- Person
- Emile Berliner
- Lived
- 1851–1929
- Field
- Sound recording
- From
- German-American
The story
Emile Berliner left his native Hanover for America in 1870 as a young Jewish clerk. There he invented the flat gramophone record, patented in 1887, and built companies to sell it. To reach Europe, he worked with his associates William Barry Owen, who founded the Gramophone Company in London in 1898, and the recording pioneer Fred Gaisberg.
In June 1898 Deutsche Grammophon was founded in Hanover together with the city's first record and gramophone factory. Its directors, according to the company's own history, were Emile and his brother Joseph. The plant used American-made hydraulic presses to stamp shellac discs for the Gramophone Company in London. By 1900, when Deutsche Grammophon became a joint-stock company with headquarters in Berlin, Berliner's disc had overtaken Edison's cylinder as the industry standard.
The company grew quickly. It was appointed purveyor to the British and Spanish royal households, and by 1907 its Hanover factory had some 200 record presses and had produced the first two-sided records. In 1913 it caused a sensation with the first complete recording of an orchestral work, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, issued on four double-sided discs. By 1925 it had recorded all nine Beethoven symphonies. By the time of Joseph's death in 1928 and Emile's in 1929, it was producing nearly 10 million records a year and employed some 600 people in Hanover.
The company survived war, depression and the Nazi years, when the Gestapo in 1942 ordered it to stop producing recordings by Jewish artists. After 1945 it rebuilt. It became the first company to make all its recordings on magnetic tape, released its first LPs in 1951, and in 1983 helped introduce the compact disc to the mass market with recordings by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
Today Deutsche Grammophon, part of Universal Music Group, is the world's oldest surviving established record company. Its yellow label is known to classical music lovers everywhere, and it still records leading orchestras and soloists.
Why it matters
Deutsche Grammophon became one of the great names in classical music, recording generations of leading musicians and bringing their performances to listeners everywhere.
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 built early helicoptersBetween 1907 and 1926 Emile Berliner worked on vertical flight, built a light rotary engine, tested a tail rotor by 1910 and demonstrated a helicopter to the US Navy in 1922.
- 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
- History of Deutsche Grammophon Deutsche Grammophon
- Deutsche Grammophon Wikipedia
- Berliner Gramophone 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.