<P> Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". </P> <P> Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recording using wax - coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter . They named their version the Graphophone . </P> <P> The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought - experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s . The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881 . The commercialization of sound recording technology was initially aimed at use for business correspondence and transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages, the storage of large numbers of records seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration . </P> <P> In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone . Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877 . The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax . The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played . With some later improvements the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system . </P>

When did the records take over the production of the phonographs