In 1889, after being granted US, German and English patents in 1887, Emile Berliner began making 5-inch ‘gramophone’ (a name coined by Berliner) discs in Germany. These first gramphone discs were initially made of celluloid before switching to a hard rubber compound. They were played on a hand-cranked turntable made by the toymakers Kämmer & Reinhardt.
The venture with Kämmer & Reinhardt didn’t last long, but in 1894 Berliner formed the United States Gramophone Company in Washington, D.C. to make single-sided 7-inch discs and the machines to play them on. The discs initially used a hard-rubber compound before switching to shellac in 1895 and played for around 2 minutes with speed varying from 60 rpm to 75 rpm.
Discs had several advantages over the brown wax cylinders available at the time, including durability and the ability to mass-produce copies.
Berliner also had interests in other countries, with a company in England (The Gramophone Company), Germany (Deutsche Grammophon), and Canada (E. Berliner Gramophone of Canada) among others.
Several illegal competitors began to sell discs and machines by the late 1890s, including the Zonophone made by the Universal Talking Machine Company. A lawsuit by the Universal Talking Machine Company forced Berliner to abandon his US operations and transfer the rights to Eldridge Johnson, who manufactured Gramophone machines for Berliner. Johnson formed the Consolidated Talking Machine Company (producing the ‘Improved Gram-O-Phone Record’) before a name change in 1901 to the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Victor introduced the 10-inch 78 rpm record in 1901, and appears to have dropped the 7-inch size by 1908. However, the 7-inch size never fully died out, and was briefly revived in 1915 by the Emerson Record Company in the US, and later by Victory Records in 1928 for the UK market. Even after this, the size was still used for 78 rpm records, often for children’s records, a late example being Happy Time Records in the 1960s (albeit on vinyl rather than shellac) before the 78 rpm speed died out.
