The first successful phonograph cylinder used by Thomas Edison was covered with tinfoil.
Edison demonstrated the phonograph in 1877 after his team developed a machine that could both record and reproduce sound. A stylus traced vibrations into a thin sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Reversing the process allowed the stylus to follow the groove and reproduce the recorded sound.
Tinfoil was suitable for early demonstrations because it was thin and could receive impressions, but it was fragile and generally could not provide durable, high-quality recordings. Later phonographs used more practical recording surfaces, especially wax cylinders.
The phonograph is often described as Edison’s invention alone, although its development drew on earlier work involving telegraphy, telephony, and mechanical sound recording. The tinfoil version was the breakthrough demonstration, not the final commercial format.