Howard B. Rockman - Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs

Berliner ultimately transferred his patent rights to the maker of the machine, Eldridge Johnson, who in 1900 formed the entirely new Consolidated Talking Machine Company at the same address as the defunct Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia. Subsequently, Johnson changed the name of the company to “Manufactured by Eldridge Johnson” and then in 1901 he made a final name change to the Victor Talking Machine Company (RCA). He built a large plant in his native Camden, New Jersey, and Victor, a direct descendant of the Berliner Gramophone Company, became the largest and best‐known record company in the world.

The word gramophone, like the word graphophone, was subsequently dropped in the United States in favor of the generic term phonograph. Until World War II, citizens of Great Britain and other countries continued to use the word gramophone for a disc record or disc machine. In the United States, the term gramophone is the basis of the term “Grammy,” the annual music award presentation by the members of the Recording Academy.

Berliner’s disc recordings were not superseded for almost 60 years, when manufacturing techniques were improved. Zinc masters were replaced by wax masters, the speed of disc revolution that varied in the early years finally settled down to approximately 78 rotations per minute, and in 1925 the electric recording process was developed. But until the development of stereo LP records, which employed Berliner’s lateral cut combined with the cylinder’s vertical cut, there was no basic change to what Berliner had begun to produce in 1894.

Berliner left one other legacy to the recording industry. In 1899, he visited the offices of the London branch of his company where he noticed a painting hanging on the wall, of a small dog with cocked head posed in front of the horn of Johnson’s gramophone machine. The little terrier was listening to “his master’s voice” coming from the horn. The painting had been created by English artist Francis Barraud, using his own dog Nipper as the model for the terrier. Berliner than contacted Barraud and asked him to make a copy of the painting. Berliner brought the copy back to the United States and immediately applied for a trademark registration for the painting. The trademark was granted by the U.S. Patent Office on July 10, 1900. It was too late for Berliner to use the mark; however, Berliner allowed the Montreal office to use the trademark, and he passed the mark on to Eldridge Johnson, who began to apply the mark on his Victor record catalogs and then on his paper labels on the disks. Then the Gramophone branches overseas adopted the mark, and shortly, “His master’s voice” became one of the best‐known trademarks and logos in the world. Therefore, if you are ever in a trivia contest, and the question is asked: “What is the name of the dog on the RCA record labels?” the answer is “Nipper.”

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