• HOME



• CATALOG



• SPECIALS



• ARTICLES



• ARCHIVES



• LINKS



• COMPANY INFO

BRUNSWICK GOES ELECTRIC
(1921–1926)

By 1921, Western Electric and General Electric in the U.S., Tri-Ergon in Germany, and others were making steady progress in developing commercially viable electrical recording systems. Primitive electrical tone-arm attachments, feeding the sound from a standard mechanical reproducer through a radio set via a telephone receiver, were being widely advertised, giving the public their first taste of the seductions of electrical amplification. The leading record companies—Victor, Columbia, and Edison—showed no interest. But for the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, a relative newcomer to the record market, electrical recording apparently seemed to hold some promise.

Brunswick’s Early Experiments with Electrical Recording

At some point in 1921, Percy L. Deutsch, the company’s vice-president and grandson of founder J.M. Brunswick, initiated formal research into electrical recording. Although circumstantial evidence suggests that Deutsch was aware of General Electric’s experimentation with electrical recording processes, Brunswick’s initial experiments seem to have been carried out independently in Chicago, far from GE's Schenectady, New York, laboratories. Deutsch entrusted much of this work to inventor Benjamin Franklin Meissner, who had earned a national reputation during World War I as an expert in wireless torpedo guidance.

The Talking Machine World for December 1921 reported that Meissner had “for some months been working in the Brunswick experimental laboratories here [in Chicago] on various methods for converting sound waves into electrical waves, and reconverting these back to sound waves on the phonograph record.” ¹ No documentation of this work is known to survive, but in December 1921 the Talking Machine World broke the news that Brunswick had been experimenting with wireless remote disc mastering in Chicago, transmitting a November 22 operatic performance from the Auditorium Theatre to a Magnavox receiver in its laboratory. There, TMW noted, “ the electrical waves were switched from the Magnavox directly to the recording apparatus.” ² Unfortunately, it is not clear whether an electromagnetic cutter was employed. No issued recordings resulted from these experiments, and Brunswick seems to have soon abandoned its independent research into electrical recording processes.

General Electric's Pallophotophone Process

Whatever lead Brunswick might have hoped to gain in developing an electrical process was lost in late 1924–early 1925, when Columbia and Victor licensed the Western Electric recording system. Despite a veil of secrecy surrounding the new process, rumors of the deal spread quickly through the industry. Shut out of the Western Electric deal, Percy Deutsch seems to have lost little time in approaching Harold Swope, president of General Electric, about licensing their Pallophotophone system as an alternative.

The Pallophotophone had evolved out of the work done by General Electric’s Charles A. Hoxie for the U.S. Navy during World War I. Hoxie had filed a patent application for a basic photo-electric recording device on April 13, 1918, following up with an improved device in May 1921. Although the original invention was designed to record radio signals on photographic film, Hoxie began to adapt it for commercial applications after the war—first to motion pictures, and then to disc recording. On December 27, 1921, a patent application (U.S. patent 1,637,903) was filed on his behalf for a disc-cutting process employing a photo-electric microphone, amplifier, and electromagnetic disk cutter—in others words, a complete electrical disc-recording system.

The Pallophotophone’s sound-collecting device, dubbed the Pallotrope, was a photo-electric microphone employing a light beam and mirror. A short, flared horn attached to the front of the device served, rather inefficiently, to collect and focus the sound. Elmer C. Nelson, assistant manager of Brunswick’s Boston branch, would later describe the Pallotrope in layman’s terms:

A powerful beam of light is centered on a minute crystal mirror (weighing one two-hundredth part of a milogram [sic]) very much smaller than the head of a pin. This delicate mirror, which is held in place by a magnetic force, is vibrated by sound waves and will respond to the slightest whisper. The mirror reflects the powerful light playing upon it... This dancing beam of light acts upon an electric magnetic wire, and a weak electrical impulse is set up. This electrical impulse is carried over wires to an amplifying unit, and thence to a cutting device which cuts the wax... ³

By late 1922, Pallotrope recordings made on film were being used sporadically in radio broadcasting, and work was under way on improving its capabilities as a disc-mastering process.

Brunswick Licenses the GE System

In early 1925, Harold Swope approved the licensing of the Hoxie process to Brunswick through the Radio Corporation of America, of which General Electric was a part-owner. Brunswick and RCA had been involved in cooperative efforts since late 1924, when Brunswick agreed to offer RCA Radiolas in some of its phonographs and began sponsoring broadcasts of its recording artists over RCA’s radio station, WJZ.

An immediate upshot of this acquisition was the suspension of recording activity in the Chicago studio, which was still operating only sporadically, in February 1925. Experimentation with the new GE equipment would be carried out instead in New York, with its established studios and easier access for GE’s Schenectady engineers.

Brunswick produced its first electrically recorded commercial masters on April 7, 1925. A new studio, Room #3, was opened for the electrical sessions in Brunswick’s Eastern headquarters at 799 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, while a steadily diminishing number of acoustic sessions continued in the older Rooms #1 and #2. Still mixing electric and acoustic sessions, Brunswick began releasing a few electrically recorded discs into the monthly lists—unannounced as such and interspersed with the more numerous acoustic recordings—as early as June 1925.⁴

On May 2, 1925, Brunswick also began recording masters for its recently acquired Vocalion subsidiary using the GE system, although acoustic recording would remain the norm for most Vocalion sessions until October 23, 1925.⁵ The Chicago studio, idle since March, was converted to GE equipment during the summer of 1925, with the first electrical session—which yielded two unissued titles by the Abe Lyman and Paul Ash orchestra—being held on September 22, 1925.⁶ On the West Coast, conversion of the Los Angeles studio was not completed until December 1927.⁷

Despite the bulkiness and fragility of the GE equipment, it was dispatched from Chicago on field trips as early as March 1926, to record the St. Mary of the Lake Seminary Choir in nearby Mundelein, Illinois. Venturing farther afield, Brunswick dispatched a GE-equipped team to Toronto in April, Cleveland in May, and St. Louis in June.

The last acoustic master intended for release in Brunswick’s main series was made in New York on June 1, 1925,⁸ an unissued recording of “Got No Time” credited to Carl Fenton’s Orchestra.⁹ Recording activity was suspended in the New York studios during July, presumably to allow conversion of the older studios.

The term “Light-Ray” was not immediately taken up by Brunswick to describe its new process. One of the earliest appearances in print seems to have been in Elmer Nelson’s October 1925 article in the Phonograph Monthly Review.¹⁰

Going Public

The conversion had not been easy, nor had the early results been good. The first Light-Ray recordings were under-recorded and had a boxy, muffled sound (no doubt induced in part by the recording horn attached to the photo-optical microphone), while somewhat later recordings tended to be shrill and badly distorted.

In its defense, it should be noted that Brunswick maintained studios of various sizes and characteristics in several cities, and matching the widely varying acoustic properties of those rooms to those of the touchy photo-electric microphones was no doubt a time-consuming task. Retraining must have proven difficult for studio engineers who, after years of working with a simple mechanical recording system, were expected to master a bewildering array of electronic paraphernalia in a matter of months.

Brunswick studio matrix card for Duke Ellington's December 29, 1926, Vocalion session.
The "E" prefix was adopted in 1925 to indicate electrically recorded masters.

On Wednesday, August 12, 1925, Brunswick formally revealed its conversion to the General Electric process to the press.¹¹ Percy Deutsch, flush with enthusiasm for his new product, announced that due to the “greater delicacy” of the groove produced by the GE process, Brunswick was able to produce a 500-line-per-inch groove that would allow playing times of up to forty minutes on a twelve-inch disc.¹² Unfortunately, no such record ever reached the market.

It is also interesting to note Deutsch’s claim, in the same article, that the first electrical recordings would be issued in October, when in fact Brunswick had been quietly issuing electrics for several months. Perhaps Deutsch was trying to distance Brunswick from their earliest, horrendously recorded electrics. In October 1925, he stated bluntly, “Mr. Hoxie’s invention has been modified considerably."¹³ By the autumn of 1926, recording quality had improved markedly, although it still lagged far behind that being achieved by Columbia and Victor with their superior Western Electric systems.

Selling the Panatrope

Brunswick’s new all-electric phonograph, the Panatrope, was formally announced on August 25, 1925, in an open letter to the trade over Deutsch’s signature.¹⁴ An advertising blitz followed in anticipation of the holiday season. General sales manager A. J. Kendrick, positioning the Panatrope as an entirely new invention, declared,

We are dropping the word “phonograph” except as applied to those phonographs which we will, for the time being, continue to merchandise, or until we have decided to entirely discontinue the production and selling of phonographs... the trend of the times, both in scientific development as well as public demand and tendency, is entirely toward electrical applications and progress.” ¹⁵

On November 11, 1925, Brunswick hosted a gala demonstration of the Panatrope at New York’s Aeolian Hall, enlisting the aid of David Sarnoff, Otto Kahn, and an host of New York businessmen, celebrities, and socialites. The next day, Deutsch demonstrated the new machines and records to an enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd in the Wanamaker Auditorium.¹⁶ While neither the Panatrope nor the Light-Ray records were technically very polished at this point, Brunswick for the time being had soundly upstaged competitors Victor and Columbia in the marketing arena.

 :

References
¹ “Record Opera via Wireless.” Talking Machine World, (December 15, 1921), p. 118.
² Ibid.
³ Nelson, Elmer C. “Brunswick Electrical Recording.” Phonograph Monthly Review (October 1925).
⁴ Listings of issues known to have been electrically recorded, although not yet designated as such in Brunswick advertising, first appeared in the Talking Machine World’s Advance Record Bulletins for June 1925.
⁵ Laird, Ross. Brunswick Records, A Discography of Recordings, 1916–1931. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. pp. 239, 247, 278.
⁶ Laird, op. cit., p. 957.
⁷ Laird, op. cit., p. 1302.
⁸ However, Brunswick continued to use the acoustic process for Spanish-language recordings made on the West Coast through May 1927, which were issued in Brunswick's and Vocalion's ethnic series. See Laird, op. cit., p. 1301–1302.
⁹ “Carl Fenton” was a fiction, invented to cover a Brunswick house orchestra under the management of Gus Haenschen, manager of the Popular Record Department. The Brunswick recording cards show Harry Reser and members of his orchestra were often present at these sessions, although complete personnel were not listed.
¹⁰ Nelson, Elmer C., op. cit.
¹¹ New York Times, August 13, 1925, p. 22.
¹² “Revolutionary Sound Reproducing Method Announced by Brunswick Co.” Talking Machine World (August 15, 1925), p. 58.
¹³ “Demonstration of Brunswick Panatrope at Chicago Headquarters Arouses Enthusiasm.” Talking Machine World (October 15, 1925), p. 150.
¹⁴ Letter reproduced in Talking Machine World (September 15, 1925), p. 5.
¹⁵ “Brunswick Co. Announces Details of Merchandising Plan of its New Line.” Talking Machine World (October 15, 1925), p. 6.
¹⁶ “Brunswick Panatrope Enthusiastically Received at Initial New York Presentation.” Talking Machine World (November 15, 1925), p. 180.