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Musée des ondes Emile Berliner

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Image of the RCA Victor Company, around 1945
The Berliner Gramophone Factory after it became part of RCA Victor, after 1929

The Musée des ondes Emile Berliner is a technical history museum featuring displays related to the development of music recording and broadcasting and subsequent industries, located in the historic factory of the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company[1] in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. To celebrate the Centennial of Broadcasting in Canada, the museum received a Governor General History Award in 2020.[2]

Phonographs and Gramophones in the permanent exhibition
Phonographs and Gramophones in the permanent exhibition

Building and museum

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The factory was since its construction in 1907 until 1924 the world headquarters of the Berliner Gramophone Company. Emil Berliner was the inventor of the flat record with a lateral cut.[3]

Emile Berliner moved his company from Philadelphia in the United States to Montreal, Canada in 1900, after a legal battle surrounding the use of Berliner's trade name "Gramophone," withdrew his right to this trade name in the USA. He built his first own factory for the Berliner Gram-O-Phone Co. Montreal in 1907 on a property in Saint Henri, Montreal.

After 1929, the factory became part of RCA Victor Canada. At the end of the 1950s, the first Canadian Satellite, the Alouette 1, was finalized here.[4]

The MOEB was founded in 1992 by five Montreal citizens inside of the former record factory in Saint Henri. Since 1996, the museum creates yearly temporary exhibitions. In 2019 the museum added a permanent exhibition. The collection of the museum consists of approximately 30.000 objects. Besides a large collection of locally produced shellac records, the museum holds objects related to recording technology, broadcasting technology, different recording media and also objects related to the development of satellites. The objects date from the pioneering time of the music industry until the time of digitization.

A weekly workshop for retired sound engineers, record collectors, historians, engineers, etc. takes place since 2006, known as the Club des vieilles lampes.

Around 1990, after RCA Victor moved to a new location in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, the building was converted to a mixed-use office complex.[5] The museum has several displays distributed throughout the building.

Inventor Emile Berliner around 1910
Inventor Emile Berliner around 1910

The museum today

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The Musée des Ondes Emile Berliner consists of a permanent exposition displaying phonographs, gramophones, radios, and records from different eras which trace de the history of sound recording and broadcasting, and temporary expositions which are presented annually. They also have a warehouse where items from the collection are kept in storage. The museum archives and the reference library are partially accessible from the museum website.

MOEB projects are financed by grants from the federal government, the city of Montreal and the province of Quebec.

As of 2019, 18% of operational costs were paid by the city of Montreal and the Sud-Ouest borough, the remaining 82% coming from the museum's self-generated revenue (visits, souvenir shop, donations).

As of 2020, the MOEB had an operating budget of $110,000.

Exhibitions

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  • From the gramophone to the satellite (1996)
  • Happy birthday Nipper… an exhibition with a 100 year bite (2000)
  • The Audio Chain (2002)
  • 50 Years of Television in Montreal (2003)
  • Marconi (2004)
  • Montreal, the Cradle of the Recording Industry (2008)
  • Goodbye Broadway, Hello Montréal (2010)
  • Montreal radio in Wartime (2015)
  • Montreal in Space (2016)
  • Design Montreal RCA (2017)
  • 100 years of radio broadcasting in Montreal (2019)
  • Herbert S. Berliner: Building the Canadian Recording Industry (2022)

Publications

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Early Radio Innovation in Canada, Canadian Marconi Company (1895-1938), by Denis Couillard. Bilingual, French and English, 2020, ISBN 978-1-7770988-0-3,

References

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  1. ^ "Berliner Gramophone Company | The Canadian Encyclopedia". Thecanadianencyclopedia.ca. Retrieved 2022-04-05.
  2. ^ "Centennial of Broadcasting in Canada". Canadashistory.ca. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  3. ^ "History of Canadian record companies". Bac-lac.gc.ca. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  4. ^ "Alouette/ISIS: How it all Began". IEEE. Retrieved 2022-04-05.
  5. ^ "RCA Victor building". Héritage Montréal. Retrieved 2022-04-05.
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