1894 – 1900
Berliner
Where the flat disc starts
Berliner Gramophone Company · Philadelphia, Washington and Montreal
The house
Emile Berliner patented the gramophone in 1887 and, against Edison's cylinder, chose a flat disc with a lateral groove — a format that could be stamped in quantity from a master rather than recorded one copy at a time. Every disc record that followed descends from that decision.
The early Berliners are seven-inch, single-sided, hand-etched with their titles and driven at first by a hand crank, which is why speeds on surviving copies wander. Eldridge Johnson's spring motor of 1896 fixed that and made the format commercially viable.
Litigation broke up the American operation around 1900; Johnson's side of it became Victor, and Berliner's Montreal company carried the name and the dog trademark in Canada for years afterwards.
What it sounds like
Primitive by any standard: narrow, loud, brief — most sides run under two minutes — and often speed-unstable. They are the earliest commercially issued discs in existence, and they sound like the beginning of something.
On the shelf
Pulling sleeves…