Benjamin moved the family to Canada, inspired by a friend's advice that he could make an excellent living bartering tin wares with trappers in exchange for furs.

[17] In 1896, the family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, following the lead of Harry, who had established a shoe repair shop in the heart of the emerging industrial town.

[18] Benjamin worked with Harry in the shoe repair shop until he secured a loan to open a meat counter and grocery store in the city's downtown area.

[29] In 1910, the Warners sold the family business to the General Film Company for "$10,000 in cash, $12,000 in preferred stock, and payments over a four-year period for a total of $52,000".

[32] Once Warner Features was established, Harry acquired an office in New York with his brother Albert, sending Sam and Jack to run the new corporation's film exchange divisions in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

[37] On April 4, 1923, following the success of the studio's film The Gold Diggers, Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. was officially established, with help from a loan given to Harry by Montly Flint.

The canine made his starring debut in Where the North Begins, a film about an abandoned pup who is raised by wolves and befriends a fur trapper.

Harry and the other independent film-makers at the Milwaukee convention agreed to spend $500,000 in newspaper advertisements; this action would help benefit Warner Bros. profits.

Harry responded, "We could ultimately develop sound to the point where people ask for talking pictures" The company also began acquiring theaters.

After a long period of refusing to accept the usage of sound in the company's films, Warner agreed to use synchronized sound in Warner Bros. shorts, as long as it was only used for background music, Harry then made a visit to Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in New York, (which younger brother Sam had visited earlier) and was impressed.

Sam, though, was able to convince the high-ups to sign with the studio after his wife Lina wore a gold cross at a dinner he attended with Western Electric brass.

Flush with cash, the Warners abandoned their old location in the Poverty Row section of Hollywood and acquired a big studio in Burbank, California.

[40] As a result of this success, Warner was able to acquire the Stanley Company of America (founded by Jules E. Mastbaum), which controlled most of the first-run theaters on the East Coast.

[47] By the time the 1st Academy Awards took place, Warner was recognized as the second most powerful figure in the movie industry, just behind MGM head Nicholas Schenck.

[49] After Albert's advice, Jack and Harry Warner acquired the rights to three Paramount stars (William Powell, Kay Francis, and Ruth Chatterton) for salaries doubled from their previous ones.

[52] During that time, Warner was engaged in a lawsuit with a Boston stockholder who accused him of trying use money from the studio's profitable businesses to try to purchase his vast 300 shares of stock and create a monopoly.

[clarify][53] The company however suffered a minor financial blow during the year after Motley Flint, the longtime banker for the studio, and by now also a close friend of the Warners, was murdered by an angry investor.

[54] In the latter part of 1929, much to Harry's dismay, younger brother Jack hired sixty-one-year-old actor George Arliss to star in the studio's film Disraeli.

[61] The film made Paul Muni a top studio star,[61] and also got audiences in the United States to question the country’s legal system.

[74] The next year, Hearst's film adaption of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream failed at the box office and the studio's net loss increased.

[78] In 1935, the studio's revived musicals also had a major blow after director Busby Berkeley was arrested after killing three people while driving drunk one night.

[81] In addition to the film's box office success, Paul Muni won the Oscar for Best Actor in March 1937 for his performance as the title role.

[81] Warner occupied a central place in the Hollywood-Washington wartime propaganda effort during the Second World War, and by the end of 1942, served as a frequent, anti-Axis spokesman for the movie industry.

[82] Despite his conservative viewpoint[83] and longtime affiliation with the Republican Party,[72] Warner was also a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and supported him during the early 1930s.

[88] Prior to the war's beginning in Europe, Warner supervised the production of two anti-German feature films, The Life of Emile Zola (1937)[89] and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

[93] At the premieres of Yankee Doodle Dandy (in Los Angeles, New York, and London), audiences for the film purchased a total of $15,600,000.00 in war bonds for the governments of England and the United States.

[97] In 1947, Warner, who was by now exhausted from all his years of arguing with his brother Jack, decided to spend more time at his San Fernando Valley ranch and to expand his interest in horse racing.

The suit, brought by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, claimed that the five integrated studio-theater chain combinations restrained competition.

[115] In 1948, Bette Davis, now fed up with Jack Warner, was a big problem for Harry after she and a number of her colleagues, departed from the studio after finishing the film Beyond the Forest.

As the threat of television grew in the early 1950s, Warner's younger brother, Jack, decided to try a new approach to help regain profits for the studio.