There were so many of you fascinated by the free 78 RPM record audio mentioned in the article on Free Audio from the Internet Audio Archive I decided to pass along some information about even older audio available for free.
The earliest recorded audio was created on cylinders, first made with metal foil, then wax, and later celluloid materials. The University of California, Santa Barbara Library has taken on the mission of digitizing as many of these turn of the century recordings as possible. The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project has thousands of these digital recordings available online for free.
You can browse the collection or use their search to locate recordings of interest. Due to heavier than anticipated traffic, the search and browse functions may be slow or not work at all at times.
One warning is in order before you delve into these early recordings. These recordings give you an amazing glimpse of history, but in order to accurately preserve the historical nature the collection is uncensored. The listener needs to be aware of the time period that these recordings were created and realize that many of them contain racially insensitive material that we find shocking by today's standards.