1.
New York Philharmonic
It is one of the leading American orchestras popularly referred to as the Big Five. The Philharmonics home is David Geffen Hall, known as Avery Fisher Hall until September 2015, founded in 1842, the orchestra is one of the oldest musical institutions in the United States and the oldest of the Big Five orchestras. Its record-setting 14, 000th concert was given in December 2004, the New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842 by the American conductor Ureli Corelli Hill, with the aid of the Irish composer William Vincent Wallace. The orchestra was called the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was the third Philharmonic on American soil since 1799, and had as its intended purpose, the first concert of the Philharmonic Society took place on December 7,1842 in the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway before an audience of 600. The concert opened with Beethovens Symphony No, the musicians operated as a cooperative society, deciding by a majority vote such issues as who would become a member, which music would be performed and who among them would conduct.
At the end of the season, the players would divide any proceeds among themselves, after only a dozen public performances and barely four years old, the Philharmonic organized a concert to raise funds to build a new music hall. The centerpiece was the American premiere of Beethovens Symphony No,9, to take place at Castle Garden on the southern tip of Manhattan. About 400 instrumental and vocal performers gathered for this premiere, which was conducted by George Loder, the chorals were translated into what would be the first English performance anywhere in the world. However, with the expensive US$2.00 ticket price and a war rally uptown, the audience was kept away. Although judged by some as an odd work with all those singers kept at bay until the end, during the Philharmonics first seven seasons, seven musicians alternated the conducting duties. In addition to Hill, Timm and Étienne, these were William Alpers, George Loder, Louis Wiegers and this changed in 1849 when Theodore Eisfeld was installed as sole conductor for the season.
Eisfeld, along with Carl Bergmann, would be the conductor until 1865 and that year Eisfeld returned to Europe, and Bergmann continued to conduct the Society until his death in 1876. Leopold Damrosch, Franz Liszts former concertmaster at Weimar, served as conductor of the Philharmonic for the 1876/77 season, but failing to win support from the Philharmonics public, he left to create the rival Symphony Society of New York in 1878. Upon his death in 1885, his 23-year-old son Walter took over, Carnegie Hall would remain the orchestras home until 1962. The Philharmonic in 1877 was in financial condition, caused by the paltry income from five concerts in the 1876/77 season that brought in an average of only $168 per concert. At first the Philharmonics suggestion offended Thomas because he was unwilling to disband his own orchestra, because of the desperate financial circumstances, the Philharmonic offered Theodore Thomas the conductorship without conditions, and he began conducting the orchestra in the autumn of 1877.
He left in 1891 to found the Chicago Symphony, taking thirteen Philharmonic musicians with him, another celebrated conductor, Anton Seidl, followed Thomas on the Philharmonic podium, serving until 1898
2.
Abe Lyman
Abe Lyman was a popular bandleader from the 1920s to the 1940s. He made recordings, appeared in films and provided the music for radio shows. His name at birth was Abraham Simon and he and his brother, changed their last name to Lyman because they both thought it sounded better. Abe learned to play the drums when he was young, around 1919, he was regularly playing music with two other notable future big band leaders, Henry Halstead and Gus Arnheim, in California. In Los Angeles Mike Lyman opened the Sunset, a night club popular with film stars as Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton. When Abes nine-piece band first played at the Sunset, it was a success, for an engagement at the Cocoanut Grove in The Ambassador Hotel on April 1,1922, Abe added a violinist and saxophonist. Opening night drew a crowd of 1500 guests in the Cocoanut Grove. Lyman appeared on radio as early as 1922 and his orchestra was broadcast from The Ambassador Hotel by late March on KOG. After the band cut their first record under the local label Nordskog Records, there they made many recordings and were one of Brunswicks leading orchestras through 1935, when Lyman signed to Decca Records.
In late 1937, Lyman signed with Victor where he was assigned their Bluebird label and he recorded prolifically for them through 1942. The Lyman Orchestra toured Europe in 1929, appearing at the Kit Cat Club and the Palladium in London and at the Moulin Rouge and his orchestra were featured in a number of early talkies, including Hold Everything, Paramount on Parade, Good News and Madam Satan. In 1931, Abe Lyman and his orchestra recorded a number of soundtracks for the Merrie Melodies cartoon series, notable musicians in the Lyman Orchestra included Ray Lopez, Gussie Mueller, and Orlando Slim Martin. During the 1930s, the Lyman Orchestra was heard regularly on shows as Accordiana and Waltz Time every Friday evening and on NBC. Lyman and his orchestra sat in for Phil Harris on the Jack Benny program in 1943 when Harris served in the Merchant Marines, when Lyman was 50 years old, he left the music industry and went into the restaurant management business. He died in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 60, ate Van Delden, Abe Lyman-The Early Years Red Hot Jazz, Abe Lyman Abe Lymans California Ambassador Hotel Orchestra
3.
Brunswick Corporation
Brunswicks global headquarters is in the northern Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois. In 2016, it had sales of US$4.5 billion with cash flow of $234 million. Brunswick was founded by John Moses Brunswick who came to the United States from Switzerland at the age of 15, the J. M. Brunswick Manufacturing Company opened for business on September 15,1845, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Originally J. M. Brunswick billiard tables were a success. It was renamed J. M, in 1874, the Brunswick company merged with competitor Great Western Billiard Manufactory owned by Julius Balke to become the J. M. Brunswick & Balke Company. In 1884, the formed the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company with capital of $1.5 million. The company expanded into making a number of other products, large ornate neo-classical style bars for saloons were a popular product. Bowling balls and equipment led a line of sporting equipment. It popularized bowling balls of manufactured materials, vulcanized rubber at first, in the early 20th century, Brunswick expanded the product line to include such diverse products as toilet seats, automobile tires, and phonographs.
In the late 1910s, they introduced a line of disc phonograph records. In 1930, Brunswick sold the control of the company to Warner Brothers. During World War II, Brunswick-Balke-Collender made small aircraft for the U. S. military. After the war, Brunswick introduced a line of school furniture, Brunswick had made two models of semi-automated, manually operated spotting tables for the tenpin sport, that the Model A unit replaced. The decade saw the introduction of a line of golfing equipment to compete with AMF in the leisure products, the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company officially changed its name to the Brunswick Corporation on April 10,1960. The following year the company reported sales of $422 million, Brunswick acquired Mercury Marine in 1961. In the 1970s, Brunswick introduced the automatic scorer, which tallied the score instead of the bowler doing it by hand. In the 1980s, Brunswick became a maker of yachts and pleasure boats, whose brands include Bayliner, Boston Whaler, Sea Ray. During the Gulf War, Brunswick supplied the military camouflage nets
4.
Noah Beery Sr.
Noah Nicholas Beery was an American actor who appeared in films from 1913 to 1945. He was the brother of Academy Award-winning actor Wallace Beery. Noah Beery was born on a farm in Clay County, Missouri not far from Smithville, the middle son of Noah Webster Beery and Frances Margaret Beery, he and his brothers William C. Beery and Wallace Beery became Hollywood actors, the Beery family left the farm in the 1890s and moved to nearby Kansas City, Missouri where the father was employed as a police officer. While still a young boy Beery got his first exposure to theatre, possessed of a deep, rich voice even in his early teens, several of the actors at the Gillis Theater encouraged Beery to take singing lessons and consider a career as a performer. A summer of singing at Kansas Citys Electric Park amusement park led to Beery leaving for New York City while just sixteen years old, Noah Beery found work in vaudeville and in the chorus of musical comedies during his early years in New York. Soon though he would turn his attention to acting in melodramas of the period, after a dozen years on the stage, he joined his brother Wallace in Hollywood in 1915 to make motion pictures.
He became a character actor, adept at playing the villain. One of his most memorable characterizations was as Sergeant Gonzales in The Mark of Zorro opposite Douglas Fairbanks, the tagline on the poster for 1923s Stormswept proclaimed Wallace and Noah Beery, The Two Greatest Character Actors on the American Screen. Beery acted through the silent film era, and successfully made the transition to talkies and he appeared in lavish early Technicolor musicals, such as The Show of Shows, the widescreen musical Song of the Flame, Bright Lights, Under a Texas Moon and Golden Dawn. He reached his peak in popularity in 1930, even recording a record for Brunswick Records with songs from two of his films. At the height of his career, Noah Beery began billing himself as Noah Beery Sr. in anticipation of his sons presence in films, after his death, his son dropped the Junior and became simply Noah Beery. Noah Beery Sr. appeared in nearly 200 films during his career, Noah Beery Sr. married fellow actor Marguerite Walker Lindsey in 1910.
Their first child died in infancy, second child Noah Lindsey Beery, born in 1913, was seriously ill in early childhood, prompting a brief move to Florida on the advice of doctors. Beery died on April 1,1946 after suffering an attack at the Beverly Hills home of his brother Wallace. It was Wallaces birthday and, in addition to celebrating the event and he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles
5.
Popular music
Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training and it stands in contrast to both art music and traditional or folk music. Art music was historically disseminated through the performances of music, although since the beginning of the recording industry. Traditional music forms such as blues songs or hymns were passed along orally, or to smaller. The original application of the term is to music of the 1880s Tin Pan Alley period in the United States, although popular music sometimes is known as pop music, the two terms are not interchangeable. Popular music songs and pieces typically have easily singable melodies, in the 2000s, with songs and pieces available as digital sound files, it has become easier for music to spread from one country or region to another. Some popular music forms have become global, while others have an appeal within the culture of their origin.
Through the mixture of genres, new popular music forms are created to reflect the ideals of a global culture. The examples of Africa and the Middle East show how Western pop music styles can blend with local traditions to create new hybrid styles. Sales of recordings or sheet music are one measure and Manuel note that this definition has problems because multiple listens or plays of the same song or piece are not counted. Manuel states that one criticism of music is that it is produced by large media conglomerates and passively consumed by the public. He claims that the listeners in the scenario would not have been able to make the choice of their favorite music, understandings of popular music have changed with time. A societys popular music reflects the ideals that are prevalent at the time it is performed or published, david Riesman states that the youth audiences of popular music fit into either a majority group or a subculture. The majority group listens to the commercially produced styles while the subcultures find a minority style to transmit their own values and this allows youth to choose what music they identify with, which gives them power as consumers to control the market of popular music.
Form in popular music is most often sectional, the most common sections being verse, chorus or refrain, other common forms include thirty-two-bar form, chorus form *, and twelve-bar blues. Popular music songs are rarely composed using different music for each stanza of the lyrics, the verse and chorus are considered the primary elements. Each verse usually has the melody, but the lyrics change for most verses. The chorus usually has a phrase and a key lyrical line which is repeated
6.
Vocalion Records
The name was derived from one of their corporate divisions, the Vocalion Organ Co. The fledgling label first issued single-sided, vertical-cut disc records but soon switched to double-sided and then, in 1920, aeolian pressed Vocalion discs in a good-quality reddish brown shellac, which set the product apart from the usual black shellac used by other record companies. Advertisements stated that Vocalion Red Records are best or Red Records last longer, Vocalions shellac was no more durable than good-quality black shellac. In 1925 the label was acquired by Brunswick Records, during the 1920s Vocalion began the celebrated 1000 race series. The 15000 series continued, but after the Brunswick takeover, it seems that Vocalion took a seat to the Brunswick label. By 1928–1929, many of the records issued on the Vocalion 15000 series were hot jazz exclusive to Vocalion and are extremely rare, in retrospect, it seems that Brunswick never really had a plan for the Vocalion 15000 series. From 1925 to 1930, Brunswick appeared to use this series as a specialty label for other than general sale.
This seems to be an explanation as to why the early 1930s Vocalions are rarer than Brunswick records. In April 1930, Warner Bros. bought Brunswick Records and, for a time, in December 1931 Warner Bros. licensed the entire Brunswick and Vocalion operation to the American Record Corporation. ARC used Brunswick as their flagship 75-cent label and Vocalion as one of their 35-cent labels, the Vocalion race/blues series continued and continued to be popular. Starting in 1933, a number of Brunswick artists were assigned to Vocalions then-new 2500 series, new signings contributed to the growing popularity of the label. Coupled with other short-term signings, including Fletcher Henderson, Phil Harris, Earl Hines, and Isham Jones, starting in 1935, Vocalion started reissuing titles that were still selling from the recently discontinued OKeh label. In 1936 and 1937 Vocalion produced the recordings of the influential blues artist Robert Johnson. From 1935 through 1940, Vocalion was one of the most popular labels for small-group swing, after the short-lived Variety label was discontinued, many titles were reissued on Vocalion, and the label continued to release new recordings made by Master/Variety artists through 1940.
This added Cab Calloway and the Duke Ellington small groups-within-his-band to the label, ARC was purchased by CBS and Vocalion became a subsidiary of Columbia Records in 1938. The popular Vocalion label was discontinued in 1940, and the current Vocalions were reissued on the recently revived OKeh label with the catalog numbers. The name Vocalion was resurrected in the late 1950s by Decca as a label for back-catalog reissues. In 1975, MCA issued five albums on the Vocalion label
7.
Chicago
Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, film, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language.
The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S.
The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
8.
Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi was an Italian violinist and musicologist, best known for his three orchestral tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals. His musicological interest in 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century music led him to pieces based on the music of these periods. He wrote operas, the most famous being La fiamma. Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy into a musical family and his father, a local piano teacher, taught him to play the piano and violin at an early age. He went on to study the violin and viola with Federico Sarti at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, composition with Giuseppe Martucci, and historical studies with Luigi Torchi, Respighi passed his exams and received a diploma in the violin in 1899. In 1900, Respighi accepted the role of principal violist in the orchestra of the Russian Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg, during his time there, he studied composition for five months with Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Respighi returned to Bologna to continue his studies in composition, which earned him a second diploma, until 1908, his principal activity was first violinist in the Mugellini Quintet, a touring quintet founded by composer Bruno Mugellini.
Following his departure from the group, Respighi moved to Rome and he spent some time performing in Germany before returning to Italy and turning his attention primarily to composition. In 1919, he married a pupil, singer Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo. Although many sources indicate some brief studies with Max Bruch during his time in Germany, during the early twentieth century, Respighi was active as a performer and composer. His compositions began to draw attention and, in 1913, he was appointed as professor of composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, in 1917, his international fame rose following multiple performances of the first of his orchestral tone poems, Fountains of Rome. Subsequent tone poems include Pines of Rome, the Trittico Botticelliano, Vetrate di Chiesa, other notable orchestral works include the Sinfonia Drammatica, in three movements, and the Metamorphoseon Modi XII. From 1923 to 1926, Respighi was the director of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, in 1925, he collaborated with Sebastiano Arturo Luciani on an elementary textbook entitled Orpheus.
He was elected to the Royal Academy of Italy in 1932, the Concerto Gregoriano and Concerto in Modo Misolidio have proven to be the most enduringly popular. Notable works for voice and piano include a series of art songs, Deità Silvane, the Lauda per la Natività del Signore and Il Tramonto are performed relatively frequently. Respighis operas after Marie Victoire were all set to libretti by his close collaborator, aside from pastiches and the re-imagined/arrangement, La Boutique Fantasque, Respighi completed only two ballets, the Ballata delle Gnomidi and Belkis, Regina di Saba. A visit to Brazil resulted in the composition Impressioni Brasiliane and he had intended to write a sequence of five pieces, but by 1928 he had completed only three, and decided to present what he had. Its first performance was in 1928 in Rio de Janeiro, the first piece, Tropical Night, is a nocturne with fragments of dance rhythms suggested by the sensuous textures
9.
Phonograph
The phonograph is a device invented in 1877 for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. In its forms it is called a gramophone. To recreate the sound, the surface is rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it. In electric phonographs, the motions of the stylus are converted into an electrical signal by a transducer. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, while other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edisons phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound. His phonograph originally recorded sound onto a sheet wrapped around a rotating cylinder. A stylus responding to sound vibrations produced an up and down or hill-and-dale groove in the foil, in the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its system, the stylus or needle.
The disc phonograph record was the dominant audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century, from the mid-1980s on, phonograph use on a standard record player declined sharply because of the rise of the cassette tape, compact disc and other digital recording formats. Records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles and DJs, vinyl records are still used by some DJs and musicians in their concert performances. Musicians continue to release their recordings on vinyl records, the original recordings of musicians are sometimes re-issued on vinyl. Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world, in more modern usage, the playback device is often called a turntable, record player, or record changer. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, the term phonograph was derived from the Greek words φωνή and γραφή. The similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings, the roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph and telephone.
In British English, gramophone may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, the term phonograph was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records. Gramophone generally referred to a wind-up machine, after the introduction of the softer vinyl records, 33 1⁄3-rpm LPs and 45-rpm single or two-song records, and EPs, the common name became record player or turntable. Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio and, from about 1960, such a system began to be described as a hi-fi or a stereo. In American English, properly specific to machines made by Edison, was used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others
10.
Willem Mengelberg
Joseph Willem Mengelberg was a Dutch conductor, famous for his performances of Mahler and Strauss with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Mengelberg was the fourth of fifteen children of German-born parents in Utrecht and his father was the well-known Dutch-German sculptor Friedrich Wilhelm Mengelberg. Four years later, in 1895, when he was 24, Mengelberg was appointed conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. In this position, Mengelberg was to premiere a number of masterpieces, Mengelberg founded the long-standing Mahler tradition of the Concertgebouw. Mahler wrote to his wife Alma Mahler that this idea was a stroke of genius. Mahler regularly visited The Netherlands to introduce his work to Dutch audiences, including his First, Mahler edited some of his symphonies while rehearsing them with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, making them sound better for the acoustics of the Concertgebouw. This is perhaps one reason that this hall and its orchestra are renowned for their Mahler tradition. Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach on Palm Sunday, Mengelberg was music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1928.
One of his first electrical recordings, for Victor, was a two-disc set devoted to A Victory Ball by Ernest Schelling, Mengelberg was described by Fred Goldbeck as the perfect dictator/conductor, a Napoleon of the orchestra, Alan Sanders writes, his treatment of the orchestra was autocratic. In years his behaviour became extreme, and there are stories of abusive verbal exchanges between him and his players at rehearsal. The most controversial aspect of Mengelbergs biography centers on his actions and his biographer Fritz Zwart writes of an interview Mengelberg had given with the Völkische Beobachter, the German Nazi newspaper. Zwart notes that Mengelberg conducted in Germany and in German-occupied countries throughout the war, explanations have ranged from political naiveté in general, to a general blind spot for criticism of anything German, given his own ancestry. This notwithstanding, he continued to draw a pension from the orchestra until 1949 when cut off by the city council of Amsterdam.
Mengelberg retreated in exile to Zuort, Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1951, Mengelbergs recordings with the Concertgebouw Orchestra are marked by frequent use of an unusually prominent portamento, the sliding of the string players left fingers from one note to another. The scholar Robert Philip has shown that Mengelbergs recordings with other orchestras do not show this portamento, freely bowed portamento sounded lighter than that we hear in Mengelbergs recordings, as not all players would slide on the same notes. Philip mentions recordings by the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter as examples of this style, in addition, Mengelberg employed fluctuations of tempo that were extreme even in an era in which tempo fluctuation was more common than in modern practice. While admirers of Mengelberg value his tempo inflections, detractors have criticized them, Mengelberg recorded with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic for Telefunken. After his death, Philips issued recordings of performances recorded by Dutch radio services
11.
Victor Talking Machine Company
The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American flagship record company headquartered in Camden, New Jersey. The company was founded by Eldridge R. Johnson, who had previously made gramophones to play Emile Berliners disc records, Victor Talking Machine Co. was incorporated officially in 1901 shortly before agreeing to allow Columbia Records use of its disc record patent. Victor had acquired the Pan-American rights to use the trademark of the fox terrier Nipper listening to a gramophone when Berliner. Barraud noticed that whenever he played a recorded by his brother. Barrauds original depicts Nipper staring intently into the horn of an Edison-Bell while both sit on a wooden surface. The London branch was managed by an American, William Barry Owen, Barraud paid a visit with a photograph of the painting and asked to borrow a horn. Owen gave Barraud an entire gramophone and asked him to paint it into the picture, the original painting still shows the contours of the Edison-Bell phonograph beneath the paint of the gramophone when viewed in the correct light.
Only 13 originally commissioned His Masters Voice paintings were commissioned by the company, in 1915, the His Masters Voice logo was rendered in immense circular leaded-glass windows in the tower of the Victrola factory building. The tower remains today with replica windows installed during Radio Corporation of Americas ownership of the plant in its years, one of the original windows is located at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D. C. There are different accounts as to how the Victor name came about, a second account is that Johnson emerged as the Victor from the lengthy and costly patent litigations involving Berliner and Frank Seamans Zonophone. A third story is that Johnsons partner, Leon Douglass, derived the word from his wifes name Victoria, finally, a fourth story is that Johnson took the name from the popular Victor bicycle, which he had admired for its superior engineering. Of these four accounts the first two are the most generally accepted, perhaps coincidentally, the first use of the Victor title on a letterhead, on March 28,1901, was only nine weeks after the death of British Queen Victoria.
Before 1925, recording was done by the purely mechanical. No microphone was involved and there was no means of amplification, the recording machine was essentially an exposed-horn acoustical record player functioning in reverse. The sound-vibrated center of the diaphragm was linked to a stylus that was guided across the surface of a very thick wax disc. The wax was too soft to be played back even once without seriously damaging it, although test recordings were sometimes made, although sound quality was gradually improved by a series of small refinements, the process was inherently insensitive. From the start, Victor innovated manufacturing processes and soon rose to preeminence by recording famous performers, in 1903, it instituted a three-step mother-stamper process to produce more stampers and records than previously possible. These new celebrity recordings bore red labels, and were marketed as Red Seal records, for many years these records were single-sided, only in 1923 did Victor begin offering Red Seals in double-sided form
