Leon Forrest Douglass

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Inventor and entrepreneur Leon Forrest Douglass around 1915.

Leon Forrest Douglass (born March 12, 1869 in Syracuse , Nebraska , † September 7, 1940 in San Francisco , California ) was an American inventor and entrepreneur in the music and film industry in the United States . Along with Eldridge R. Johnson, he was one of the founders of the Consolidated Talking Machine Company , which subsequently became the Victor Talking Machine Company .

Life

Early years

Leon Forrest Douglass was born in Syracuse, Nebraska on March 12, 1869, to Seymour James Douglass and Mate Fuller Douglass, the third child of six. Due to a plague of locusts, the family left the area in the 1870s and went to Lincoln , Nebraska , where he attended school and took up various jobs to support his parents and siblings financially. At the age of eleven he worked as a telegraph delivery man. At the age of thirteen he improved the financial situation of his relatives as a telephone operator in one of the first telephone exchanges in his new hometown. Those first contacts with the then fully electrically operated telephone systems aroused his interest in the phonograph developed by Thomas Alva Edison , for which he developed an additional coin slot device and had it patented. In 1889 he sold the rights to his invention.

Music industry

Douglass made his first steps in the music industry with the Nebraska Phonograph Company, founded in Omaha , Nebraska in 1890 , a regional subsidiary of the North American Phonograph Company under the direction of Jesse H. Lippincott . After leaving the company, he moved to Chicago , Illinois , where he founded the Chicago Talking Machine Company (Chicago Talking Machine Co.) together with Charles Dickinson and HB Babson around 1892 . In the summer of 1900, he and Johnson started to build up the Consolidated Talking Machine Company , later renamed Eldrige Johnson Manufacturing Machinist , in order to avoid confusion with Emil Berliner , with the aim of using his equipment, including the associated sound recordings to be able to offer to the market for speaking machines for sale.

In the following year, 1901, Douglass took part in the founding of the Victor Talking Machine Company , where he held the position of Vice President until 1906 before he gave up his management position due to a serious illness. Another year later, in 1902, he, also in the Johnson group, took over the Globe Records Company , a manufacturer of shellac records for the Columbia Phonograph Company .

Services

Leon Forrest Douglas was one of the most important inventors of his time. In this regard, he was active in a wide variety of areas. He developed magnetic torpedoes that were used in the First World War, constructed a periscope camera for underwater photography and lighters. Between 1890 and 1909 he was granted thirteen patents for the music industry alone. He has published magazines in the United States with tips on new releases and free records for gramophone customers.

Patents

Note: The above patents relate to the areas of phonography and cinematography , in which Douglass was predominantly active.

literature

  • Frank Hoffmann & Howard Ferstler:  Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound,  Routledge, London 2005, ISBN 978-0-415-93835-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leon Forrest Douglass, 1869-1940. Nebraska State Historical Society, February 13, 2009, accessed July 31, 2017 (Compiled from the 1940 biography of Leon Forrest Douglas).
  2. ^ German Reich Patent Office Patent No. 4690902. (PDF) German Reich, December 3, 1928, accessed on August 1, 2017 (dirks-feuerzeuge.de, pdf).
personal data
SURNAME Douglass, Leon Forrest
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American inventor and executive in the music and film industry
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Syracuse , Nebraska
DATE OF DEATH September 7, 1940
Place of death San Francisco California