Emile Berliner

The German-American inventor Emile Berliner was initially known as Emil Berliner. His creation of the lateral-cut flat disc record, known as a "gramophone record" in American and British English when played on a gramophone, is his most famous invention. He established the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada in Montreal in 1899 (chartered in 1904), the United States Gramophone Company in 1894, The Gramophone Company in London, England, Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, Germany, and The Gramophone Company in 1897. A helicopter (1919), acoustical tiles (1920s), and what is likely the first radial aviation engine (1908) were all created by Berliner.

Early Life

Emile Berliner made an equally important contribution to contemporary technology, even if he may not be as well-known as Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. The twentieth century saw the widespread usage of audio recording and playback methods made possible by Berliner's ideas. The value of his inventions and discoveries-the first discs or records-has risen continuously, making them jewels for collectors.

In Wolfenbuttel, a German town close to Hannover, Emile Berliner was born on May 20, 1851. Sarah, Emile's mother, raised him and his 10 siblings, while Samuel, his father, worked as a salesman. Berliner began working for a printer at the age of 14 to help support the family financially. His first innovation, a power loom, came in handy when he secured a job at a tie shop shortly after.

Berliner received an invitation to work in his father's store in Washington, D.C., when he was still a teenager from a friend of his who had just relocated to the U.S. Berliner emigrated to the United States in 1870 to evade conscription into the Prussian military. Berliner was a bright, hardworking young guy who battled the recessionary economy and the linguistic and cultural obstacles that new immigrants had to overcome. He was going to work at a dry-goods store in Washington, D.C. Berliner worked as a clerk for Gotthelf, Behrend & Co. for three years until deciding in 1873 that New York City offered him more opportunities. Once more, Berliner worked long hours during the day and studied alone at the Cooper Institute at night in an attempt to better himself.

After working for a little while in Milwaukee as a "drummer," or traveling salesman, for a "gents' furnishings" (men's clothes and accessories) business, Berliner returned to New York, where he was extremely lucky to land a job as the general cleanup man in the saccharine discoveryer Constantine Fahlberg's laboratory. Berliner was inspired to pursue science, research, and creation after having this experience in a laboratory. He studied the science of sound and electricity for a long time at the Cooper Institute Library in Washington. With an aim to enhance current technology, he established a basic laboratory in his flat and started experimenting with his concepts.

Inventor of Audio Technology

Alexander Graham Bell unveiled his telephone at a display during Philadelphia's centennial celebration in 1876. Berliner realized that he could enhance the sound transmission quality of the phone. In 1877, Berliner created a telephone transmitter through experimentation with a telephone he had put together in his room. This invention would eventually lead to the development of the very first microphone and clear long-distance telephone conversation.

On June 4, 1877, he filed a patent on the invention. Three months later, Berliner, desperate for money, sold all rights to his invention for $75,000 (some reports claim $50,000) to the Boston-based Bell Telephone Company. He also accepted a paid job as an engineer at Bell. After returning to Germany in 1881, Berliner worked with his brother Joseph to establish the Telephon-Fabrik Berliner, the first telephone firm in Europe.

In 1883, Berliner returned to the United States and focused on his laboratory in Washington, D.C., leaving the telephone industry behind. In an attempt to gain as much knowledge as possible about sound recording, he studied the works of Thomas Edison and Charles Croz. Records were typically created on cylinders back then. Berliner started capturing audio on discs after learning about Croz's findings.

This technology requires an up-and-down groove playback method, even though it was already in use. Berliner invented the lateral technique, in which the needle vibrates rhythmically from left to right. His initial discs were zinc bits coated in wax and coded with a sound diaphragm. After the discs were submerged in acid, the wax was removed, and the design was burned into the metal. Berliner patented his full playback device, dubbed the "gramophone," on September 26, 1887.

Though Berliner originally commercialized his device in Germany, it was initially shown at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1888. To create his gramophones, he hired Waltershausen-based Kummerer Reinhardt, a toy maker. His device was currently operated manually by a crank. Berliner went back to his U.S. lab and began working on refining his disc replication method and the power foundation for playback. For his discs, he hired a number of musicians. He started creating discs out of a brand-new substance made of fur, soot, and shellac.

In order to sell the phonograph and maintain ownership of its patents, Berliner established the United States Phonograph Company in 1893 with financial support from friends and acquaintances. Investors added another $25,000 at the end of 1895 to establish the Berliner Gramophone Company, a manufacturing business. This new technology could have sold better at first. But when New Jerseyan Eldridge R. Johnson replaced the laborious hand crank in 1896 with a wind-up spring motor, sales increased significantly. About twenty-five thousand of these motors were produced for the Berliner Gramophone Company over the following four years.

American recordings from the start of the 20th century, including songs by Buffalo Bill Cody, Cal Stewart, Len Spencer, Arthur Collins, Vess Ossman, and Harry Macdonough, were available on early Berliner records. Berliner recorded a style of music that came to be known as Ragtime and Tin Pan Alley. Berlin discs released "After the Ball," a song connected to and made famous by the 1927 musical Show Boat, on November 1, 1894.

Berliner only continued to be a minority shareholder in his firm despite its success. The company acquired his patent for the phonograph. After the Berliner Gramophone Company brought on Frank Seaman of New York to oversee the company's marketing campaign, the Seaman National Gramophone Company was established. Three businesses now shared ownership and management over Berliner's inventions: the Seaman National Gramophone Company in New York, the Berliner Gramophone Company in Philadelphia, and the United States Gramophone Company in Washington.

Subsequent Inventions and Berliner's Reputation

Berliner sold Bell's telephone firm ownership rights to his inventions and started working on other enhancements to the device in his modest Washington home. Then, in 1886, he started working on the creation that would turn out to be his greatest contribution to humanity. This was the process by which the phonograph was developed-the recording and playback of sound using disc records. His other creations included:

Soundproof Tile

Berliner knew full well that numerous concert halls, theaters, churches, and synagogues had subpar acoustics because he regularly went to symphonic concerts, operas, and other musical performances, in addition to lectures, plays, and sermons. After years of studying acoustics, he decided to take action. Soon after, he created a brand-new kind of tile that was able to be mounted on a room's existing wall. The inventor of acoustic tiles claimed that they were "... composed of porous cement, are equally hard as rock, and yet have the resonance of wood when vibrated by a tuning fork." For these tiles, he was granted Patent 1,573,475 in 1926.

Before public address systems, they were incredibly successful. The Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, the Church of the Messiah in Montreal, the Leicester Theatre in London, the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, the Second Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and the board room of the Karachi Port Trust in what is currently Pakistan were a few of the structures that featured these tiles.

The Internal Combustion Engine and the Helicopter

Emile Berliner had a fascination with the flying machine in 1906 or 1907. This resulted in his participation in the creation of the helicopter, which he said was among the first heavier-than-air vehicles ever imagined, dating at least as far back as Leonardo da Vinci. To power the rotors, Berliner created and patented a novel kind of lightweight internal combustion engine. In 1909, he built a functioning model that could support the weight of two grown men, but there was no effort at free flight because the helicopter was attached to the ground. Berliner's son Henry carried up his father's work on the helicopter, even though Berliner had to give it up.

It is not known that Emile Berliner had tense relationships with his other inventors; instead, he seems to have been an exceptionally calm individual. It wasn't Berliner who resorted to violence to protect his reputation after certain slights were directed at him; rather, some of his fans did. At the beginning of the century, for example, several writers claimed that Thomas A. Edison was the creator of the loose-contact telephone transmitter.

Emile Berliner is credited with inventing that particular sort of microphone, according to a letter written by Theodore Vail, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Once more, a number of Edison's friends objected when he was given a statue of "Orpheus Discovering the Gramophone Record," just as they did when Congress was thinking of giving Edison a medal for creating the gramophone in addition to his many other genuine inventions.

Nonetheless, the holdings of the Library of Congress make clear that Berliner was conscious of his reputation and took note of others' questionable assertions. The Library possesses a scrapbook that appears to have been put together by Berliner, which contains letters and articles about Thomas Edison being given credit for Berliner's creation of the gramophone. Berliner also noted that it could be vital to keep this book intact in order to safeguard his reputation on the front page of a volume containing telephone litigation.

Social Involvement and Death

For a long time, Emile Berliner actively supported social and communal initiatives, especially those related to public health. He provided funding in 1909 for an infirmary building honoring his father's memory at the Starmont Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Washington Grove, Maryland. Berliner served as the Washington Tuberculosis Association's president for a while. The Bureau of Health Education was established by him in 1924 with the aim of advancing health education and public hygiene among mothers and children.

He felt strongly about the health of children. Alice, his youngest daughter, fell very ill in 1900, most likely from bacteria she had consumed in food or drink. Berliner fought against the high infant and young child mortality rate as a result of this sickness. Using every tool at his disposal, he became an ardent supporter of clean milk and advised women to "scald their milk" prior to serving it to their children. He also started to feel repulsed by what he thought was children's disregard for hygiene.

He and a few of his colleagues wrote and released a book of rhymes and colored images in 1919 that showed what happened to kids who don't take care of themselves. The book Muddy Jim was distributed to Washington area schools as well as other schools. Emile Berliner wrote all of the rhymes. The book was shortly translated into French, presumably for Quebec, a province in Canada.

Emile Berliner was also deeply involved in the Zionist movement. Berliner wrote four works on the topic between 1913 and 1918: "The Social Status of the Jews," "Zionism and the American Spirit," "Americanism and Zionism," and "Thoughts on Zionism."In 1919, Berliner held the position of head of the Committee on Arrangements for the renowned rabbi Stephen S. Wise's reception. That same year, he corresponded with the editors of the Washington Star and Washington Post over the second remembrance of British statesman Arthur Balfour's 1917 proclamation that "His Majesty's Government favors the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine."Berliner published "A Study Towards the Solution of Industrial Problems in the New Zionist Commonwealth," another study, in 1919.

On August 3, 1929, Emile Berliner, then 78 years old, passed away from a heart attack at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. According to Berliner's grandson Oliver, there were five seconds of silence on the NBC radio platform when the news of his passing was made public. Almost $1.5 million was the German-Jewish immigrant Emile's fortune at the time of his death; he had immigrated to the United States, hardly knowing how to speak English. He left most of it to his family.

Despite having given each of his sons, Herbert and Edgar, significant sums of money throughout his lifetime, Berliner did not include them in his bequests. Edgar did not contest the will, but Herbert did for a short while. Three days later, Berliner's burial took place precisely as he had asked in the letter from the previous year. The Rock Creek Cemetery served as his grave. Following her death in 1942, Cora Adler Berliner was buried next to her spouse and their infant son, Oliver.