- Person
- Emile Berliner
- Lived
- 1851–1929
- Field
- Sound recording
- From
- German-American
The story
Emile Berliner never stopped inventing. Born in Hanover in 1851, he had emigrated to the United States in 1870, devised an improved telephone transmitter that Bell bought, and patented the flat-disc gramophone in 1887. By the early 1900s he had left the record business in America to others. In 1907, aged 56, he turned to one of the hardest engineering problems of the day: flying straight up.
The biggest obstacle was weight. The engines of the time were too heavy for their power to lift a machine vertically. Berliner obtained air-cooled rotary engines from the Adams Company of Dubuque, Iowa, whose engineer Fay Oliver Farwell had designed them, and with Farwell and his assistant R. S. Moore he developed a 36-horsepower rotary engine for helicopter use, much lighter than the inline engines then common.
On July 1, 1909, The New York Times reported that a helicopter built by Berliner and J. Newton Williams of Derby, Connecticut, had lifted Williams from the ground on three occasions at Berliner's laboratory in the Brightwood neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. That year Berliner founded the Gyro Motor Company in Washington, with himself as president and Moore as designer and engineer. Its building still stands at 774 Girard Street NW.
By 1910 he was experimenting with a vertically mounted tail rotor to counteract the torque that makes a single main rotor spin the whole aircraft around. That basic arrangement, one large lifting rotor balanced by a small tail rotor, became the configuration of the practical helicopters of the 1940s and remains the most common helicopter layout today.
Berliner's son Henry joined the work. On June 16, 1922, father and son demonstrated a helicopter for the US Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. Henry grew disillusioned with helicopters in 1925 and the company closed, but in 1926 he founded the Berliner Aircraft Company, which became Berliner-Joyce Aircraft in 1929, the year his father died.
Why it matters
Berliner's experiments anticipated key features of the modern helicopter, now vital for rescue, medical evacuation and transport around the world.
About Emile Berliner
Largely self-taught Hanover-born inventor of an early telephone microphone and of the flat disc record and gramophone, the format that carried recorded music for a century.
More about Emile Berliner
- Emile Berliner founded Deutsche GrammophonIn June 1898 Emile Berliner and his brother Joseph founded Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, now the world's oldest surviving established record company.
- Emile Berliner invented the flat disc recordEmile Berliner, a Jewish immigrant from Hanover, patented the gramophone and flat disc record in 1887 and earlier invented an improved telephone transmitter, an early microphone.
- Emile Berliner funded research by women scientistsEmile Berliner advocated women's equality and created a research fellowship in his mother's name so that qualified women could continue scientific research.
Sources
- Emile Berliner Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.