Emile Berliner funded research by women scientists

Person: Emile Berliner
Lived: 1851–1929
Field: Sound recording
From: German-American

The story

Emile Berliner knew how much talent could be wasted for lack of opportunity. After emigrating from Germany in 1870, he lived in New York on odd jobs such as a paper route and washing bottles, and studied physics at night at the Cooper Union while working by day. That self-education led to his telephone transmitter and his gramophone. In the early twentieth century, women who wanted careers in science faced far greater barriers, and money to support their research was scarce.

Berliner became an advocate of women's equality. In 1908 he established the Sarah Berliner Research Fellowship for Women in honour of his mother. It was first awarded in 1909 and offered $1,200 to a woman who held a doctorate or was otherwise capable of advanced research, to study physics, chemistry or biology in America or Europe. The psychologist and logician Christine Ladd-Franklin helped bring the fellowship into being and chaired its first awarding committee.

At first it was offered every other year. In 1911 Berliner increased the funding so that it could be awarded annually; the National Inventors Hall of Fame dates the fellowship to that year.

The roll of recipients reads like a guide to early American women in science. It includes the zoologist Caroline McGill, the first winner in 1909; the psychologist Gertrude Rand; the physicist Elizabeth Laird; Janet Howell Clark in physiology and biophysics; the zoologist Ethel Browne Harvey; the geologist Carlotta Maury; the chemist Emma Dietz; and the astronomer Dorothy Davis Locanthi.

Berliner's public spirit went further. He campaigned for public health and sanitation, publishing pamphlets on safe milk for children and on the fight against tuberculosis, and even wrote health rhymes for children. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994 for his microphone and gramophone, but his support for women in science was among his most forward-looking acts.

Why it matters

Berliner's fellowship gave women scientists rare support to pursue research at a time when few institutions would fund them, helping launch notable careers in physics, biology and astronomy.

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.

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Emile Berliner

1851–1929 · Sound recording

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