I am a collector of antique audio, and do a weekly radio show about it. Although cylinder records were first, by the mid 1890s, there was already competition between cylinders and discs. Cylinders sounded better then discs through 1905 or so. In 1908, Columbia Records, followed a year or two later by Victor, began marketing "double-sided discs". Two songs for the price of one! One on each side, of course. This was the first big nail in the coffin of the cylinder product. By 1911, disc records had the upper hand. By 1915, I think there were only two cylinder manufacturers in the U.S. - Edison and Indestructible, with Indestructible being a small concern, and Edison surrepititiously admitting that their cylinders were a second-rate product, as their primary focus was on the Edison Diamond Disc. In Sept. 1914, they stopped recording directly for cylinder, and made inferior dubs of their disc masters onto their otherwise upgraded "Blue Amberol cylinders. Once the patents started running out during the World War I era of 1917-1918, the door was flung open for tons of new record brands, none of which were cylinders manufacturers. In the 1920s, Indestructable went out of business (a fire ruined everything, and it wasn't worth starting up again), and Edison slogged along to the end of the decade with every decreasing sales of both cylinders and their disc line, until all of their commercial recording was stopped at the end of October, 1929.
