<P> The crude tinfoil phonograph proved to be of little use except as a novelty . It was not until the late 1880s that an improved and much more useful form of phonograph was marketed . The new machines recorded on easily removable hollow wax cylinders and the groove was engraved into the surface rather than indented . The targeted use was business communication, and in that context the cylinder format had some advantages . When entertainment use proved to be the real source of profits, one seemingly negligible disadvantage became a major problem: the difficulty of making copies of a recorded cylinder in large quantities . </P> <P> At first, cylinders were copied by acoustically connecting a playback machine to one or more recording machines through flexible tubing, an arrangement that degraded the audio quality of the copies . Later, a pantograph mechanism was used, but it could only produce about 25 fair copies before the original was too worn down . During a recording session, as many as a dozen machines could be arrayed in front of the performers to record multiple originals . Still, a single "take" would ultimately yield only a few hundred copies at best, so performers were booked for marathon recording sessions in which they had to repeat their most popular numbers over and over again . By 1902, successful molding processes for manufacturing prerecorded cylinders had been developed . </P> <P> The wax cylinder got a competitor with the advent of the Gramophone, which was patented by Emile Berliner in 1887 . The vibration of the Gramophone's recording stylus was horizontal, parallel to the recording surface, resulting in a zig - zag groove of constant depth . This is known as lateral recording . Berliner's original patent showed a lateral recording etched around the surface of a cylinder, but in practice he opted for the disc format . The Gramophones he soon began to market were intended solely for playing prerecorded entertainment discs and could not be used to record . The spiral groove on the flat surface of a disc was relatively easy to replicate: a negative metal electrotype of the original record could be used to stamp out hundreds or thousands of copies before it wore out . Early on, the copies were made of hard rubber, and sometimes of celluloid, but soon a shellac - based compound was adopted . </P> <P> "Gramophone", Berliner's trademark name, was abandoned in the US in 1900 because of legal complications, with the result that in American English Gramophones and Gramophone records, along with disc records and players made by other manufacturers, were long ago brought under the umbrella term "phonograph", a word which Edison's competitors avoided using but which was never his trademark, simply a generic term he introduced and applied to cylinders, discs, tapes and any other formats capable of carrying a sound - modulated groove . In the UK, proprietary use of the name Gramophone continued for another decade until, in a court case, it was adjudged to have become genericized and so could be used freely by competing disc record makers, with the result that in British English a disc record is called a "gramophone record" and "phonograph record" is traditionally assumed to mean a cylinder . </P>

Who invented a method for recording sound on flat discs