Before discs, records were wax cylinders you could shave and reuse
The first records were hollow cylinders, not flat discs. Early wax ones wore out after a few dozen plays, but owners could shave the surface smooth and record something new. That ability to record at home was the cylinder's big selling point until discs won the market in the 1910s.
Edison's team invented the phonograph in December 1877 using tin foil wrapped around a hand-cranked grooved cylinder. It sold only as a novelty, and Edison turned his attention to the electric light. The real advance came from Charles Sumner Tainter, Alexander Graham Bell and Chichester Bell at their Volta Laboratory, who switched to wax and to engraving grooves rather than pressing dents. Congressional reporters were trying their Graphophone by 1887. Prompted by a demonstration, Edison returned to the problem and settled on a thick cylinder of solid wax that could be shaved repeatedly. Both systems went on sale in 1888.
Prerecorded cylinders of music and comic monologues appeared in 1889, first bought by owners of coin-operated machines in arcades and taverns, then by families. Companies agreed on a standard size of about 10 centimetres long by 5.7 across, holding roughly two minutes of sound. At first every copy had to be recorded live on soft brown wax that could wear out after around 20 plays. Edison's 1902 Gold Moulded line changed that: a mould taken from a master could turn out several hundred copies, and the harder wax survived over 100 plays. The name came from gold vapour given off by electrodes in the process.
Thomas B. Lambert's 1900 patent brought celluloid cylinders that survived being dropped and could be played thousands of times, though they could not be recorded over. Edison bought those patents in 1912 and launched Blue Amberol records, after earlier doubling playing time to four minutes by cutting grooves half as far apart.
The boxes cylinders came in prompted John Philip Sousa to sneer at canned music, a jab borrowed from Mark Twain. Discs, cheaper and eventually dominant, pushed Columbia to abandon cylinders in 1912, and Edison's own later cylinders were mere acoustic copies of his disc masters.
Source: Phonograph cylinder
