Gramophone Company

The British Gramophone Company was a Berlin from the German - Americans and Records pioneer Emil founded in 1898 for the European market company that was based in Hayes, England.

Company History

The company founded in turn as you probably the most important German subsidiaries, the gramophone company, headquartered in Hanover, led by Berliner's brother Joseph. Hanover was the birthplace of the brothers. The first records of the world were fabricated in the local J. Berliner telephone factory in Kniestrasse. On January 1, 1900, the daughter was transformed into a corporation. 40 % of the shares were among the brothers, 60 % went to the parent company in England. In the German Empire, it came to the start of World War II for the expropriation of the parent company by seizure.

The Gramophone Company was quite early ( " The voice of the Lord" ) generate the dog Nipper and a gramophone of their house and the line His Master's Voice, a brand and establish who should temporarily among the best known in the Western world and even today actively used, but legally speaking lies in many hands, eg even with RCA or Victor. Not without a certain, rather random symbolism for the technical as well as market development is the fact that the artistic presentation by Francis Barraud initially used a phonograph of Edison showed but was then replaced by a paint over with a gramophone. What is certain is that the image, including copyright, in 1899, was purchased for a total of 100 pounds by the company, to use it in their newspaper ads. Later, blackboards for sale rooms and of course the use were added to the media of the company itself. The original is still in the Board Room of the EMI hang in Hayes and his to recognize the painted-over point clearly. After the 1900 made ​​acquisition of the rights of the Lambert Typewriter Company, the Company was for some years Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. ..

On 8 May 1925, founded by the Gramophone Company in Nowawes near Berlin Electrola GmbH, which received its license with the record label code LC 00193 in December 1925. The Electrola moved in September 1953 its headquarters to Cologne and became one of the major music labels in Germany. The Gramophone Company went on in the EMI Group, which was lifted in March 1931 in cooperation with UK Columbia Records from the baptism.