[4] In December 1877,[5] Thomas Edison and his team invented the phonograph using a thin sheet of tin foil wrapped around a hand-cranked, grooved metal cylinder.

[6] Tin foil was not a practical recording medium for either commercial or artistic purposes, and the crude hand-cranked phonograph was only marketed as a novelty, to little or no profit.

Edison moved on to developing a practical incandescent electric light, and the next improvements to sound recording technology were made by others.

In 1887, their "Graphophone" system was being put to the test of practical use by official reporters of the US Congress, with commercial units later being produced by the Dictaphone Corporation.

Eventually, a patent-sharing agreement was signed, and the wax-coated cardboard tubes were abandoned in favor of Edison's all-wax cylinders as an interchangeable standard format.

Their general appearance allowed bandleader John Philip Sousa to deride their contents as "canned music", an epithet he borrowed from Mark Twain.

[14] On March 20, 1900, Thomas B. Lambert was granted a US patent (645,920) that described a process for mass-producing cylinders made from celluloid, an early hard plastic.

(Henri Jules Lioret [fr] of France was producing celluloid cylinders as early as 1893, but they were individually recorded rather than molded.)

[15][16] A 1905 Edison Phonograph may be seen and heard playing a celluloid cylinder at the Musical Museum, Brentford, England and the quality of the sound is surprisingly good.

[19] In late 1908, Edison had introduced wax cylinders that played for nominally four minutes (instead of the usual two) under the Amberol brand.

[20] Edison designed several phonograph types, both with internal and external horns for playing these improved cylinder records.

Edison marketed its "Fireside" model phonograph with a gearshift and a 'model K' reproducer with two different styli, which allowed it to play both two-minute and four-minute cylinders.

[27] In 2010 the British musical group The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing released the track "Sewer", from their debut album, Now That's What I Call Steampunk!

[28] In June 2017 the Cthulhu Breakfast Club podcast released a special limited wax cylinder edition of a show.

[30] In May 2023, Needlejuice Records released wax cylinder singles for Lemon Demon songs "Touch-Tone Telephone" and "The Oldest Man On MySpace", from albums Spirit Phone and Dinosaurchestra, respectively.

[32] In an attempt to preserve the historic content of the recordings, cylinders can be read with a confocal microscope and converted to a digital audio format.