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Hello!
Today I would like to present a machine, about which I have absolutely no knowledge.

A friend brought me this Pathéphone (?) from a household resolution of a music store yesterday.
Although I have only one Pathé-disc in my entire collection, I thought that every kind of gramophone (apart from the crap-o-phones) would be too bad for the dumpster or charity shop - and so I took it.

I suspect that the machine was manufactured in Germany during the first world war. More precisely, in 1916. There is no decal on the machine, but on the underside of the horn, the veneer was glued with several newspaper strips. One of the strips is a headline of a war report of March 30, 1916, and another is an advertisement for military cameras.
I am very surprised that a French company produced gramophones here in Germany during the first world war.... I once read that in Paris the German company "Odeon" was plundered and burnt down when the war began. How could it be that Pathé was still producing in 1916? Was the German part of the company independent? And which model is it?
For any information about this Pathéphone I would be grateful! 

(By the way : I like the sliding doors very much. They work excellently. )

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Let's fast forward from WWI to WWII. Prior to the second war Ford and other US car makers had factories in Germany and supplied vehicles to the Nazis. Ditto to the US war effort. It's called business. Allied forces bombed these factories as part of the Allied war effort. After the war, Ford pressed the US government (that's us) for remunerations, that is, for the destruction of its property during the war. That a French firm was making and selling phonographs in Germany during WWI does not surprise me in the least. It's called business.

That is an interesting roll top phonograph...

@jboger: Yes, maybe you're right. A phonograph factory had no meaning for the war, so why should it be closed. And apparently there were customers for these machines.
The old music store, from where this phonograph comes, never sold records or machines, they sold only stringed instruments. So the machine is perhaps from the private ownership of the family.

@Curt A: Yes that's true! I've never had a machine in such a design. I wonder if this phonograph came up in a catalog, and whether it was sold in both countries, or only in Germany.



Can I use this Pathé-reproducer also for playing "normal" records with steel- or fibre-needle? The angle between needle and record should be correct, I think.....But I do not want to risk anything

I have a variation of this machine, made in France. The case is identical, but the motor and tone arm are the older Pathé models, with the lever brake and no friction brake on the motor board, and the horn is also different. I do not know if Pathé had a factory in Germany: there was a assembly facility in Belgium, and it is not unusual to find such variations from French models, as even in the French production Pathé did not care much for standardizing their products.

I don't speak German fluently, but I think you might have stretched a bit the meaning of the message concerning the camera. "Photoapparate fürs feld" sounds to me like a plain translation of "field camera", a classic and common type of camera, still made today by Linhof and other brands by the way. As far as I understand, there are no references to war in that ad. If you see any, can you please expand?

Marco Gilardetti wrote:I don't speak German fluently, but I think you might have stretched a bit the meaning of the message concerning the camera. "Photoapparate fürs feld" sounds to me like a plain translation of "field camera", a classic and common type of camera, still made today by Linhof and other brands by the way. As far as I understand, there are no references to war in that ad. If you see any, can you please expand?

In this case, the meaning is at least very clear for a native speaker. The term "für´s Feld" would not have been chosen for a field camera in the actual sense. They would have written "Feldkamera". The meaning of "Kamera für´s Feld" can not be equated with the meaning of the word "Feldkamera" that easy. I have written "battlefield" instead of "field" in the translation to correctly reflect the meaning of the word in German.


German is a difficult language. Here is another advertisement from the same year.I believe that the term "Feld-Kamera" was deliberately chosen ambiguously by the manufacturer:

@CarlosV: Many thanks for the answer! I also have no idea if there was a factory for machines, or only for records in Germany. Maybe someone can solve this riddle.
Could you please post a few pictures of your model? It would be very interesting to me how similar the models are.

Can I use this Pathé-reproducer also for playing "normal" records with steel- or fibre-needle? The angle between needle and record should be correct, I think.....But I do not want to risk anything [/quote]

To play conventional records on a Pathéphone you need one of these, a 90 degree adaptor to fit the straight Pathé tonearm and a conventional soundbox :