Victor Talking Machine Company
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- Victrola redirects here. For other uses, see Victrola (disambiguation)
The Victor Talking Machine Company (1901 - 1929) was an American corporation, the leading American producer of phonographs and phonograph records and one of the leading phonograph companies in the world at the time.
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[edit] Origins
The company was incorporated in Camden, New Jersey on October 3, 1901 by Eldridge R. Johnson. It was created by merger and reorganization of two existing companies: The US division of Emile Berliner's Berliner Gramophone Company, which produced disc records, and Johnson's Consolidated Talking Machine Company, which produced machines for playing disc records. The European division of Gramophone remained as a separate company.
In 1901, the phonograph cylinder produced primarily by Edison and Columbia, still dominated the market for recorded sound. Disc records and phonographs were widely considered to be little more than toys, for they were cheaper, less reliable and usually of lower audio fidelity than the cylinder records. Johnson embarked on efforts to change these perceptions. He built more reliable spring-wound phonographs out of durable materials and hired engineers to research improved sound for the recordings. Within a few years, Victor was producing records with some of the finest audio fidelity of the era.
[edit] Name and Logo
There is some controversy as to how the name came about. Fred Barnum gives various possible origins of the "Victor" name; he writes in "'His Master's Voice' In America," "One story claims that Johnson considered his first improved Gramophone to be both a scientific and business 'victory.' A second account is that Johnson emerged as the 'Victor' from the lengthy and costly patent litigations involving Berliner and Seaman. A third story is that Johnson's partner..., Leon Douglass, derived the word from his wife's name 'Victoria.' Finally, a fourth story is that Johnson took the name from the popular 'Victor' bicycle, which he had admired for its superior engineering. Of these four accounts the first two are the most generally accepted."
Victor had the rights in the United States and Latin America to use the famous trademark of the dog Nipper listening to an early disc phonograph. (See also His Master's Voice.)
[edit] Acoustical Recording Era
After increasing the quality of disc records and phonographs, Johnson began an ambitious project to have the most prestigious singers and musicians of the day record for Victor Records, with exclusive agreements where possible. Often these artists demanded fees which the company could not hope to make up from sale of their records. Johnson shrewdly knew that he would get his money's worth in the long run in promotion of the Victor brand name. These new "celebrity" recordings bore red labels, and were marketed as "Red Seal" records. For many years these recordings were single-sided; only in 1923 did Victor began making double-sided "Red Seal" records. Many advertisements were printed mentioning by name the greatest names of music in the era, with the statement that they recorded only for Victor Records. As Johnson intended, much of the public assumed from this that Victor Records must be superior to cylinder records.
The Victor recordings by Enrico Caruso between 1904-1920 were particularly successful, many of them conducted by Josef Pasternack. They were often used by retailers to demonstrate Victor phonographs; Caruso's rich powerful low tenor voice highlighted the best range of audio fidelity of the early audio technology while being minimally affected by its defects. Even people who otherwise never listened to opera often owned a record or two of the great voice of Caruso. Caruso and Victor Records did much to boost each other's commercial popularity. He made his final recordings in September 1920, only three months before his final appearances at the Metropolitan Opera.
Victor recorded numerous classical musicians, including Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Victor Herbert, and Sergei Rachmaninoff in a series of recordings at its Camden, New Jersey studios. Rachmaninoff, in particular, became one of the first composer-performers to record extensively; he first made several recording for Thomas Edison in 1919, then became an exclusive Victor artist from 1920 to 1942.
Orchestras were at a disadvantage in acoustical recordings, due to the limited frequency range of the recording equipment. Musicians had to gather as closely as possible around the recording horn. Percussion instruments, in particular, were used sparingly since many of them could not be heard on the recordings. However, Victor began making recordings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Muck and the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski in 1917. In 1920-21, Arturo Toscanini made his first recordings, conducting the Scala Orchestra, which was then on an American tour.
The origins of country music as we know it today can be traced to two seminal influences and a remarkable coincidence. Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family are considered the founders of country music and their songs were first captured at an historic recording session in Bristol, Tennessee on August 1, 1927, where Ralph Peer was the talent scout and sound recordist for Victor Records.
[edit] Electrical Recording Era
In 1925, Victor switched from the old acoustical or mechanical method of recording sound to the new microphone based electrical system developed by Western Electric. Victor called their version of the improved fidelity recording process "Orthophonic", and sold a line of new designs of phonographs to play these improved records, called "Orthophonic Victrolas". The large top-of- the-line "Credenza" models of Orthophonic Victrolas had a 1.8 m (6 foot) long horn coiled inside the cabinet, and are often considered the high point of the development of the commercial wind-up phonograph, offering audio fidelity seldom matched by most home electric phonographs until some 30 years later. They were introduced on "Victor Day," November 2, 1925.
On April 4, 1925, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians recorded Collegiate, a song written by Moe Jaffe, which was the first electrical recording of a song, using Victor's new electrical microphone technology, rather than an acoustic horn. Victor quickly recorded the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Stokowski in a series of electrical recordings, initially at its Camden, New Jersey studios and then in Philadelphia's Academy of Music. Among Stokowski's first electrical recordings was a performance of Marche Slave by Peter Tchaikovsky. Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made a series of recordings for Victor, beginning in 1925. The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alfred Hertz made a few acoustical recordings early in 1925, then switched to electrical recordings in Oakland, California, that continued until 1930. Within a few years, Serge Koussevitsky began a long series of recordings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Toscanini made his first Victor electrical recordings with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1929.
In 1928, Johnson sold his controlling interest in Victor to the banking firm of Siegelman & Spyer, who in 1929 sold to the Radio Corporation of America, which then became known as the Radio-Victor Division of the Radio Corporation of America later RCA Victor. (See RCA and RCA Records for later history of the Victor brand name.)
[edit] Victor (Japan)
The Japanese Victor Company (JVC), founded in 1927, severed its ties to RCA Victor at the start of World War II, and is still one of the oldest and most successful Japanese record labels as well as an electronics giant.
[edit] The Victrola
Victrola Model XVI, 1910s
In September 1906, Johnson and his engineers designed a new line of phonographs with the turntable and amplifying horn tucked away inside a wooden cabinet. This was not done for reasons of audio fidelity, but for visual aesthetics. The intention was to produce a phonograph that looked less like a piece of machinery and more like a piece of furniture. These internal horn machines, trademarked with the name Victrola, were first marketed to the public in August of that year and were an immediate hit. Soon an extensive line of Victrolas was marketed, ranging from small tabletop models selling for $15, through many sizes and designs of cabinets intended to go with the decor of middle-class homes in the $100 to $250 range, up to $600 Chippendale and Queen Anne-style cabinets of fine wood with gold trim designed to look at home in elegant mansions. Victrolas became by far the most popular brand of home phonograph, and sold in great numbers until the end of the 1920s. RCA Victor continued to market phonographs with the "Victrola" name until the late 1950's.
