History of the Victor Talking Machine Company

Although Edison patented the phonograph in 1877, he did not market it seriously until the late 1880s. During this time, Edison staked the future of recorded sound on cylindrical recordings – on a wax material that was easily cut by the recording stylus and allowed the deep grooves necessary for up-and-down movement of the playback stylus and the reproduction of sound. A German-born immigrant to the U.S., Emile Berliner, had a different idea: flat disc records that could be made into masters and used to press limitless copies. The records were to be cheap, plentiful, and stored flat or in albums. The machine he envisioned played sound using a back-and-forth, lateral, vibration and priced in a range that the middle class could afford a new talking machine and enjoy low-cost new records every month.

Working with a machinist from Camden, New Jersey by the name of Eldridge Johnson, Emile Berliner built the first spring motor-powered “Gramophone” in 1897. Demand quickly grew for this small, well-built contraption. By the late 1890s, Berliner’s assets were threatened by legal conflicts within his company, and in 1901 Johnson incorporated a new legal entity to produce Berliner’s designs under the name “The Victor”. Although the name “Victor” is thought alternately to refer to Johnson’s wife Victoria, or the court victory that led to Johnson’s retaining the Berliner patents over an in-house struggle, Johnson himself in interviews recalls simply thinking it was a nice-sounding name.

Eldridge Johnson also had rights to a famous painting of a famous dog listening to a Berliner Gramophone that graced the offices of the London Berliner Gramophone firm and was quickly becoming one of the world’s most recognizable trademarks.

Johnson was an excellent businessman, and built a full range of talking machines for the wealthy and poor alike. Although early models closely resembled Berliner’s phonograph – small, with a needle attached directly to a brass horn, Johnson soon improved the cabinets and mechanisms and diversified the product line to build machines with one, two, or three-spring motors, oak or mahogany finishes, and a wide choice of sound boxes. Beginning in the 1902 era, Johnson designed a sound-box apparatus that allowed the weight of the horn support independent of the record and the diversification of horn styles. Indeed, horns of brass, steel, painted decorations, shiny nickel, and even wood were available for Victor Talking Machines. Hundreds of thousands of such phonographs were shipped during a period that lasted until the First World War.

Always an innovator, Johnson built a new line of talking machines during the pre-war period that concealed the amplifying horn inside the wooden cabinet. To differentiate these phonographs from the traditional Victors, he called them Victrolas, a name which has become jargon today on the same level as Kleenex and Coke. These phonographs, built to the same level of quality as the earlier products and in a bewildering variety of cabinet styles, mechanical components, and prices sold by the millions throughout the ‘teens and ‘twenties. During the late 1920s, Victor further improved sound fullness by developing an elaborate, and highly effective “Orthophonic” line of phonographs with specially designed sound-boxes and complex folded horns within the cabinets.

In 1929, the Victor Talking Machine Company merged with the Radio Corporation of America to become RCA Victor, a continuing leader in the area of sound recording and playback through the twentieth century.