History of Recorded Sound Part 3: Berliner and Montreal

This week for history Monday we will be talking more about Victor talking machine company and Montreal’s role in the beginning of the recording industry.

If you watched the previous episode of history Monday you know that Emilee Berliner and Eldredge Johnson founded the united states gramophone company in the late 1890’s and after dealing with many lawsuits and companies stealing his designs, Berliner decided to transfer all of his patent's to Johnson. Johnson rebranded the company as Victor talking machine company.

Before the mid-1920’s recording was done in a purely acoustical way. The sounds were played into a horn and then the vibrations would make a diaphragm that was held in place vibrate and then the vibrations would make the stylus move; the stylus would engrave the waveforms into the disc or cylinder and voila you had your recording.

However, you could not play back the recording you had because they were made on a soft wax, and if you played it back you would damage the wax and lose the recording. The wax master would be sent to a processing plant where it would be electroplated to create a metal stamp of the recording. The metal stamp was used to press the recording into a heated shellac biscuit.

This recording process was not very effective as the horn could only pick up sounds that were close to it and had a frequency that was neither too high or too low. As I mentioned in the previous episode, bands would use euphoniums instead of tubas and blocks of wood instead of a bass drum. But the horn would also pick up unwanted noises as it was recording all the noises in the room. It was like having your condenser microphone’s input cranked all the way up while recording, you would pick up unwanted background noise. The background noise would drown out the necessary overtones and sibilants for a clear recording.

Now let’s talk about Montreal and its involvement with Berliner and Johnson’s companies! Starting around 1900, Berliner and Johnson would manufacture most of their recordings in Montreal. Until around 1960 most of the recordings, you would hear in Canada were made in the US and Europe, sent to Montreal to be pressed and then sold in Canada and the US. Now at the time of all those legal battles I was telling you about earlier, Canadian patent law required that anyone who wanted a valid patent in Canada had a manufacturing plant somewhere in Canada. While the legal battles were going on, Berliner decided to open the plant in a suburb of Montreal, thus clinching his claim of a valid patent in Canada.

After WWI Herbert and his brother Edgar decided to reduce the number of imported recordings from the US to reduce the number of royalties they owed to Victor. In 1916, Herbert, through a subsidiary company, his master's voice, introduced the 216000 series, devoted to Canadian recordings. Later, an exclusively French-Canadian series was initiated in the HMV 263000 series.


By 1920, most of the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company's recordings were recorded and pressed in Canada. Victor was unimpressed by this situation and asserted considerable pressure to displace Herbert from his position of power. How it was achieved will remain a mystery but, in 1921, Herbert resigned from the company and departed for the compo company in Lachine, Quebec, which he had established independently in 1918. The aim of compo was to manufacture records for other recording labels. His younger brother Edgar became president of Berliner gramophone company; the HMV series was phased out and replaced with Victor recordings. In 1924, Victor acquired controlling interest in the Berliner Gram-o-phone company, changing its name to the Victor talking machine company of Canada. Edgar remained president but the other directors were also active directors of the American company.

Even the powerhouse Victor company could not stand against the increasing predominance of radio in the sound recording business and, in 1929, RCA (radio corporation of America) merged with Victor, including the victor branch in Canada, to create RCA Victor. Emile Berliner died the same year, at the age of 78, and the following year Edgar Berliner resigned from the presidency of Victor of Canada, severing the family's last tie to the company, and ending the first era of recorded sound in Canada.