You Spin Me Right Round

There were many before and many after but Emile Berliner, born in 1851 in Hannover, invented the gramophone and the records that were played on it.

In 1877 Thomas Edison invented a tin-foil phonograph. The phonograph played sounds that were recorded onto cylinders. The quality was bad and the cylinders only lasted one play.

Next came Alexander Graham Bell's graphophone. This used wax cylinders which could be played many times, however, each cylinder had to be recorded separately making the mass reproduction of the same music or sounds impossible with the graphophone.

Emile Berliner changed all of this. He produced both a new type of machine and a new type of flat disc that revolutionised, not only, the recording industry but the communication industry as well. It all came about due to a rivalry between Thomas A. Edison and the Volta Laboratory team of Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. Their mission was to improve upon Edison's earlier tin-foil phonograph. Whilst this contest was rumbling on, Berliner quietly studied all the designs he could and began to make his own. In 1887 he was awarded the first patent for what he called a 'gramophone'.

In 1899, Emile Berliner visited the London offices of the Berliner Gramophone Company. His eye was caught by a painting on the wall by English artist Francis Barraud. The artist, using his own terrier called Nipper, painted it with a cocked head posed in front of a gramophone. The little terrier was listening to his master's voice coming from the horn.

Emile Berliner contacted Francis Barraud and asked him to make a copy. Berliner brought the copy back to the United States and immediately sought a trademark for the painting which was not granted until July 10th 1900. Berliner passed it on to Eldridge R. Johnson, with whom he had worked on improving the playback machine. Johnson began to print it on his Victor record catalogs and then on the paper labels of the discs. Soon, "His Master's Voice (HMV)" became one of the best-known trademarks in the world, still in use today.