The first recording Edison made was of himself--or one of his assistants (history is not clear on this point)--speaking the lyrics of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." He made the recording on a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a turning cylinder. Though Edison is often credited as the inventor of the phonograph, two Frenchmen, Leon Scott and Charles Cros, developed machines that were precursors to Edison's invention. Edison's first phonograph bore little resemblance to those that would quickly follow. It was merely a tinfoil-covered cylinder with a crank handle attached to a wooden base. A rudimentary "speaker"--a short tube--was attached to the base to capture the sound from the cylinder.
After inventing the phonograph and applying for a patent, Edison lost interest in the device for a time. But others had not. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and his apprentice, Charles Sumner Tainter, set about making improvements to the device. Bell and Tainter developed a better way to create recordings by using wax covering the cylinder instead of tinfoil. They called their invention the graphophone.
Neither Edison nor Bell saw their inventions as a device for the masses and entertainment. Bell originally believed the phonograph would help teach the deaf (his mother was deaf) . By 1890, both machines were being marketed as dictation devices for office use and neither was making much money. However, distributors of the devices saw the potential of them as amusements, and the recording devices were often on display in amusement parks as coin-operated machines.
German emigrant Emile Berliner created the improvement that made the phonograph popular. Instead of a cylinder, Berliner's 1885 invention used a disc for what he called the gramophone. The use of the disc allowed mass production of recordings and that gave the phonograph its populous appeal.
In 1901, the Victor Talking Machine Company (co-founded by Berliner) started making and distributing phonographs commercially. The company was so successful, phonographs, regardless of the manufacturer, became generically known as Victrolas. Its trademark image was a little white dog with brown ears listening into the Victrola's speaker with the caption "His Master's Voice." This marked the true beginning of the music industry as we know it in 2010.