(Picture stolen from Google Image Search, as I don't have a photo of the unit I inherited and it's not somewhere I can easily get to at the moment)
I don't know why or how my parents had this. Thrift store find? Inherited from an ancestor? Leftover plunder from my parents' secret past life raiding the high seas? At least two of those are credible guesses.
These days, some folks use “dictaphone” as a generic term for a tape recorder, particularly of the type that accepted microcassettes and later evolved into digital voice recorders. But before that, the Dictaphone was this thing.
I also have a collection of wax cylinders that, as far as I know, came with it. I have never attempted to play any of them, on the assumption that doing so would permanently fuck up whatever recording is engraved.