The inventor: Emile Berliner

When Emile Berliner opened his first factory in St-Henri, Robert Bourrassa was gearing up for a fight about bilingualism, the first cinema in Montreal was about to open, and fewerthan 300,000 people lived in the city.

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Berliner was recovering from years of injunctions and patent violations which left him unable to sell his own invention the gramophone in the United States.

To restart his business, Berliner moved to Montreal the centre of Canadian commerce and culture. It was also the closest Canadian city to Philadelphia, his former base of operations, according to his grandson, Oliver Berliner.

In 1900, he opened his first store, and six years later his state-of-the-art factory opened up in St-Henri on Lenoir Street.

Over the next three decades, it merged with the Victor Talking Machine Company and then RCA, becoming one of the biggest record producers in Canada.

It also became one of the most important employers in St-Henri, with three thousand people working there.

Today, RCA has splintered and the factories left St-Henri for St-Anne-de-Bellevue in the 1970s.

But,Berliner and his gramophone have left a mark on the neighbourhood.

In 2002, Montreal honoured Berliner by naming a park after him, on the same street as the factories he built and the museum he inspired.

St-Henri Chronicles

St-Henri Chroniclesis a collaboration between the Department of Journalism at Concordia University, and CBC Montreal.

Students in a graduate-level multimedia course were asked to find and produce original stories on St-Henri for their final class project.

They spent the winter term developing these stories, and experimented with sound, pictures, video, infographics and maps to tell them.

• About the journalists