Established in Camden, New Jersey, Victor was the largest and most prestigious firm of its kind in the world, best known for its use of the iconic "His Master's Voice" trademark, the design, production and marketing of the popular "Victrola" line of phonographs and the company's extensive catalog of operatic and classical music recordings by world famous artists on the prestigious Red Seal label.

RCA historian Fred Barnum[2] gives various possible origins of the name in "His Master's Voice" In America, he writes, "One story claims that Johnson considered his first improved Gramophone to be both a scientific and business 'victory.'

Barraud's original painting depicts Nipper staring intently into the horn of an Edison-Bell while both sit on a polished wooden surface.

The horn on the Edison-Bell machine was black and after a failed attempt at selling the painting to a cylinder record supplier of Edison Phonographs in the UK, a friend of Barraud's suggested that the painting could be brightened up (and possibly made more marketable) by substituting one of the brass-belled horns on display in the window at the new gramophone shop on Maiden Lane.

[1] In 1915, the "His Master's Voice" logo was rendered in immense circular leaded-glass windows in the tower of the Victrola cabinet building at Victor's headquarters in Camden, New Jersey.

[8] In the early 1920s, the advent of radio as a home entertainment medium presented Victor and the entire record industry with new challenges.

Not only was music becoming available over the air free of charge, but live radio broadcasts using high-quality microphones and heard over amplified receivers provided sound that was startlingly more clear and realistic than any contemporary phonograph record.

On March 21, 1925, Victor recorded its first electrical Red Seal disc, twelve inch 6502 by French pianist Alfred Cortot, of works by Chopin and Schubert.