[Phono-L] Dating pre-1915 A-series Edison Disc Phonographs

Andrew Baron andy at popyrus.com
Fri Jun 22 16:06:11 PDT 2007


Hi George ~

Thanks for sharing that the Form 632 on your A-80 has no date.  I  
have an A-200 that apparently has the same undated form pasted to the  
inside of the rear cabinet door (same location as on my early  
A-250).  My later A-250, has a different Form 632 located in a  
different location; on the floor of the horn compartment near the  
front left, with a later form date of 8-20-14.

That makes three known versions of Form 632, and two locations where  
the form may be found.  On the A-80, is it on the bottom of the  
cabinet or on the back or inside the horn compartment?

I appreciate your observation of how long it might take for an  
updated dataplate to appear, based on how quickly inventories moved.   
This stands to reason and I hadn't thought of it.  Plates would not  
have been changed out on completed machines, so a slower moving model  
could be several months or even years in inventory and yet carry an  
outdated edition of the dataplate.  In this case, the date that a  
particular machine was sold can be very much later than when it was  
made.

Between the Form 632 and the dataplates, we have two possible date  
indicators for manufacture, and I would think that both can serve to  
narrow down when a machine was made, regardless of when it was first  
sold to the public.

Best,
Andy








On Jun 22, 2007, at 3:10 PM, gpaul2000 at aol.com wrote:

>
>  Andy,
> Looks like you're narrowing the window of possibility for your  
> machine's manufacture - and the clues were right there all along!?  
> I don't have a sense of how long it took for new patent dates to  
> appear on Edison dataplates, as this would imply that newly- 
> patented features appeared on those particular machines.? I suspect  
> that the time varied, depending on whether the model in question  
> was a faster-selling one (such as the "A-250") or slow-selling one  
> (such as the "A-150") with larger inventories of unsold machines.?  
> In any event, based on the evidence you've discovered today, I'd  
> amend my earlier assessment to "late 1912/early 1913" for your  
> example.? Here's a puzzler: you state that Form 632 (pasted to your  
> "A-250") is dated 11/20/12.? I have Form 632 pasted to an "A-80"  
> and it has NO DATE ON IT.? What do you suppose that means?? Those  
> fellows at West Orange didn't make this easy for us, did they?
>
> George Paul
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________ 
> __
> AOL now offers free email to everyone.  Find out more about what's  
> free from AOL at AOL.com.
> _______________________________________________
> Phono-L mailing list
> http://phono-l.oldcrank.org



More information about the Phono-L mailing list