This is an example of Royal Purple Amberol cylinder, one of the latest designs made by Thomas Edison in the late 1910s. These cylinders were the same as celluloid coated wax as his Blue Amberols, but they were dyed purple and marketed as higher end recordings. They usually stuck to classical and operatic genres, and the songs are said to have been chosen by Thomas Edison himself.

This cylinder is a recording of ‘Simon the Cellarer’, originally written by composer John Liptrot Hatton (1809-1886) & lyricist William Henry Bellamy (1800-1866) in 1860. It is a British comedic tale of Simon and Dame Margery, a drunken pair of singletons considering marriage – but Simon denies Margery’s advances. This cylinder is an American version of the song by Arthur Middleton (1800-1929), an American opera and bass-baritone singer, said to be the house bass for Edison’s National Phonograph Company.

Thomas Edison’s distinctively blue ‘Amberol’ cylinders were released in 1912 after he acquired the US patent for celluloid phonograph cylinders. They had a plaster-of-paris core with a surface layer of ‘indestructible’ celluloid. Celluloid cylinders offered improved sound quality and were much sturdier than their wax counterparts, which could crack easily and wear down over time. The US patent for celluloid cylinders had been granted to Thomas Lambert in 1900, so Edison, who invented the phonograph, had missed out on these improvements in those 12 years.

Edison’s ‘Amberol’ cylinder had existed in a black wax format since 1908. It was an improvement on brown wax cylinders due to its finer engravings which allowed recordings of up to four minutes – double that of the wax alternative. However, this meant a finer stylus tip was required to fit into the engravings of an ‘Amberol’. Edison introduced the ‘Amberola’ phonograph to solve this, as well as kits that could be used to adapt earlier phonographs. The blue Amberol cylinders required further adaptations, with a diamond tipped stylus introduced specifically for them.

This cylinder contains a recording of ‘Afton Water’, written by the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns and sung by Christine Miller, an Edison Records recording artist.