Given the choice between having thousands of songs to select from a small contraption that fits in your pocket and having one song stored on a cumbersome cylinder of wax, most music lovers of 2008 would leave wax to the bees and candle makers.

But the history of recorded music cannot be understood without an appreciation of wax as a recording medium, as an audience assembled at the Port Carling Community Centre the evening of May 12 witnessed first hand.

Paul Dodington is known far and wide for his expertise on Disappearing Propeller boats, but he is also one of this country’s authorities on the history of recorded sound. He began collecting wax cylinder recordings before he was 10 years old, and boasts one of the most extensive collections in Canada with recordings dating to the 1890s.

Dodington gave an extensive talk and multimedia presentation on his non-nautical passion, followed by the making of some local history — a time capsule in the form of a wax recording.

Muskoka Lakes town-ship mayor Susan Pryke introduced accomplished tenor soloist and conductor Albert Greer, who performed from Leoncavallo’s Mattinata to make a recording. The wax cylinder will be deposited at the Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling, and if played on the museum’s 1890 Edison Class M phonograph in 2101, will demonstrate the technology’s viability over four centuries.

Dodington began the evening by playing a digital reproduction of the first recorded sound, a woman in France singing into a phonautograph machine in April 1860. The machine was built for tracing sound waves visually to help understand the science of sound, not for playback.

Thomas Edison’s 1877 tinfoil phonograph was a true milestone in the history of recorded sound. The tinfoil cylinder only lasted for a few playbacks, often just one, and after an initial flurry of excitement, Edison turned his attention to the incandescent light bulb.

After the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell developed the idea into the graphophone by replacing the tinfoil with wax. Edison reclaimed the idea by developing a purely wax cylinder.

The phonograph became the centre of much speculation over what would make it a commercially viable invention. There was the initial novelty of recorded sound. Capturing and replaying sound, especially the human voice, was an astonishing feat. There was some suggestion it would replace the letter as the predominant medium of correspondence, but only a very few of the privileged with access to the technology ever recorded phonograph letters.

The phonograph’s use as an office dictating machine was thought to be where the real money in recorded sound was, but fearful stenographer and secretaries, most of them male, began sabotaging the machines, which were already prone to malfunctioning.

Then it was discovered that people would pay to put on headphones and listen to recorded sounds. It’s not uncommon to see teenagers today sharing an IPod, each wearing one earphone, but they have nothing on the first recorded music fans, who listened with multiple sets of headphones wired to the same machine.

This early jukebox craze created a demand for recorded music, but serious musicians were not willing to fill the demand.

It was not until Emile Berliner, a German immigrant working on the improvement of the telephone in Washington D.C. invented and began to market the disc gramophone, which played records and projected sound through a cone, that the modern music industry as we know it began to take off. The records were far simpler to reproduce than wax cylinders and Berliner was able to convince world-famous opera stars to record.

Dodington played a 1907 recording of opera superstar Enricho Caruso performing Pagliacci. Caruso made recording respectable, and an audience beyond those in the seats of major opera houses flourished.

Henry Bird, founder of Bird’s Woolen Mill in Bracebridge, was probably the first owner of a record player in Muskoka. He bought a Columbia Eagle in 1898, which Dodington now owns and wound up to play a xylophone solo. Even when wound all the way, the momentum was gone before the song was complete.

Dodington’s presentation was rich in Canadian content, including an original version of O Canada and the music of Os-ke-non-ton, who was discovered while singing as a guide on Lake of Bays and went on to perform around the world in the 1920s and ’30s.

Dodington also discussed the history of Huntsville’s Anglo Canadian Leather Band, which from 1917 to 1922 was one of the highest-ranking concert bands in the world. Dodington played a recording of the band’s leader Herbert Clarke, who was regarded as the world’s premiere cornet player. In spite of their success, however, no recordings of the band were made. Montreal was home to Canada’s only recording studio, the centre of Berliner’s recording and marketing empire in Canada since 1899, and the band never made it further than the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.

Not having to carry around a duffle bag of wax cylinders and spare needles as you play your selection of downloaded songs on the dock or in the boat is worth appreciating, but Dodington’s passion for recorded sound reminds us obsolete does not equate to irrelevant.