The story
The Gramophone Company was founded in April 1898 by William Barry Owen and Edmund Trevor Lloyd Wynne Williams, commissioned by Emil Berliner, in London.
Owen was acting as agent for Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone record, whilst Williams provided the finances. Most of the company's early discs were made in Hanover, Germany at a plant operated by members of Berliner's family, though it had operations around the world.
In 1898, Fred Gaisberg moved from the U.S. to London to set up the first disc recording studio in Europe; it was situated in Maiden Lane. Among early artists he recorded was Syria Lamont, an Australian soprano whose single "Coming through the Rye" was one of the first ever issued. In December 1900, Owen gained the manufacturing rights for the Lambert Typewriter Company, and the Gramophone Company was for a few years renamed the Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. This was an attempt to diversify the business model, in response to a series of lawsuits by Edison Bell.
Lawsuits
The Berliner Gramophone Company was hit the hardest with a lawsuit that involved a former employee, Frank Seaman. Berliner had hired Seaman, part of The National Gramophone Company, to handle the distribution of record players and disk as an exclusive sales agent. In secret, he started producing a product inferior to the Gramophone, which he called the Zonophone and began solely marketing that instead of the gramophone. Berliner cancelled his contract with The National Gramophone Company, and in turn was sued for breach of contract.
In 1900, the U.S. parent of Gramophone lost a patent infringement suit brought on by Columbia Records and Zonophone, and was no longer permitted to produce records in the U.S.
The agreement allowed Columbia to produce disc records themselves in the United States, which they began doing in 1901, with the UK Gramophone Company and others continuing to do so outside of the US. Emile Berliner established Berliner Gramophone in Montreal, where he became Victor's Canadian distributor and held the rights in Canada to the "His Master's Voice" trademark.
His Master's Voice
While the general public in the UK came to refer to the records and company as "His Master's Voice" because of the prominence of the phrase on the record labels, The Gramophone Company was never officially incorporated as His Master's Voice. The painting "His Master's Voice" was made in the 1890s with the dog Nipper listening to an Edison cylinder phonograph.
In 1899, Owen bought the painting from Francis Barraud, the artist, and asked him to paint out the Edison machine and substitute a Gramophone, which he did. In 1900, Emile Berliner acquired the US rights to the painting and it became the trademark of the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901; the UK rights were retained by the Gramophone Company. Victor utilized the Nipper trademark far more aggressively than the Gramophone Company, first using it on their record labels in 1902.
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In February 1909, the Gramophone Company introduced new labels featuring the famous trademark known as "His Master's Voice", generally referred to in the UK as HMV, to distinguish them from earlier labels which featured the Recording Angel trademark. The latter had been designed by Theodore Birnbaum, an executive of the Gramophone Company pressing plant in Hanover, Germany.
Recording studios
In the mid-1920s, company chairman Trevor Osmond Williams approved funding for the company to secure property and build a recording studio, putting F. H. Dart from the company's technical recording department in charge of the project. Number 3 Abbey Road was acquired in 1929 and, after nearly 2 years of extensive renovations, the 3-studio facility that would come to be known as EMI Recording Studios (and eventually Abbey Road Studios) opened on 12 November 1931.
Formation of EMI
In March 1931, Gramophone merged with the English Columbia Graphophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries Ltd (EMI). The "Gramophone Company, Ltd." name, however, continued to be used for many decades, especially for copyright notices on records.
From the 1930s onwards, HMV manufactured radio and television sets and radiograms under the HMV and Marconiphone brand names in its factory in Hayes, Middlesex.
Gramophone Company of India was formed in 1946. The Gramophone Company Ltd legal entity was renamed EMI Records Ltd. in 1973. After EMI was acquired by Universal Music, the company was renamed to Parlophone Records Ltd. and taken over by Warner Music.
From Wikipedia’s article on Gramophone Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3