Alexander Graham Bell had just invented the telephone when he heard about Edison's invention of the tin foil phonograph. He was somewhat peeved:

It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers…the thought never occurred to me to indent a substance and from the indentations to reproduce sound (Bell 1878).

Using prize money received for inventing the telephone, Bell, his cousin Chichester A. Bell (a chemist) and Charles Sumner Tainter (an instrument maker) formed the Volta Laboratory In 1881 and began to investigate the limitations of Edison's tin foil phonograph.

Their experiments were wide-ranging and systematic. Much of the work was materials research to replace tin foil. The requirements were demanding: soft enough to take a groove, tough enough to retain the recording without being too brittle, not sensitive to temperature, able to be cooled without cracking after coating the cardboard tube. They tried different form factors, e.g disks, paper strips and cylinders, and mechanisms: lateral vs. hill-and-dale grooves, jets of air or liquid vs. a metal stylus, a magnetic pickup for an iron disk record (Newville 1959). For the first commercial cylinders, they eventually settled on six inch cardboard tubes coated with ozocerite, a type of paraffin wax (Tainter 1890). The groove was inscribed rather than embossed as with the tinfoil phonograph (Tainter 1887).