In 1900, the records were made by the Lambert Company, but that company went bankrupt in early 1906 after

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...

brought a suit against Lambert for

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

infringement. Messer had been responsible for developing a means of mass-producing the Lambert cylinders using a steam press. In 1906 he set up the Indestructible Phonographic Record Co. in Albany, New York, to record and produce them. The company was also known as the Albany Indestructible Record Company and acquired the patent rights held by Lambert.Bill Klinger, ''Cylinder Records: Significance, Production, and Survival'', Library of Congress, 2007, pp.4-14
/ref> It produced celluloid cylinders in two-minute and, from 1909, four-minute versions, each having a cardboard core with metal reinforcing rings.
Retrieved 18 May 2013 Between 1907 and 1922, it produced 1,598 titles, almost all of which have survived. The cylinders are described as "rugged" and "practically immune to splitting". From 1908 to 1912, the Indestructible Company's output was distributed by

Columbia Records Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music, Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese Conglomerate (company), conglomerate Sony. It was founded on Janua ...

. After the arrangement with Columbia ended, the cylinders were sold directly by the firm as well as through

Sears, Roebuck Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...

and

Montgomery Ward Montgomery Ward is the name of two successive U.S. retail corporations. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a world-pioneering mail-order business and later also a leading department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001. The curren ...

retail stores. In 1917 the company was re-organized as the Federal Record Corporation of Albany, New York, which began disc record production in 1919 as the

Federal Federal or foederal (archaic) may refer to: Politics General *Federal monarchy, a federation of monarchies *Federation, or ''Federal state'' (federal system), a type of government characterized by both a central (federal) government and states or ...

label. After a factory fire in 1922, the company ceased making cylinders, and it formally closed down in 1925.

References

{{Authority control American record labels Cylinder record producers Record labels established in 1906 American companies established in 1906