Actually the very first phonographs by the Edison company, which used wax-covered cylinders, could record as well as play back. For music consumption, the "records" quickly became "read-only" (I assume because the "read-write" version was much less robust), but the wax cylinder survived in the Dictaphone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictaphone) which was used for, well, dictation. There were also versions that recorded on discs ("Voicewriter" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_machine), however these were replaced by magnetic tape in the 1950s/60s.
BTW, according to Wikipedia, the very first Edison phonographs had electric motors, which were however powered by "hazardous, high-maintenance wet cell batteries" and made the devices very expensive, so they were soon replaced by wind-up spring mechanisms.
> The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked in 1907 by the Columbia Graphophone Company, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices. This perpetuated the use for voice recording of wax cylinders [...] Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C. King Woodbridge. [...] In 1947, having relied on wax-cylinder recording to the end of World War II, Dictaphone introduced its Dictabelt technology.
So the company used the wax-cylinder technology for 40 years, and then continued with other technologies until 1979, when they were bought up by Pitney Bowes. Doesn't sound like a failure to me...
