[Jukebox-list] "Phonograph" TM

[David Breneman]

--- Ron Rich <ronnnrich at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I wonder why he did not keep it TM'ed?

In the late 1920s, about the time "phonograph" came
into common usage in the US, the recorded music industry
was in decline.  Radio was the hot new entertainment medium,
and people were disinclined to buy records when they
could hear music performed live for free over the air.
All of the major labels went bankrupt.  Victor was
bought out by RCA, Columbia changed hands several
times, and Edison simply shut his record business
down after the stock market crash.  His son Charles had
been running that operation for several years, but
he encountered the same problems Edsel Ford did - a
headstrong patriarch who, although he wasn't officially
the boss, nevertheless kept insisting on calling the
shots as his whim suited him.  Charles Edison did 
succeed in adopting electric recording (the last major
label to do so), packaging Phonographs with radios,
and even introducing lateral-cut 78s in 1929, but
by then the business had been losing money for so long
that the depression finally put an end to it.  No
sense protecting a trademark for something you don't
sell.  Thomas Edison died three years later.

The Edison organization did produce a very high quality
radio transcription system in the 1930s, but it suffered
from incompatibility with turntables and pickups already
in use in stations, and it just sort of faded away with
the onset of war production.


David Breneman         david_breneman at yahoo.com


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