Emile Berliner Creates The Recording Industry

I'm in my studio doing restorations of the tango hits a short distance from the location of the world's first record factory and recording studio - set up in 1900 by the inventor of the gramophone and record industry, Emile Berliner (1851-1929).

He had his gramophone and decided he needed a name for the player. He called it the Victrola.

This genius of the modern age also invented microphones and worked on helicopters and public health and ... but this is about records and music.

Emile was a German immigrant to the USA who worked for Thomas Edison. (The story which follows parallels Edison's futile efforts to quash Alternating Current and it's inventor - who also worked for him for a time - Nikola Tesla).

Edison was promoting his little wax cylinder thingy as the future of recording. Emile thought that was a non-starter because he wanted to make something better. He invented the gramophone, the players and the means of manufacturing them both.

Edison went ballistic, as was his habit with smart people. He tied Berliner up in lawsuits. Made his life miserable.

So Emile moved from the US to Montréal, built his manufacturing plant and the record business was born.

In 1900, Berliner sold 2,000 records. In 1901, he sold more than 2 million. And of course, all the machines to play them on. He won his war with Edison, for sure. Immediately.

Enrico Caruso was the artist who made many things happen - for records and Berliner, culture, the modern era of marketing ... and, in an unforetold way, for tango.

It was just on the other side of my neighbourhood where he did all this world-changing work and registered the trademark for his company, "Nipper" - the dog listening to a gramophone. The painter Francis Barraud created the image which was used for more than 80 years. This trademark first appeared from out-of Montréal on the back of record # 402 - "Hello My Baby", by Frank Banta.

In 1924 Berliner's company was bought by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which merged in 1929 with the Radio Corporation of America to become R.C.A. Victor - the company that recorded most of the big tango orquestas and then infuriatingly destroyed the Masters in the 1960s.