23 Facts About Emile Berliner

Emile Berliner originally Emil Berliner, was a German-American inventor.

Emile Berliner is best known for inventing the lateral-cut flat disc record used with a gramophone.

Emile Berliner founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894; The Gramophone Company in London, England, in 1897; Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, Germany, in 1898; and Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada in Montreal in 1899.

Emile Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1851 into a Jewish merchant family.

Emile Berliner completed an apprenticeship to become a merchant, as was family tradition.

Emile Berliner invented an improved telephone transmitter, one of the first type of microphones.

Emile Berliner moved to Boston in 1877, where became a United States citizen four years later.

Emile Berliner worked for Bell Telephone until 1883, when he returned to Washington and established himself as a private researcher.

In 1886, Emile Berliner began experimenting with methods of sound recording and reproduction.

Emile Berliner was granted his first patent for what he called the "Gramophone" in 1887.

In practice, Emile Berliner opted for the disc format, which made the photoengraving step much less difficult and offered the prospect of making multiple copies of the result by some simpler process such as electrotyping, molding, or stamping.

In 1888, Emile Berliner was using a more direct recording method, in which the stylus traced a line through a very thin coating of wax on a zinc disc, which was then etched in acid to convert the line of bared metal into a playable groove.

Emile 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.

Emile Berliner began marketing seven-inch records and a more substantial Gramophone, which was still hand-propelled like the smaller toy machine.

Engineer Eldridge R Johnson, the owner of a small machine shop in Camden, New Jersey, helped Berliner develop a suitable low-cost wind-up spring motor for the Gramophone, then to manufacture it.

Emile Berliner developed a rotary engine and an early version of the helicopter.

Between 1907 and 1926, Emile Berliner worked on technologies for vertical flight, including a lightweight rotary engine.

Emile Berliner obtained automobile engines from the Adams Company in Dubuque, Iowa, whose Adams-Farwell automobile used air-cooled three- or five-cylinder rotary engines developed in-house by Fay Oliver Farwell.

In 1909, Emile Berliner founded the Gyro Motor Company in Washington, DC The company's principals included Emile Berliner, president; Moore, designer and engineer; and Joseph Sanders, inventor, engineer, and manufacturer.

Emile Berliner, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1914, advocated for improvements in public health and sanitation.

Emile Berliner advocated for women's equality and, in 1908, established a scholarship program, the Sarah Berliner Research Fellowship, in honor of his mother.

Emile Berliner was awarded the Franklin Institute's John Scott Medal in 1897, the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1913, and the Franklin Medal in 1929.

Emile Berliner is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, alongside his wife and a son, Herbert Samuel Berliner.