Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (4 page)

Realizing they needed a spring-driven motor of their own, in February 1896, Berliner’s technicians called in a handyman by the name of Eldridge Reeves Johnson, a lanky machine artisan from Delaware who owned a small sewing-machine repair store in Camden, New Jersey. It was to be a lucky encounter that would change Johnson’s destiny and, in time, make him one of the richest men in America.

Although Johnson would later joke that Berliner’s prototype sounded like “a partially educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head,” he was fascinated. He was also fed up with the sewing-machine business, having endured backbreaking years barely eking out a profit. In his spare time, Johnson began tinkering with the Gramophone and came to understand its many subtleties. By doing away with some parts, Johnson found a cheap solution and became Berliner’s chief manufacturer.

Berliner and his partners then stumbled upon a promoter and advertising man, Frank Seaman. Confident, optimistic, and above all convincing, Seaman talked Berliner into a deal: no upfront fees, just sign away fifteen-year exclusive agency rights. Setting up a third company in the network, Seaman moved into the music district on Broadway and began advertising the Gramophone in magazines.

Crucially, Berliner’s musical director, Fred Gaisberg, realized that despite his company’s small output, he was able to record respected singers who would never have subjected themselves to the mind-numbing repetition involved with cylinder recording. His first big fish was an Italian tenor, Ferruccio Giannini, who sang edited versions of arias from
Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore,
and
Cavalleria Rusticana
. Berliner and Gaisberg also brought in speakers, evangelists, freethinkers, actors, and orators. Even the very popular John Philip Sousa and his U.S. Marine Band abandoned Columbia and agreed to record exclusively for the Gramophone disc.

With demand booming, by 1898, Frank Seaman had exceeded the $1 million mark. Nevertheless, Berliner’s international expansion, setting up Deutsche Grammophon in Germany and the Gramophone Company in England, caused consternation—both in his own camp and over at Columbia. Seaman began brooding; his sales contract with Berliner covered America only, but he had harbored hopes of commanding a global empire. Concerned by Berliner’s growth, Edward Easton called in a noted patent lawyer from Washington. Although nobody could have guessed it, the following period would be a legal disaster with consequences that would shape the record business for the entire century ahead.

The fearsome attorney, Philip Mauro, placed a Berliner Gramophone on a table and began carefully studying its characteristics. He then began researching his adversary’s business structures. In October 1898, Mauro filed a lawsuit against Seaman’s company for copyright infringement against Bell and Tainter’s principle of a floating stylus. The cruel brilliance of Mauro’s strategy was to hamper the Gramophone’s commercial growth while accentuating divides within Berliner’s camp. Three different companies were dividing profits: Eldridge Johnson was selling the machines to Berliner’s company at a 25 percent markup; Berliner then sold the machines to Seaman with a 40 percent markup on cost price. Mauro was reliably informed that Seaman, due to his huge advertising costs, wanted to renegotiate the original deal.

When Columbia’s lawsuit came to court, Mauro convinced the judge there had been a patent violation, but Seaman won time by appealing. Determined to outwit his now numerous adversaries, Frank Seaman secretly prepared to manufacture the Zonophone
,
a shameless copy of Berliner’s Gramophone, except heavier and given extra decorative detail. He set up a new company in March 1899 with the same name but registered in a different district. Then, in October, he stopped ordering Gramophones from Berliner’s factory, throwing Berliner’s and Johnson’s companies into a financial crisis.

Berliner was stunned by Seaman’s move. His partners were, too, but as outside investors could do little more than initiate a legal response. The one person for whom Seaman’s shenanigans spelled imminent bankruptcy was Eldridge Johnson. Sitting on $50,000 worth of Gramophone stock, he had just borrowed heavily to build a four-story factory.

The plot thickened when Seaman’s appeal came to court. In a complete about-face, Seaman accepted Mauro’s claim that the Gramophone did copy Bell and Tainter’s floating stylus. The judge upheld the injunction, which effectively closed down Berliner’s business in America. Just two weeks later, Seaman and Mauro struck a deal for legal protection and commercial advantage.

With Berliner barred from conducting business in America, Eldridge Johnson had no choice but to sell his stock or go bankrupt. Although he had no patents of his own, he did have one card up his sleeve; for three years he had been secretly examining Berliner’s discs under a microscope. Jagged defects in the groove, he felt, were causing a raspy, metallic timbre. By using waxy compounds instead, Johnson developed his own superior, smoother-sounding disc. His lawyers, however, advised him against applying for a patent, believing his compound infringed the Bell and Tainter wax cylinder.

Determined to pay off his creditors, Johnson recruited a talented salesman, Leon Douglass, who came up with an unbeatable commercial plan. In the autumn of 1900, Douglass spent half of Johnson’s last $5,000 on double-or-nothing advertisements, “Gramophone records FREE.” The eye-catching campaign invited Gramophone owners to apply for a free sample of Johnson’s new, improved disc. It was enough to get momentum building.

Seaman hit back with advertisements claiming the Zonophone was the only legitimate disc player and threatened Gramophone buyers with prosecution. Making every effort to throw doubt on Johnson’s reputation, he also sent letters to dealers. While Berliner’s three separate lawsuits against Seaman snailed through the legal system, the German was dealt a personal tragedy. His newborn daughter, Alice, was wasting away due to severe intestinal disorders. By Christmas 1900, she was eight months old yet weighed less than eight pounds, close to death.

As Berliner sat by his daughter’s bedside, the complex web of litigation spun around him. With Mauro in the shadows, Seaman tried to get injunctions put on Johnson’s business, claiming Johnson’s new operation was just a front for Berliner’s old company. In his first show of steel, on March 1, 1901, Eldridge Johnson personally addressed the judge, whose ruling was swayed by Johnson’s compelling testimony exposing the deceit and greed of his adversaries. He stepped out of the courtroom in the strongest position he’d ever been in. He had to refrain from using the
Gramophone
trademark in America, but he was free to sell his various products.

Johnson’s next decisive move was to hammer out a durable deal with Berliner. A complex but soundly conceived contract was drawn up, under which the Consolidated Talking Machine Company gained control of Berliner’s patents and traded under a new brand name, the Victor Talking Machine. Johnson’s new Camden factory began working twenty-four hours; 7,570 Gramophones were sold in Victor’s first year of trade.

Then came Philip Mauro’s next coup de theatre. In the early days, an errand boy named Joseph Jones was working for the summer inside Berliner’s secret laboratory. Watching Berliner struggle with his zinc masters, the young man realized that wax was the ideal material for making disc records. In November 1897, Jones filed a patent application for wax discs, which remained in administrative no-man’s-land until Philip Mauro entered the building.

Joseph Jones had since taken Berliner’s trade secrets to a shady entrepreneur, Albert Armstrong. Jones and Armstrong had set up a small phonograph company, Standard Talking Machine, making dual-horn players that used Berliner’s laterally cut disc system despite having no patent. Berliner, of course, sued, but with Easton and Mauro’s discreet guidance, Jones and Armstrong folded their company and set up a new one while Mauro tended to Jones’s patent application. To break into the rapidly growing disc market by the back door, through a complex string of companies, Columbia began distributing laterally cut discs, stamped with a
Climax
logo at a casino chip factory. As such, Columbia wasn’t directly producing discs, just distributing them.

Thanks to Mauro’s legal prowess, the Joseph Jones patent was approved on December 10, 1901. Easton and Mauro celebrated. Their alliance with Jones meant Columbia could start legitimately pressing disc records embossed with its own logo.

Johnson and Douglass came up with a brilliant riposte. Hearing that the manufacturers of the bootleg discs were feeling used, Johnson bought them out and had their discs embossed with a Victor Talking Machine logo. When Easton was handed a copy of his new discs with a VTM logo, he hit the roof and called in Mauro—precisely what Johnson and Douglass were expecting. In the subsequent legal exchanges, it was negotiated that Victor would sell the factory to Columbia for the original $10,000. In return, Columbia and its various proxies would drop all other legal proceedings against Victor.

The four-year drama ended with a cross-licensing agreement signed on December 8, 1903, whereby Victor and Columbia pooled their patents, creating an effective monopoly over the laterally cut disc format. Edward Easton was happy with the outcome; his archrival, Thomas Edison, had been excluded from the new format. Eldridge Johnson could celebrate, too. Having started out as a sewing-machine repairer, he had ended up in a relatively secure position, effectively inheriting Berliner’s invention.

Even the biggest loser in the saga, Emile Berliner, could be philosophical. Against such crafty operators, he could easily have lost everything. In the bitter end, Eldridge Johnson would develop the Gramophone exactly as he dreamed while paying dividends for the rest of his life. Throwing away the stone in his shoe, Berliner bought out Frank Seaman’s American operations for $135,000 and duly closed them down.

On a personal note, the sensitive Emile Berliner had been spared from tragedy at home. Sensing that bacteria in raw milk was causing his daughter’s intestinal problems, he dismissed the doctors and began boiling the milk before feeding it to her. Slowly but surely the baby put on weight, weighing almost twenty pounds on her first birthday in April 1901.

Berliner walked away from the whole experience a changed man. For the rest of his life, he spent a portion of his Gramophone-related wealth printing and distributing milk-hygiene leaflets in American schools. Lobbying health organizations and politicians in Washington, the inventor of the disc record became a key campaigner for milk pasteurization.

The golden age of inventors had reached a conclusion. Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner had been left behind by faster, shrewder players. The infant record industry was now healthy and walking steadily. Lawyers, salesmen, and musicians were taking over.

3. HIS MASTER’S VOICE

Around the world and deeper into the urban experiment, record buyers began traveling with their ears. American culture had long been forged by waves of immigration, but the new century experienced a marked increase in the numbers arriving. Nine million foreigners entered America in the first decade of the new century. This vast and ever-growing melting pot in and around New York created some great opportunities for ethnic satire.

Columbia was the leader in Jewish comedy, notably its “Cohen on the Telephone” caricature of a Yiddish immigrant talking on a telephone in ridiculous English. There were also funny American accents to tease, especially the Southern redneck. Len Spencer, for example, scored a hit in 1902 with “Arkansas Traveler.” “How far is it to the next crossroads?” the traveler asks the Southern fiddler.

“You just foller yer nose and you’ll come t’it.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“See that mule? It wuz here when I got here.”

The traveler asks why he doesn’t fix the leak in his roof, to which the redneck replies that it’s been raining. The traveler asks why he doesn’t fix it when it isn’t raining.

“It doesn’t leak when it doesn’t rain.”

The most frequently satirized ethnic group of them all was what society then called
the Negro
. By the turn of the century, the minstrel format was turned on its head by (Bert) Williams and (George) Walker—two black men mimicking white minstrels pretending to be black. Originally called
Two Real Coons,
they had spent years developing their comedy routine in vaudeville theaters. Once hits on Broadway, they were invited by both Victor and Columbia to record songs from their musicals. “Black-faced white comedians used to make themselves look as ridiculous as they could when portraying a ‘
darky
’ character…,” explained Walker in 1906. “The one fatal result of this to the colored performers was that they imitated the white performers in their make-up as ‘
darkies
.’ Nothing seemed more absurd than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself.”

In this spirit of improbable culture clashes, white songwriters were playing with the
coon song
tradition from black vaudeville. One such number that was popular in the sheet music market, “I Wants a Ping Pong Man
,”
gave the Victorian fashion of table tennis an absurd twist with a black maid’s saucy innuendo. Such experiments, however, including Scott Joplin’s 1899 sheet music hit “Maple Leaf Rag
”
went under the radars of the major record companies. Their classically trained music staff, busily emphasizing talking machines as luxury domestic entertainment, were simply unaware that a Southern wave was brewing in the creative world.

As Emile Berliner had predicted, the single biggest genre boom of the new era would be grand opera. In 1902, Victor’s Fred Gaisberg sailed to Italy to hear a twenty-eight-year-old opera tenor making waves among European audiences—Enrico Caruso. In a hotel room in Milan, Gaisberg immortalized Caruso’s voice on what are still considered some of the most important recordings of all time.

In Caruso, Victor found the first monumental star to showcase its revolutionary disc format. After his debut in New York, Victor signed an exclusive deal with the Metropolitan Opera, which evolved into its hugely successful
Red Seal
series, featuring all the biggest operatic and classical stars of the day.