This website is being created, in part, from inspiration of the Victor-Victrola Page (specifically, their dealer locator), but also out of the want and need for archiving scattered information on companies and stores which sold Edison (from the National Phonograph Co., Thomas Edison Inc., Edison Laboratories, etc.) records/phonographs (but not specifically the business phonograph, kinetoscope/moving picture technology, and/or Edison radios- unless those businesses also sold commercial phonographs). The stores and companies mentioned on this site are strictly from the 49 states (as well as the District of Columbia- Hawaii, as far as I know so far, did not have any local wholesale companies operating on the islands from the sources I have used for research and compiling data), but I encourage anyone else who wants to do the same for Edison's operations in Canada, the American territories, and/or in Europe to do the same and archive/create a website for that specific information.
This project was started as a passion project during the summer of 2023, but I did not seriously keep up with archiving the wholesale companies until the winter of 2024, by January of this year, I would also start to tie it into a school project for one of my college classes this semester.
Throughout this site, you will see pages for specific pieces of Edison business history, along with sources used for the archival stage and the academic sources used for the school aspect of the project, and the dealer search itself. The dealer search itself will go further into detail about how to navigate that section, but it is divided into separate regions (New England, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Great Plains, and the Rockies/West) where each of the states are separated into. The final page you will see on this site is a roadmap of current progress- as this project goes beyond just a class project- my goal for this website is to gather all these scattered sources of wholesale companies, like the ones done for the Victor Page, archive/compile said companies and stores, and present it in a visually appealing way that is easy on the eyes, and can allow those who have Edison products to, hopefully, be able to help identify or get closer to learning more about their phonograph.