45worlds Forum - View Single Post - Victor -> RCA Victor

Latest Posts » 78 RPM » View Topic

View Single Post

Topic: Victor -> RCA Victor

26th Mar 2013, 10:41 AM
	Whyperion SUBS Too Many Records , Too Little Time Member since Jan 2013 306 Points	Seems a good place to try out a mini label biography , details sourced from Graces' Guide ( Did they take it from Wikipedia or Wiki from them ? ) 1892 Emile Berliner' founds the (United States) Gramophone Company based in the USA. Don't forget at this time the Gramophone was playing cylinders , not flat discs. 1897 The UK Gramophone Co was founded by William Barry Owen and his partner/investor Trevor Williams, as the UK partner of Berliner's Gramophone Co. 1890s The picture of a dog listening to an early gramophone painted in England by Francis Barraud. That painting entitled "His Master's Voice" is stated to be the dog listening to an Edison cylinder Phonograph, which was capable of recording as well as playing, but Thomas Edison did not buy the painting. 1899 Owen bought the painting from the artist, and asked him to paint over the Edison machine with a Gramophone, which he did. Internet sources note technically, since Gramophones did not record, the new version of the painting makes no sense, as the dog would not have been able to listen to his master's voice (the master being Barraud, and his own Nipper the dog), my note - although one has always assumed that the recording facilities were elsewhere anyway and the dog was listening to a previously recorded cylinder rather than a 'dictating' machine. 1900 December, Owen gained manufacturing rights from the Lambert Typewriter Co of the USA. and therefore for a few years the Gramophone Co was renamed as the Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd, registered on 10 December. The United States branch of Gramophone lost a patent infringement suit, brought on by Columbia Records and Zonophone, and was no longer permitted to produce records in the USA. Gramophone's talking machine manufacturer, Eldridge R. Johnson, was left with a large factory, thousands of talking machines and no records to play on them. He filed suit in 1900 to be permitted to make records himself. He won, in spite of the negative verdict against Berliner's Gramophone Company. This victory by Johnson, used to name the new record company the Victor Talking Machine Company, this was founded formally in 1901, may have been partly due to a patent-pooling handshake agreement with Columbia that allowed the Columbia to begin producing flat records themselves, which they began doing in 1901. As Johnson's earlier company (Called What ??) had been making the talking machines for Berliner, it was Johnson that owned a number of mechanical patents, These patents were valuable in the patent pool agreement with Columbia. As so , Victor and Columbia began making flat records in America, with UK Gramophone and others continuing to do so outside America, Edison remained as the only major player in the making of cylinders (Columbia still made a limited number ) Emile Berliner, the inventor of flat records, was left out of the legal US production, although he had the master recordings of his earlier records, which he took to Canada and there reformed his Berliner label in Montreal, including the Nipper logo and all. Edison soon join the flat record market with his diamond discs and their players. In 1902 Eldridge Johnson's Victor Talking Machine Company acquired the US rights to use the dog and gramophone as the Victor trademark and the logo began appearing on Victor records that year. ( UK rights to the logo were reserved by Gramophone). Appartently Nipper lived from 1884 to 1895 and is buried in England with a celebrated grave marker. Quite how Gramophone Company managed to lose a patent suit when its supplier could win one seems answerable only to the convoluted US patent laws , so if anyone can more easily reference the detail on this , thats welcome. Edited by Whyperion on 26th Mar 2013, 10:56 AM