Читать книгу Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs - Howard B. Rockman - Страница 156

During the 1880s a contest developed between Thomas Edison and Volta Laboratory, a research laboratory founded by Alexander Graham Bell, where Bell's cousin, Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter worked on improving the phonograph that Edison had developed in 1877. The contest was directed toward transforming Edison’s 1877 tin foil phonograph, or talking machine, into a device capable of taking its place alongside the typewriter as a business correspondence device. The contest involved, among other things, finding a substance to replace tin foil as a recording medium.

By the beginning of 1887, both sides in the contest announced the invention of a machine using a wax cylinder that would be incised vertically to match the sound vibrations. The same machine used to make the recording would be used for playback. Edison defined his wax cylinder apparatus a “phonograph.” C.A. Bell and Tainter named their apparatus a “graphophone.” Neither machine was much of a success. The phonograph did not succeed as a dictating device, so Edison’s company began to market pre‐recorded wax cylinders of popular music that could be played in the office or home, or even in coin slot machines in arcades, saloons‚ and elsewhere.

Tainter made improvements to the Volta graphophone, and his team also entered the entertainment field. Both sides of the contest had applied for a patent on the vertical cutting or incising of sound vibrations into a wax cylinder, and both sides made recordings on phonograph cylinders that could be played on the graphophone and phonograph.

Meanwhile, Emile Berliner in Washington D.C. began examining in detail both the phonograph and the graphophone to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each. He soon came to the conclusion that the wax recording cylinder was too soft and fragile to last as a permanent recording. A wax cylinder would wear out rapidly, so he sought a more durable substance. Also, the vertical cut, or hill and dale cut and grooves, were not deep enough to keep the stylus from skidding across the surface of the cylinder. The graphophone had the stylus attached to a feed screw that carried the stylus over the cylinder. A constantly deep groove enabled elimination of the feed screw, but something different from the vertical cut would be required. Soft wax cylinders could not be mass produced, so if recordings were to be widely distributed, another method of mass production of exact facsimiles was necessary.

Thus, there was a need for a different type of machine in the recording industry, one that did not use soft wax cylinders, one that did not use vertical cut grooves that were alternately deep with loud sounds and shallow with soft sounds, and one that employed a relatively hard and permanent recording medium that could be easily reproduced in large quantities. Both the Edison and Tainter teams eventually overcame many of the cylinder’s defects; however, the cylinder record appeared already doomed to extinction by the flat disc record.

Emile Berliner went through many trials and errors in developing what he called the “gramophone.” Early in his work, Berliner decided upon the disc format using the lateral vibration developed by Leon Scott in Scott's phonautograph. Scott had developed his machine in the 1850s for the sole purpose of visually recording vibrations of the voice so they could be studied by those involved in analyzing human speech. Scott's vibrations were made by speaking into the large end of a megaphone whose small end included a thin diaphragm that could freely vibrate. A thin brush attached to the diaphragm would make tiny tracks on blackened glass. These lateral vibrations could then be photographed and studied. Apparently, it never occurred to Scott or anyone else at the time that if these tiny tracks could be fixed, and the stylus passed through the tracks, the reverse process would take place and sounds would be reproduced through the large end of the megaphone.

Starting with Scott's phonautograph, Berliner first tried to replicate the thin tracing Scott made on blackened glass on a sturdier substance through a photoengraving process. Berliner was unaware that this was a practice that had been previously advanced by a Frenchman, Charles Cros, in a paper written in April 1877 and deposited with the French Academy. In this paper, Cros for the very first time, stated a theory for recording and reproducing sound. However, Cros never acted upon his theory. Had he done so, he would have been the inventor of the talking machine and not Thomas Edison. Edison was never aware of Cros or his paper, and Edison’s tin foil machine owed nothing to Cros’ theory. Meanwhile, Berliner found that trying to photoengrave the surface of a glass disc led to problems, so he then turned to an etching process.

After attempting many different substances, Berliner turned to zinc. After many failed attempts, he developed a process for coating a zinc disc made from regular stone maker's zinc, with a beeswax and cold gasoline mixture. The coating was then cleared away with fine lines made by a stylus attached to a mica diaphragm so that it would vibrate. After coating the blank reverse side of the disc with varnish, the disc was immersed in an acid bath. After a certain time, the acid etched the fine lines into grooves on the zinc, leaving the remaining parts of the disc untouched. With the vibrations fixed into the zinc, the disc was able to be placed on a turntable, and the sound reproduced with a steel stylus.

Early disc records were made using this process. Berliner’s method, however, required two machines, one for each process. As a name for the whole operation, the inventor coined the word “gramophone.” His earlier patents on this device were No. 372,786 dated November 8, 1887, and No. 382,790 dated May 15, 1888. Berliner then faced the problem of finding a process to reproduce the master zinc record. First, the master had to be electroplated resulting in a metal reverse, or negative record, with grooves projecting outward instead of inward. The negative could then be used to stamp positive copies of a substance that would hold the impression exactly.

Berliner tried numerous substances, including Plaster of Paris and sealing wax, with unsatisfactory results. It then occurred to him that a new substance on the market called celluloid might provide the answer. Berliner contacted J.W. Hyatt, the inventor of celluloid, and Mr. Hyatt felt certain he could provide exact duplicates of Berliner’s records. However, it soon became clear that the material could not withstand the pressure of repeated playings using big, hard steel needles under the full weight of tone arm and horn. Therefore, Berliner abandoned the celluloid process. If you locate an early celluloid disc today, you probably have a very rare and valuable item in your hands.

Berliner next began contacting manufacturers of hard rubber items. He found that warming the rubber made it possible to stamp copies of a zinc negative.

Berliner began marketing his gramophone in the early 1890s. The first samples of laterally cut disc records were issued in Germany, and not in the United States. In 1887, Berliner had obtained patents in both Germany and England for the gramophone. In 1889, he went to Germany to demonstrate his invention to German scientists. While visiting his native Hanover, he was approached by members of the firm of Kammerer and Reinhardt, a toy manufacturer in the town of Waltershausen, who offered to place small discs and small hand‐turned machines on the toy market, and Berliner agreed. For several years, five inch Berliner Gramophone records were manufactured in Germany‚ and several were exported to England. Some of the first discs were made of celluloid, while the later discs were made in part of rubber. However, this was a very small operation.

Subsequently, Berliner returned to the United States and entered into an agreement with several New York investors, and they formed the American Gramophone Company. The company never got off the ground, and then Berliner organized the United States Gramophone Company in Washington, D.C. He stated that he formed the new company at the same time that he switched from celluloid to rubber discs. A patent application for the hard rubber discs was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office in 1893, and the rubber discs entered the market in 1894, the year following the application for the rubber records patent. Today, many consider that that creation of the United States Gramophone Company in Washington, D.C. in 1894 was the true beginning of the American record industry. Gramophone discs and machines reached rapid popularity. Until 1894, all available records were wax cylinders designed to be played on cylinder machines. These wax cylinders were easily broken and did not last long. Also, they could not be mass produced and could be copied only in limited numbers. Moreover, cylinders employed a vertical or hill and dale cut, and the machines had to have a feed screw attachment to prevent the reproducer stylus from jumping out of the grooves, and the feed screw easily came out of adjustment.

Berliner’s disc record was made of hard rubber that was difficult to break and could be mass produced so that the discs could be widely marketed. His discs had a constant deep groove with sound vibrations on the walls; thus, the stylus could be lodged down into the groove, and the groove itself would pull the stylus with its attached tone arm and horn across the face of the disc. One other advantage was that the discs had a blank center area where the title, performer, and disc number could be etched, or a permanent paper label could be attached. The fact that the gramophone machine could not be used for making home recordings as a cylinder machine could does not seem to have had much effect on Berliner’s invention's popularity with the public.

Soon after the beginning of the United States Gramophone Company, Berliner lost faith in rubber pressings. He then turned to the Duranoid Company, which made shellacked electrical parts. In 1895, Berliner sent Duranoid a nickel‐plated stamper, and the company returned to him a shellac pressing that was in every way superior to the hard rubber pressings. By the middle of 1895, all Berliner discs were being made by Duranoid using the shellac process.

In 1896, Berliner licensed a group of businessmen to market and distribute his products. They formed the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia and hired Frank Seaman to organize the National Gramophone Company in New York to handle the distribution of the discs and machines. Recordings were made in Washington and Philadelphia and the stampers were made in the Washington laboratory, and pressings were made by Duranoid.

The major problem Berliner faced at this time was with the playback machines. Originally, these were hand turned. Spring motors were attached to some, but the springs were rather weak and required a high degree of power to rotate the gramophone with its heavy tone arm and horn, compared to a cylinder machine and its floating stylus. Berliner then began working with a machine shop owned by Eldridge Johnson in Camden, New Jersey, to manufacture machines with spring motors. Johnson eventually designed a gramophone using a spring driven turntable of his own design. The Johnson machine, while not entirely satisfactory, was the best that could be produced at the time.

On September 29, 1897, a tragedy occurred when the Washington Traction Company, where the laboratory of the Gramophone Company was located, burned to the ground. The Gramophone Company lost at least 100 zinc masters that had not been pressed, as well as all of its equipment. Everything had to be replaced.

During the late 1890s, the market for Berliner's discs began to expand into foreign countries. Berliner had obtained patents in Germany and England, and in the following years, patents were obtained in Italy, France, Belgium, and Austria. In April 1898, he formed the Berliner Gramophone Company of London. Two gentlemen were sent to Germany to form a German branch with the main office in Hanover. Eventually, there were gramophone companies in all the major countries of Europe including Russia. Berliner’s sons, Herbert and Edgar, opened the Berliner Gramophone Company of Montreal, Canada, in 1899. Subsequently, after Berliner lost his fight against illegal competitors, the Berliner name was gradually dropped from each corporation so that, for instance, the London branch became simply the Gramophone Company.

In 1898, the first of illegal recordings generated by the financial success of Berliner’s invention hit the market. Records made by the Standard Talking Machine Company were simply copies of Berliner records, but with the number “1” added to the disc number. This obvious infringement of Berliner’s patents was soon halted. In 1899, a more serious challenge arose when advertisements appeared for the Vitaphone Disc and Machine made by the American Talking Machine under rights from the Graphophone Company. However, the lawyers for the Berliner Gramophone Company pointed out that the graphophone patents covered vertical cuts, while the Vitaphone’s lateral cuts were an infringement of Berliner’s patents. The Vitaphone operation was subsequently shut down, but not until a large number of records were sold.

Finally came the Zonophone made by Universal Talking Machine Company. It was disclosed that Universal’s president was O.D. LaDelow, who was at the same time secretary and general manager of the National Gramophone Company, and that Frank Seaman, president of National, was also an executive of Universal. This was perceived by Berliner as a betrayal of the Gramophone Company’s interests, and the Philadelphia organization refused to send Seaman and LaDelow any more records or machines. Seaman’s lawyer brought suit claiming that by its 1896 contract, the Philadelphia organization was legally obliged to continue to supply National with discs and machines. Despite Seaman’s and LaDelow’s extra‐legal methods, which included issuing original Berliner discs with all identifying information except the title erased and exchanging the Gramophone Company label pasted onto Johnson’s machines for one reading “the Zonophone,” in June 1900 a court miraculously issued an injunction that shut down the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia and left Emile Berliner with no way to operate his company. Attempts were made by Berliner over several years to overturn the injunction, but without success.

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.”