Edison turned down multiple offers from the Volta laboratory to work together, but he considered Bell and associates "pirates" and went on to pursue his own improvements to the phonograph (Weeks et al. 2021). He finally adopted aluminum stereate, a blend of aluminum and stearic acid with a waxy feel, for his cylinders. His "brown wax" cylinders were four inches long with 100 grooves per inch and held about two minutes of recording. They were thicker than Bell and Tainter's to allow repeated shaving for office dictation

Like the Volta Graphophone, the grooves were incised rather than embossed. However, it turned out that Volta had patented incised grooves in 1890 (Bell and Tainter 1896). Edison tried to fight it but ultimately had to license the idea. The competition between Edison and the company Volta became—The American Graphophone Co.—was fierce and there were numerous legal battles (Newville 2009).

Edison, like Bell, believed office dictation would be the primary application of the phonograph, but dictation proved to be a commercial failure—early phonographs were too complex and unreliable. However, prerecorded music turned out to be commercially viable, initially in coin-operated jukeboxes offered in arcades similar to Edison's Kinetoscope movie parlors.