In 1878, Shortly after inventing his phonograph, Thomas Edison created a list of possible uses for it. Number ten read: “Connection with the telephone, so as take that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.” Edison later discovered that it was much more difficult to record telephone signals on tin foil than he first thought, and turned to the recording of the voice directly from the air. When the first phonographs actually came to market, that’s what they were designed to do. However, other inventors pursued the idea of telephone recording, especially after Edison introduced the phonograph in the late 1880s as a desktop business machine. The telephone was also mainly a business machine at the time, and the phonograph’s utility as a call recorder seemed obvious. However, even though wax cylinders had been substituted for the original tin foil, the phonograph and its imitators still were not sensitive enough to record a call very well.