At the Menlo Park Laboratory, Thomas Alva Edison conceived in July 1877 the idea of recording and playing back telephone messages while working on the telephone transmitter, experimented by pressing a telephone diaphragm with an embossing point against rapidly moving paraffin paper, and concluded that the human voice could be stored and reproduced automatically. By the end of November 1877, he had developed a basic phonograph design with a grooved cylinder on a long shaft, a screw pitch of ten threads per inch, and a hand crank for power. During the first week of December, machinist John Kruesi built the first prototype, and Edison wrapped tin foil around the cylinder, recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and had the machine play the sound back perfectly. Despite progressive hearing loss from about age twelve, Edison had created the world’s first machine to record and play back sound, and he continued improving it over the next fifty years. In 1887 he founded the Edison Phonograph Company to sell the phonograph to the public, helping begin the sound recording industry, whose first records from Edison and Columbia Phonograph Companies were wax cylinders. The phonograph became one of Edison’s most significant inventions, earned him the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” drew visitors and reporters from across the region, and astonished scientists and the public, even as some initially dismissed the idea of a talking machine. Interest in the device helped spur further investigation into acoustics and recorded sound. Edison received his first phonograph patent on December 24, 1877, awarded February 19, 1878, and of his 1,093 United States patents, 199 related to phonographs and sound recording. Although he soon shifted attention to electric lighting, he returned seriously to sound recording in 1887-88, spurred by competitors including the wax-recording graphophone of Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1885 and Emile Berliner’s gramophone in 1888; by the late 1890s these machines had become the basis of a new sound recording industry.