Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph in the late 1870s, and Alexander Graham Bell made it an actually useful device, but it still had some issues. Both Edison and Bell used cylinders for the recording medium. These worked fine, but were difficult to manufacture in large quantities, and as you can see from a brief visit to any shop or website that deals in physical recordings, the cylinder format didn’t survive. It was supplanted by the disk format, invented by Emile Berliner in about 1886.
Berliner was born May 20, 1851 in the Kingdom of Hanover, which is now part of Germany. He became an accountant, and worked on various inventions as a hobby. Then the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, Berliner left Hanover to avoid being drafted, and traveled to the US. He worked in a friend’s shop in Washington, D.C., and soon after moved to New York to study physics in night classes.
Around the same time, the telephone and phonograph were the brand-new high tech of the day, and Berliner got interested in both. He invented the carbon microphone, which was a huge improvement over the previous telephone transmitter. David Hughes, in England, probably came up with it first, but news about inventions could travel slowly in those days, and Berliner and Hughes weren’t aware of each other’s work.
Unfortunately for Berliner, who got a patent on his microphone, he was up against Thomas Edison — who is better described as the Edison Company; he wasn’t a solitary operator. The Edison Company did have laboratories and employees working on various sorts of inventions, but they also had an enormous legal department. There was a years-long fight over Berliner’s patent (which he had sold to the Bell Telephone Company, so he wasn’t really the target), and the Edison Company won.
Berliner had meanwhile worked on other ideas, and in 1886 came up with the “Gramophone,” which was the first device to record and play back sound on the flat surface of a disk. The disk format had the advantage that it could be manufactured in quantity by simply stamping out copies. By 1890 Berliner’s US patents were still pending, but Gramophones were being manufactured in Germany.
The original German Gramophones were toys, and the disks were made of hard rubber, about five inches in diameter. Berliner found investors in the US as well and founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894, intending to make Gramophones for more serious use. Once again, the US legal system intervened and after more years of fighting, the US Gramophone Company shut down and other companies such as the Victor Talking Machine Company took over the market (after starting by marketing unauthorized copies. The “Gramophone” name mostly disappeared in the US, but continued to be used in Canada and Europe, among other places. Berliner himself moved to Canada.
His next projects were the rotary engine (a design for airborne power where the whole engine spins) and a very early helicopter, which he demonstrated in 1909. His helicopter proved to be too far ahead of its time, though (helicopters weren’t available commercially for another 30 years), and he shut down the company by 1925. He also invented one of the first acoustic tiles, and designed an improved loom.
Besides his inventions, and what must have been a frustrating history with US lawyers, Berliner worked toward equal rights for women as well as public health and sanitation. He lived to be 78, and passed away just a couple of months before the start of the Great Depression. The five books he wrote (mostly about health) around the turn of the 20th Century included one for children: Muddy Jim, which used rhymes to try to educate children about the value of good hygiene. It’s no longer in print, which may be a good thing; Emile Berliner was a much better inventor than poet.
