The graphophone was an improve version of the phonograph invented through the laboratories of Alexander Graham Bell. It took five years of research under the directorship of Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell to develop and distinguish the machine from Thomas Edison's phonograph. The graphophone used a floating stylus to cut hill and dale grooves into a wax-coated cardboard cylinder. The sound quality was significantly better than the sound quality of Edison's machine. Because at this time recording was a mechanical process rather than an electromechanical process, it was called acoustic recording.