13 Facts About Dictaphone

Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines.

Name "Dictaphone" was trademarked by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1907, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices.

Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C King Woodbridge.

Dictaphone in turn added magnetic recording models while still selling the models recording on the Lexan belts.

Dictaphone developed "endless loop" recording using magnetic tape, introduced in the mid-seventies as the "Thought Tank".

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Dictaphone was prominent in the provision of multi-channel recorders, used extensively in the emergency services to record emergency telephone calls and subsequent conversations.

In 1979, Dictaphone was purchased by Pitney Bowes and kept as a wholly owned but independent subsidiary.

Dictaphone bought Dual Display Word Processor, a stiff competitor to Wang Laboratories, the industry leader.

Dictaphone thereafter sold a range of products that included speech recognition and voicemail software with limited success as the market only existed among some early adopters despite its vertical markets' enhancements.

In early 2002, Dictaphone emerged from bankruptcy as a privately held organization, with Rob Schwager as its chairman and CEO.

In June 2005, Dictaphone sold its Communications Recording Solutions to NICE Systems for $38.

In September 2005, Dictaphone sold its IVS business outside the United States to a private Swiss group around its former VP Martin Niederberger, who formed Dictaphone IVS AG in Urdorf, Switzerland and developed "FRISBEE", the first hardware-independent dictation-management software system with integrated speech recognition and workflow management.

In February and March 2006, the remainder of Dictaphone was sold for $357 million to Nuance Communications, ending its short tenure as an independent company that had begun in 2002.