Hasta La Ideas

Up above is what we Americans think of as the RCA logo, having grown up seeing it everywhere. But the logo first belonged to British entertainment company HMV, which is in fact named after the original painting on which the logo is based, called “His Master’s Voice.”

Francis Barraud was a Liverpudlian painter who had a brother named Mark. In the late 1800s, after Mark died, Francis inherited a bunch of his stuff: An early cylinder phonograph player, cylinder recordings of Mark’s voice, and Mark’s dog, a fox terrier named Nipper.

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