A merchant family in Hanover
Emil Berliner was born in Hanover on 20 May 1851, one of thirteen children of Samuel Berliner, a Jewish merchant and Talmudic scholar, and Sarah Friedman Berliner, an amateur musician. From his father, the family later said, he took integrity and a love of learning; from his mother, a lifelong love of music.
His formal schooling ended at fourteen, when he graduated in 1865 from the Samsonschule, a Jewish school in nearby Wolfenbüttel. He spent the next few years at odd jobs, helping to support the large family, and trained in the merchant trade. In 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, he accepted a clerk’s job in Washington, D.C., offered by a family acquaintance, a move that also took him out of reach of military service. He left Hanover in March 1870 and became, in America, Emile.
Self-education in America
For three years Berliner clerked in a Washington dry-goods store. In 1873 he moved to New York, where he took whatever work he could find by day and studied physics at night at the Cooper Institute. After a spell as a travelling salesman, he found a job as a cleaner in the laboratory of Constantin Fahlberg, the chemist who discovered saccharin. Watching research at close quarters fired his ambition: science and invention, he decided, would be his life.
Back in Washington in 1876, the year of the American centennial, he saw a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone. Berliner was fascinated, and he noticed its weakness: the transmitter, the part that turned the voice into an electrical signal, produced a faint sound.
The microphone
Working alone in his rooming house, with only a rudimentary knowledge of electricity, Berliner devised a ‘loose-contact’ transmitter, in which varying pressure between two contacts varied the current and so strengthened the transmitted voice, in effect an early microphone. In April 1877 he filed a caveat with the Patent Office, written without a lawyer. The young American Bell Telephone Company sent Thomas Watson, Bell’s famous assistant, to investigate. Watson returned so impressed that Bell bought the rights and hired Berliner, who worked for the company in New York and Boston until 1883.
The invention became the subject of a long legal battle with Thomas Edison, whose carbon transmitter covered similar ground, and in 1901 a federal appeals court ruled Berliner’s patent invalid and credited Edison with the use of carbon. Theodore Vail, president of AT&T, nonetheless insisted that Berliner had invented the loose-contact microphone. While in Boston, in 1881, Berliner became an American citizen and married Cora Adler.
His success helped his family too. He and his brother Joseph founded a telephone factory in Hanover, described as the first in Europe, the same brother with whom, in 1898, he would found Deutsche Grammophon.
Inventing the gramophone
In 1884 Berliner set himself up in Washington as an independent inventor, and in 1886 he turned to recorded sound. Edison’s phonograph and the Bell–Tainter graphophone both used cylinders, cut with a groove that went up and down, ‘hill and dale’, with the volume. Berliner studied both and saw their limits: wax cylinders were fragile, they could not easily be copied, and a shallow vertical groove let the stylus skid. He went back to an older device, the phonautograph, which traced sound waves side to side, and worked on a flat disc instead.
After many failures he arrived at a method of coating a zinc disc with a film of beeswax, tracing a laterally vibrating groove through it, and etching the groove into the metal with acid. He called the system the gramophone and patented it on 8 November 1887. Crucially, a master disc could be used to stamp out copies, first in celluloid, then hard rubber and later shellac, so that a single performance could be reproduced by the thousand. On 16 May 1888 he demonstrated it at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Building an industry
The first commercial discs were toys: in 1889, visiting Hanover, Berliner licensed the German toy-maker Kammerer & Reinhardt to sell small hand-cranked gramophones and five-inch discs. In 1894 he persuaded investors to put up $25,000 and founded the United States Gramophone Company in Washington, followed by the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia. In 1898 associates launched the Gramophone Company in London, and that year Emile and his brother Joseph founded Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover. His sons opened a Berliner Gramophone Company in Montreal in 1899.
On a visit to the London office in 1899 Berliner saw Francis Barraud’s painting of a terrier, Nipper, listening to a gramophone horn. He commissioned a copy and registered it as a trademark in the United States in 1900, then passed it to Eldridge Johnson, whose Victor Talking Machine Company made ‘His Master’s Voice’ one of the most famous trademarks in the world. Berliner himself lost control of his American business amid litigation with competitors, but his disc won. Within a few years it had eclipsed Edison’s cylinder, and Victor, later RCA Victor, built its empire on his patents.
Restless inventor
Berliner kept inventing. He patented a parquet-style floor covering, a loom and an acoustic tile of porous cement that improved the sound of theatres, churches and concert halls. From about 1907 he worked on vertical flight, designing a lightweight rotary engine; by 1909 he had a tethered helicopter that could lift two men, and in 1922 he and his son Henry demonstrated a helicopter to the US Navy.
He was also a tireless campaigner for public health. After his youngest daughter fell gravely ill in 1900, he fought infant mortality, urging mothers to ‘scald the milk’, funded a tuberculosis infirmary in memory of his father, led the Washington Tuberculosis Association and in 1924 founded a Bureau of Health Education. He wrote a children’s book of hygiene rhymes, Muddy Jim (1919), and established a research fellowship in his mother’s name for women scientists.
Jewish identity and Zionism
Raised in an observant, learned Jewish household and educated at a Jewish school, Berliner remained engaged with Jewish life in America. Zionism became one of his deepest causes. Between 1913 and 1918 he wrote essays including ‘The Social Status of the Jews’, ‘Zionism and the American Spirit’ and ‘Americanism and Zionism’, arguing that loyalty to America and support for a Jewish homeland were compatible.
In 1919 he chaired the arrangements for Washington’s reception for Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, wrote to the city’s newspapers marking the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, and published A Study Towards the Solution of Industrial Problems in the New Zionist Commonwealth. For an immigrant who had found freedom and success in the United States, a Jewish national home was a way of offering something similar to Jews who had neither.
Music for the masses
Berliner’s first discs were made of celluloid and then hard rubber; by the mid-1890s his companies were pressing records from a shellac-based compound. Early on, according to one of his laboratory assistants, Berliner himself sometimes played the piano on test recordings, and in 1897 he wrote and recorded a ‘Columbian Anthem’ in honour of the District of Columbia. His associate Fred Gaisberg became one of the first great record producers, travelling Europe to sign singers for the Gramophone Company; in 1902 he recorded Enrico Caruso in Milan, records that made both the tenor and the disc famous.
The economics were what changed the world. A cylinder had to be recorded more or less one at a time; a disc master could stamp out thousands of identical copies cheaply. By 1907 Deutsche Grammophon’s Hanover factory was running some two hundred record presses and producing the first two-sided discs, and by the late 1920s its annual output approached ten million records. Music that had once belonged to concert halls and parlour pianos could now be bought, owned and replayed anywhere, the beginning of the recording industry and of popular music as we know it.
Berliner did not reap all the rewards. He lost his long fight against unlicensed competitors and former associates, the Berliner name was gradually dropped from the companies he had founded, and the Victor company built its fortune on his system. But the format he devised, and the trademark of a dog listening to a horn, became part of daily life on every continent.
Last years and legacy
Berliner suffered a nervous breakdown in 1914 but remained active for years afterwards. In 1928 he wrote to his wife asking for a simple funeral, the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, money for poor mothers with babies, and burial at sunset. He died of a heart attack at his Washington home on 3 August 1929, aged seventy-eight, and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery. That year he received the Franklin Institute’s Franklin Medal.
Berliner did not invent recorded sound; Edison did that. What he invented was a way to make it a mass medium. The flat, laterally cut, stamped disc he devised in 1887 became the 78, then the vinyl LP and single, and in spirit the compact disc. The microphone principle he pioneered helped make the telephone practical. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994, and the company he founded with his brother, Deutsche Grammophon, still issues recordings today.
Sources & further reading
Emile Berliner, Wikipedia · Emile Berliner (biography), Library of Congress · The Gramophone, Library of Congress · Emile Berliner, National Inventors Hall of Fame · History, Deutsche Grammophon · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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