Emil Berliner

Who was Emil Berliner?

Emil Berliner was born on May 20, 1851 in Hanover to a Jewish merchant family. He emigrated to the USA in 1870 and is considered the inventor of the record and the gramophone. He also received patents for other inventions, e.g. he developed a mixed drink made from syrup, coffee and chocolate. He was granted American citizenship in 1881. There he initially worked as an accountant and worked on inventions in his spare time.

In 1877, Emil Berliner was able to capitalize on his hobby for the first time: he sold a microphone he had developed. microphone to the Bell Telephone Company for 75,000 dollars.

He also experimented with Edison’s phonograph and found ways to improve it: He changed the angle between the needle and the carrier foil by 90 degrees and thus invented lateral sound recording. This process – also known as the Berlin typeface – made it possible to reproduce a flat sound carrier.

This was the major innovation over Edison’s phonograph cylinder, with which the duplication of a recording was much more difficult. While Edison’s cylinder was far too expensive for a large number of copies, Berliner dreamed of creating a new industry that would allow his new product to be duplicated thousands of times over.

On November 8, 1887, he registered his patent “Method and apparatus for recording and reproducing sounds” with the Imperial Patent Office, having already patented his invention in Washington on September 29, 1887.

The birth of the gramophone

With a flat disk, Berliner had a completely new sound carrier in his hands. This first record was made of sheet zinc, had a diameter of twelve centimetres and rotated at 150 revolutions per minute. This meant that it could be played for around one minute. He called the matching playback device the “ gramophone “.

In May 1888, Emil Berliner presented his invention at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The following year, he brought the gramophone to Germany and commissioned the Kämmerer & Reinhardt toy factory in Thuringia to manufacture it.

Shellac instead of hard rubber

From 1890, records were no longer made from sheet zinc but from hard rubber. However, as the background noise of these records was very strong, the record was not initially taken seriously as a medium for preserving music.

This changed in 1895 when Emil Berliner began experimenting with a mixture of shellac, rock flour, carbon black and plant fibers. This was the birth of the shellac record .

Shellac is a resinous substance produced by insects (Cocus lacca) on a certain East Indian plant. By leaching and melting it down, a red raw material is created which is ideal for the production of lacquers, varnishes and even records. This material remained the leader in the record industry for almost 60 years.

Between 1883 and 1895, Emil Berliner founded two gramophone and record companies in the United States and the first in Europe in 1898. The Gramophone Company in London and the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft in Hanover. The Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft was the first company to produce records exclusively. A new industry was born.

His brother Joseph Berliner, who managed the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (a branch of the Gramophone Company founded in London) in Hanover and lived in the Villa Simon, mass-produced the first records in 1898. He was also instrumental in the spread of the telephone in Germany. In 1914, Emil Berliner endowed the Sarah Berliner Research Scholarship in honor of his mother. This scholarship supports women who have an academic degree in chemistry, physics or biology. The scholarship has been awarded by the American Association of University Women since 1928.

Emil Berliner Studios in Langenhagen was the in-house recording studio of the classical music label Deutsche Grammophon (DG) until May 2008, when it was SOLD to EBS Productions GmbH & Co KG as part of a management buy-out. Since then, EBS (Emil Berliner Studios) has been an independent production studio for acoustic music (classical, jazz, crossover and film music productions). In spring 2010 EBS moved to the center of Berlin.

Emil Berliner died in Washington, D.C., on August 3, 1929, at the age of 78.