The museum has a very large collection of wax cylinder recordings, but the ones they display in the museum are all replicas.
The real ones are restricted to researchers like me, and after years of testing, my laser-reader is ready to finish digitizing them all.
I showed up with my equipment, and was quickly escorted to the stairway down.
“There was an electrical fire in a storage room,” says the facilities manager. “The sprinklers weren’t enough. Whatever didn’t burn, warped and melted.”
We slosh through the basement and pull aside a charred door.
Looking upon the ugly ruin, I wept.