He moved to London at the behest of American Railway magnate William Jackson Palmer to promote the Edison telegraph system. Gouraud did not meet Edison himself until 1874 when the latter was sent to demonstrate new equipment that he had invented to the British Post Office. As an enthusiast of new electric inventions, in the late 1880s and early 1890s he had many gadgets installed in his house at Beulah Hill, Upper Norwood in South London, which he renamed "Little Menlo" after Menlo Park, New Jersey where Edison's research facility was situated.
In 1888, Thomas Edison sent his "Perfected" Phonograph to Gouraud in London and on 14 August 1888, Gouraud introduced the phonograph to London in a press conference, including the playing of a piano and cornet recording of Arthur Sullivan's "The Lost Chord", one of the first recordings of music ever made. from 1888 A series of parties followed, introducing the phonograph to members of society at "Little Menlo". Sullivan was invited to one of these on 5 October 1888. After dinner, he recorded a speech to be sent to Thomas Edison, saying, in part:
Later years
In 1896 Gouraud created a scandal in Niagara, meeting the Chinese viceroy Li Hongzhang, unfortunately kissing his hands. He hurried back in England and became involved in an acoustic laboratory in Brighton, trying to perfect an amplifier invented by Horace Short and presented as the Gouraudophone at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. By 1904 Gouraud was the "Governor General" of French sugar millionaire Jacques Lebaudy's fictional "Empire of the Sahara" and speaking of offering his son's regiment, the 17th Lancers, as Lebaudy's Guard of Honour. "Lebaudy's Army", New York Times, Jan. 19, 1904 In 1909 he went bankrupt. Gourard died in 1912.
Family
He was the son of the French engineer Francis Fauvel Gouraud who came to the US in 1839 to introduce the daguerrotypes technology for photography. Both parents died in the summer of 1847 and George and his older sister Clemence were thus orphaned. George was married in New York in 1870 to Florence Willis Snow and the family moved to London. His first wife died in Brighton in 1907. In 1909 he was married again, in Paris to the Norwegian composer Helga Smith-Hald, niece to the painter Hans Dahl. They resided in France and Switzerland. George Gouraud died in 1912 in Vevey, Switzerland, only a week after his son Bayard Gouraud had died from a heart failure while returning home to England from India where he served in the 17th Lancers, a cavalry regiment of the British Army. Another son was ragtime songwriter Jackson Gouraud who in 1901 became the third husband to heiress and orientalist Aimée Crocker. A third son was composer and broadcasting pionéer Powers Gouraud, who married to Gladys Crocker, who was Aimée Crocker's daughter from her first marriage to Richard Porter Ashe. The daughter Theodora Florence Goudard was married at St Paul's, Knightsbridge in London, 1899 to Reginald Courtenay Gayer. His eldest son was George Fauvel Gouraud, a lawyer that also wrote poetry.
