Emile Berliner (born Emil Berliner; May 20, 1851 – August 3, 1929) was a German-American inventor and businessman who invented the lateral-cut flat disc record, also known as a "gramophone record," used with a gramophone. He founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894;[Library of Congress. "Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry: The Gramophone". Retrieved January 19, 2017.]
Early life
Berliner was born in
Hanover, Germany, in 1851 into a Jewish merchant family.
["Concerning Emile Berliner, The Jew TO BE a Jew may mean one of several identities. For example, the Jew, Emile Berliner, the late inventor, called himself agnostic." B'nai B'rith, The National Jewish monthly: Volume 43; Volume 43.]["In 1899, Berliner wrote a book, Conclusions, that speaks of his agnostic ideas on religion and philosophy." Seymour Brody, Jewish heroes & heroines of America: 151 true stories of Jewish American heroism (2003), page 119.] He completed an apprenticeship to become a merchant, as was family tradition. While his real hobby was invention, he worked as an accountant to make ends meet. To avoid being drafted in the Franco-Prussian War, Berliner migrated to the United States of America in 1870 with a friend of his father's, in whose shop he worked in Washington, D.C.
He moved to New York and, living off temporary work such as a paper route and cleaning bottles, he studied physics at night at the Cooper Union Institute.
Career
After some time working in a livery stable, Berliner became interested in the new
Sound technology of the
telephone and
phonograph. He invented an improved telephone transmitter, one of the first types of
. The patent was acquired by the Bell Telephone Company (see
The Telephone Cases), but contested, in a long legal battle, by
Thomas Edison. On February 27, 1901, the United States Court of Appeals would declare Berliner's patent void and awarded Edison full rights to the invention. "Edison preceded Berliner in the transmission of speech," the court would write. "The use of carbon in a transmitter is, beyond controversy, the invention of Edison".
[ Inventors Hall of Fame , E. Berliner, filed June 1877, issued November 1891]
Berliner moved to Boston in 1877, where he became a United States citizen four years later. He worked for Bell Telephone until 1883, when he returned to Washington and established himself as a private researcher.
Gramophone
In 1890, a Berliner licensee in Germany was manufacturing a toy Gramophone and five-inch hard rubber discs (stamped-out replicas of etched zinc master discs), but because key U.S. patents were still pending they were sold only in Europe. Berliner meant his Gramophone to be more than a mere toy, and in 1894 he persuaded a group of businessmen to invest $25,000, with which he started the United States Gramophone Company.
Rotary engine and helicopters
Berliner also developed a rotary engine and an early version of the
helicopter. According to a July 1, 1909, report in
The New York Times, a helicopter built by Berliner and J. Newton Williams of Derby, Connecticut, had Williams "from the ground on three occasions" at Berliner's laboratory in the Brightwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Between 1907 and 1926, Berliner worked on technologies for vertical flight, including a lightweight rotary engine. Berliner obtained automobile engines from the Adams Company in Dubuque, Iowa, whose Adams-Farwell automobile used air-cooled three- or five-cylinder developed in-house by Fay Oliver Farwell (1859–1935). Berliner, his assistant R.S. Moore, and Farwell developed a 36-hp rotary engine for use in helicopters, an innovation on the heavier inline engines then in use.
In 1909, Berliner founded the Gyro Motor Company in Washington, D.C. The company's principals included Berliner, president; Moore, designer and engineer; and Joseph Sanders (1877–1944), inventor, engineer, and manufacturer. The manager of the company was Spencer Heath (1876–1963), a mechanical engineer who was connected with the American Propeller Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of aeronautical related mechanisms and products in Baltimore, Maryland. By 1910, Berliner was experimenting with the use of a vertically mounted tail rotor to counteract torque on his single-main-rotor design, a configuration that led to practical helicopters of the 1940s.
Henry became disillusioned with helicopters in 1925, and the company shut down.
Other
Berliner's other inventions include a new type of
loom for mass-production of cloth and an
Soundproofing.
Berliner, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1914,
Death
On August 3, 1929, Berliner died of a heart attack at his home at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78.
He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., alongside his wife and a son,
Herbert Samuel Berliner.
Publications
Books
Patents
Patent images in Tag Image File Format
-
Telephone (induction coils), filed October 1877, issued January 1878
-
Telephone (carbon diaphragm microphone), filed August 1879, issued December 1879
-
Microphone (loose carbon rod), filed September 1879, issued February 1880
-
Microphone (spring carbon rod), filed Nov 1879, issued March 1880
-
UK Patent 15232 filed November 8, 1887
-
Gramophone (horizontal recording), original filed May 1887, refiled September 1887, issued November 8, 1887
-
Process of Producing Records of Sound (recorded on a thin wax coating over metal or glass surface, subsequently chemically etched), filed March 1888, issued May 1888
-
Combined Telegraph and Telephone (microphone), filed June 1877, issued November 1891
-
Sound Record and Method of Making Same (duplicate copies of flat, zinc disks by electroplating), filed March 1893, issued October 1895
-
Gramophone (recorded on underside of flat, transparent disk), filed November 7, 1887, issued July 1896
Further reading
External links
