vinyl

The recording medium vinyl started being called that much later than you’d expect, in 1976. Before that, starting from 1936, the slang term for a record was instead wax, named after the process of creating an original recording by etching onto a wax disk that was then plated with metal.

Records started being made of the material vinyl in 1948 with the introduction of the “long playing” LP format, which could hold 23 minutes of music per side instead of 5. Before that, they were made of shellac, a record format that was still being sold well into the 1960s. We still keep a trace memory of the shellac era in the notion that a record will shatter if you drop it, which is unlikely if it’s made of vinyl.

Vinyl, the material, is a shortening of polyvinyl chloride, better known by its initialism PVC. PVC was first synthesized in 1872, but was not commercially produced until 1933. The “vinyl” in polyvinyl chloride refers to a chemical radical that got its name in 1863 from Latin vīnum, meaning wine. That radical was derived from ethylene, and ethyl alcohol is the type of alcohol found in wine.