- Person
- Emile Berliner
- Lived
- 1851–1929
- Field
- Sound recording
- From
- German-American
The story
Emile Berliner was born in 1851 in Hanover, Germany, into a Jewish merchant family, and trained as a merchant according to family tradition. In 1870, partly to avoid being drafted for the Franco-Prussian War, he emigrated to the United States. He worked in a shop in Washington, then moved to New York, living on odd jobs while he studied physics at night at the Cooper Union.
Alexander Graham Bell's new telephone fascinated him. Berliner devised an improved transmitter in which the contact pressure between two terminals varied as a voice acted on it, one of the first types of microphone. He sold the patent to the young Bell Telephone Company, for $50,000 according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and worked for Bell until 1883, when he returned to Washington as an independent researcher. Thomas Edison contested the patent in a long legal battle, and in 1901 a federal appeals court ruled for Edison on the use of carbon in transmitters.
Berliner's greatest invention came next. Edison's phonograph recorded on cylinders, which were hard to copy. Berliner's gramophone, patented on November 8, 1887, recorded the sound groove side to side on a flat disc. He then developed a method of etching recordings on zinc and stamping many duplicates from a single master, so that records could be made cheaply in large numbers.
In 1894 he founded the United States Gramophone Company. Legal disputes forced him out of the American business in 1900, and his patents passed to Eldridge Johnson, whose Victor Talking Machine Company later became part of RCA. Companies Berliner helped start abroad grew into the Gramophone Company in Britain, later part of EMI, Deutsche Grammophon in Germany and the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company in Canada.
Berliner also cared about public welfare. In 1904 he published a study of milk and child mortality, campaigning for safer milk for children, and he founded a research fellowship for women scientists. He received the Franklin Institute's medal in 1929 and died that year in Washington. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994.
Why it matters
Berliner's flat disc made recorded music affordable for ordinary families and shaped how the world listened to music for most of the twentieth century.
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 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 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
- Emile Berliner National Inventors Hall of Fame
- History Deutsche Grammophon
- 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.