Victor

Last week another vast business passed, from the family that built it, toward the hands of the public. Eldridge R. Johnson, the Camden, N. J., mechanic who 32 years ago took the squeak out of toy phonographs like the ones he saw at Coney Island; his son, E. R. Fenimore Johnson, and his secretary, H. R. Hathaway, turned over a majority holding of common stock in the Victor Talking Machine Co. to J. and W. Seligman & Co., Manhattan brokers, and Speyer & Co., Manhattan bankers. For all 348,863 shares outstanding, the buyers were prepared to pay some 40 millions hospital, coal wharf, the largest yard of African mahogany and other cabinet woods in the world. Out of the town have come instruments by the tens of thousands to carry "canned music," on rubber records pressed in the Argentine, to hamlets, shacks and tents thousands of miles from a concert hall. The conduct of the swelling business was continuously under the direction of Mr. Johnson, whose relatives were enriched by unfailing dividends, including an 80% one in 1916 and a 600% stock dividend in 1922, until 1925, when the competition of radio made itself dangerously felt. But Mr. Johnson, mechanic-president, had seen the hard time coming. He arranged with the Radio Corporation of America for a combination radio and talking machine week Victor reported earnings of $5,648,446 in the first nine months of 1926ime talking machine, before which Nipper one day squatted inquiringly. Painter Barraud beheld a picture of popular appeal. To brighten up his canvas be borrowed a brass horn from the Gramophone Company Ltd., English subsidiary of Victor, which bought the finished picture, later pensioning Painter Barraud.

The Victor instruments were evolved upon a basic patent taken out in 1887 by of Thomas Alva Edison, primarily in that the spiral sound-recording lines incised upon the records have a uniform depth and zig-zag laterally, while Mr. Edison has adhered to lines of uniform width going over "hill and dale." A good account of Mr. Edison's first phonograph (1877) is contained in Edison: The Man and His Work by George S. Bryan, lately published (Knopf, $4.00). He had his mechanician mount a metal drum on a shaft with a balance wheel at one end, a crank at the other. On the drum's surface was incised a spiral line. On either side of the drum was a small tube; over the inner end of each tube was a parchment diaphragm; centred in each diaphragm and pricking into the spiral incision was a needle. Mr. Edison wrapped tinfoil around the drum, cranked slowly and into one of the tubes loudly declaimed, "Mary had a little lamb! Mary had a little lamb!" Turning the shaft back, he adjusted the other tube, cranked again and the tube repeated timidly, "Mary had a little lamb." Mr. Edison and a mechanic worked all night. In the morning Mr. Edison went to New York with his contraption under his arm. He placed it on the desk of the editor of The Scientific American, adjusted it and invited the editor to crank. "Good morning," said the machine. "What do you think of the phonograph?"

Phonographs toured the U.S., a great fad. But Mr. Edison's early improvements failed to make them commercially practicable. He dropped phonography for ten years, returning to it as his pet about 1890. He was convinced that its future was to assist stenography.