The Zheleznodorozhny Local Lore Museum presents the Victor tabletop gramophone, produced by the American company Victor Talking Machine Company.

The wooden body of the gramophone is square at the base and is decorated with elegantly embossed thin metal plates. The corners of the base are smoothed and decorated with wooden elements. The horn is made of brass. Gramophones used various styluses: diamond or bamboo, sometimes flaring at the bottom or sharply bent, and even with a winding spring. On the front wall of the gramophone is the famous trademark with the image of a dog and the inscription “His Master’s Voice”.

This trademark has a remarkable history. In 1884, Mark Barraud, a British scenery designer, picked up a puppy on the street and named him Nipper, allegedly because he liked to nip people’s feet. Mark’s favorite pastime was experimenting with his home phonograph, which he used to make recordings of his own voice. In 1897, Mark died, and his younger brother, the artist Francis Barraud, took in both the dog and the phonograph with recordings. One day, when Francis turned on the device in his office, the dog climbed onto the table and clung to the speaker, listening to his dead master’s voice. Nipper stayed near the phonograph, waiting for the sound of his favorite voice to return. This impressed Francis so much that he reproduced the scene on canvas and sold the painting to the London manager of the Gramophone Company, owned by Emile Berliner, for just 50 pounds. A year later, Berliner realized what a precious gift life had given him and registered both the painting and its title — His Master’s Voice. The success was resounding. The image of a dog listening to a gramophone took the world of records, gramophones and advertising brochures by storm. Products with the image of Nipper were very successful and yielded a huge profit. His Master’s Voice would be the most recognizable brand in the world for many decades to come. Later, it began to produce portable phonographs and radios.

Francis Barraud died in 1924. The original “His Master’s Voice” painting that he created is now displayed at EMI Music’s Gloucester Place headquarters. Nipper the dog is buried in Kingston upon Thames. But the Victor Company still exists today, albeit under the name of the Japanese corporation JVC (Japan Victor Company).