wire stitching and bookbinding machines, Johnson's shop executed a variety of smaller jobs involving steam models and machine alterations. A customer named Henry Whitaker brought a manually driven, hand-cranked Berliner Gramophone, developed by Emile Berliner, into Johnson's shop and asked Johnson to design a spring driven motor for it. Johnson did so, but Whitaker found the result unsatisfactory. Johnson was immediately captivated by the Gramophone; of his initial introduction, Johnson later wrote that “the little instrument was badly designed. It sounded much like a partially educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head. But the little wheezy instrument caught my attention and held it fast and hard. I became interested in it as I had never been interested before in anything. It was exactly what I was looking for.” In 1895, Johnson was recommended to the Berliner Gramophone company as a potential developer of a spring-driven motor. While cylinder phonographs had been successfully equipped with clockwork motors, the disc playing Gramophone presented a number of design challenges in this regard. Foremost was the drag that the needle and soundbox created when applied to the outer edge of the disc. This required that the motor provide sufficient torque at start up while retaining a constant speed. Representatives of the Berliner company were satisfied with Johnson's design, and within a year Johnson had begun producing motors for Berliner. Johnson continued to refine the motor during this period, externalizing the motor and leveraging a triple ball based centrifugal governor design to maintain a constant speed. Johnson also spent a winter in Philadelphia collaborating on various Gramophone refinements with Alfred C. Clark; the most significant of these was a vastly improved soundbox. Along with Johnson's new motor, the Clark-Johnson soundbox became the foundation for Berliner's Improved Gramophone of 1897. Consolidated Talking Machine Company Around this time, Johnson began experimenting with recording and disc duplicating technologies under a cloud of secrecy. Johnson had long been dissatisfied with the raucous, scratchy sound of Berliner's discs and believed a better recording and mastering process could be developed. Berliner's process for creating master records involved coating a zinc disc with an acid-resistant fatty film and then scratching the coating away with a recording stylus. Berliner would then submerse the recorded disc in an acid bath to create deeper grooves. From this master, stampers could easily be made for mass production of records—a definite advantage