It took five years of research under the directorship of Benjamin Hulme, Harvey Christmas, Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell at the Volta Laboratory to develop and distinguish their machine from Thomas Edison's Phonograph.

[3] Additionally the Graphophones initially deployed foot treadles to rotate the recordings, then wind-up clockwork drive mechanisms, and finally migrated to electric motors, instead of the manual crank on Edison's Phonograph.

[3] In 1885, when the Volta Laboratory Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors.

It formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.

[4] After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in Washington, D.C., businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace.

Tainter resided there for several months to supervise manufacturing before becoming ill, but later went on to continue his inventive work for many years.

[3] Jesse Lippincott set up a sales network of local companies to lease Phonographs and Graphophones as dictation machines.

In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers, resulting in the company's bankruptcy.