Sound As Entertainment Following Edison’s initial demonstration of the phonograph, his peers both in America and abroad began making alterations and improvements to his original design. In the 1880s, Bell used money he had been awarded for inventing the telephone to fund research into improved phonography. Working with his cousin, Chichester Bell, a chemical engineer, and Charles Sumner Tainter, a scientist who made instruments, Bell retained the cylinder format but chose wax instead of foil as the surface material. Bell and his associates dubbed their sound reproduction machine, the graphophone, and replaced the rigid needle in Edison’s design with a floating stylus that extended the playing life of the cylinders. The company set up by Bell to produce and distribute his device and the cylinders that held the recorded sound, Columbia Phonograph Company, rivaled the Edison Phonograph Company, as both sought to market their machines as dictation devices for business use in the late 1880s. When this avenue failed to turn a significant profit, both companies and smaller manufacturers turned their eyes towards the entertainment possibilities of the phonograph, and began marketing their devices as coin-operated models suitable for public use in arcades, saloons, and ferry boats. By this time, nearly every phonograph maker including Edison was using wax cylinders rotating at about 120 r.pm. with a floating stylus transmitting the vibrations through a diaphragm. Phonograph technology coupled with a steady supply of new sound recordings and coin operation made these ‘proto-jukeboxes’ a near instant success. Reproduction of previous musical performances became the first marked commercial success for sound recording technology. For an aspiring saxophonist seeing the notes of a solo by Charlie Parker doesn't compare to hearing a recording by Bird. This alone accounts for a significant portion of the impact that sound recording would have on the evolution of music and entertainment in the 20th century. Miller illustrates this point well: Whether you play an upright bass or drums, think about how many people learn from listening to a record player or listening to a tape. They practice their guitar riff to a Hendrix tune. And think about how that’s been going on for a while, it used to be, before you had to go hear the person play to really study under them. But, these days and probably for the last, maybe thirty years, forty years, people practice off of recordings or off the radio. Its just an open-ended structure. The fact that musicians could exchange ideas across the world without ever leaving home has radically altered existing musical forms, speeding their evolution and differentiation. Certainly, the telephone makes this sort of communication possible, but the static nature of a sound recording allows a performance to be studied again and again—even by the artist who produced it. Musical pieces that incorporate what are thought to be different forms of music are not a new phenomenon, but their proliferation is on a scale incomparable to any period in man's history due in large part to the technology of recorded sound.