The evolution of the record player starts in July of 1877 when Edison filed his first patent in Great Britain on the recording and reproduction of sound. Full specifications for the phonograph were filed in April 1878. Later in 1881, Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell, and assistants created what would become known as the Graphophone, an improved version of the phonograph, and donate a prototype to the Smithsonian Institution. The graphophone used wax as the recording medium rather than tin foil like the phonograph, and the recording was cut or chiseled into the wax rather than being embossed.
In 1894, Emile Berliner introduced a commercial version of the gramophone that he had been developing since 1887. The player used a disc instead of a cylinder and was made of zinc coated with wax. Come 2016, EMW Street Bio iGEM team has modified the gramophone to record the visuals of a petri dish “disc” rotating in the place of a vinyl disc. From those images, sound is generated based on algorithms measuring colony position, density, and size.