Leon Douglass
| Leon Forrest Douglass | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 12, 1869 Nebraska, USA |
| Died | September 7, 1940 (aged 71) San Francisco, USA |
| Occupation | Inventor, Businessman |
| Known for | Inventor |
| Spouse(s) | Victoria Adams |
| Children | Leon Forrest, Dorothy Victoria, Earl Seymour, Eldridge Adams, Ena Lucile, Florence Carol |
Leon Forrest Douglass (March 12, 1869 – September 7, 1940) was an American inventor and co-founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company who registered approximately fifty patents, mostly for film and sound recording techniques.
Douglass was born in rural Nebraska, near present-day Syracuse. His parents were Seymour James Douglass, a millwright and carpenter, and Mate (Fuller) Douglass. He attended grammar school in Lincoln, Nebraska, was apprenticed to a printer, at eleven was working as a telegraph messenger, and by seventeen was telephone exchange manager for the Nebraska Telephone Company in Seward.
In 1888 Douglass saw a phonograph for the first time and was fascinated. He made his own and took it to Omaha to show it to E.A. Benson, President of the Nebraska Phonograph Co., who hired him as the company’s agent for the western part of the state. In 1889 he invented a nickel-in-the-slot attachment for the phonograph. Benson paid $500 for the patent and promoted Douglass to a job with the Chicago Central Phonograph Company, which he also owned and that was part of the Thomas Edison-affiliated North American Phonograph Company, distributor for the Edison Phonograph. In the early 1890s Douglass invented a machine for duplicating phonograph cylinders and became known as "Duplicate Doug." He sold this patent to Edward Easton, director of the American Graphophone Company and president of the Columbia Phonograph Company, moved to Washington D.C. and worked for Easton briefly before returning to the Chicago Central Phonograph Company as a manager in 1892. He was elected Vice President and Treasurer, and secured a concession for a hundred slot phonographs at the World's Columbian Exposition, better known as the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. At the fair he also met Peter Bacigalupi of Lima, Peru and San Francisco; he shipped phonographs to Lima for him and later traveled to San Francisco where he met his step-sister Victoria Adams, whom he married in 1897. After the Chicago fair closed, Douglass bought the hundred slot phonographs and secured a concession for the 1894 Midwinter Fair in San Francisco; this concession and the phonographs were ultimately taken over by Bacigalupi, who then used the machines to open a phonograph arcade on Market Street.
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