A Dictaphone is a sound recording 
device most commonly used to record speech for later playback or 
to be typed into print. The name "Dictaphone" is a trade mark of a 
corporation which makes such devices, but has also become a common 
way to refer to all such devices, especially historic versions that 
used phonograph cylinders as the recording medium, as was common 
from the late 19th century until the mid 20th century, when audio 
tape became the preferred medium. Sometimes when the general 
term rather than the specific company is referred to, the 
variation "dictophone" is used.

The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked by the Columbia Graphophone 
Company in 1907, which soon became the leading manufacturer of 
such devices. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company 
in 1923.

The machine marketed by the Edison Records company was 
trademarked as the "Ediphone".

History

Shortly after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first 
device for recording sound, in 1877, he thought that the main 
use for the new device would be for recording speech in 
business settings. (Given the low audio fidelity of earliest 
versions of the phonograph, thinking that recording speech 
would be more important than recording music may not have 
been as absurd an assumption as it may seem in retrospect.) 
Some early phonographs were indeed used this way, but this 
did not become common until the mass production of reusable 
wax cylinders in the late 1880s. The differentiation of 
office dictation devices from other early phonographs (which 
commonly had attachments for making one's own recordings) 
was gradual.



Electric microphones generally replaced the strictly acoustical 
recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s. 
In 1947, Dictaphone replaced wax cylinders with their DictaBelt 
technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt 
instead of into a wax cylinder. This was later replaced by 
magnetic tape recording.

Today the Dictaphone company sells a range of products, 
including voice recognition software and interactive voice 
response systems (IVR, for voicemail loops.)

As of 2004 Dictaphone is split into three divisions:

    IHS - Healthcare Division focuses on Dictation for 
    the medical industry
    IVS - Dictation for Law Offices and Police Stations
    CRS - Communications Recording Solutions. Focuses 
    on recording Phones and Radios in Public Safety 
    Organizations and Quality Monitoring solutions for 
    Call Centers.