Emile Berliner

Emile Berliner is a German Engineer born the May 20th 1851.

Working initially like printer then as clerk in a workshop of weaving, it can consequently illustrate its talents of inventor by developing a new power loom. It is under the influence of one of his/her friends that the Emile young person decides to cross the Atlantique. Impassioned by science and the new discoveries, he assiduously attends the many libraries and particularly that of Cooper Institute where he devotes himself particularly to research concerning electricity and acoustics.

It is in 1876, during the exposure birthday of the centenary of the American revolution to Philadelphia which he discovers an invention which interests it in the most point and initiated by Alexandre Graham Bell: the téléphone.
Unfortunately for Beautiful, its demonstration fails of little because the message which he wanted to transmit does not arrive clearly at destination. The problem coming from the transmitter. Emile Berliner then decides to work on the invention and takes again his research with same passion. Its small apartment located in the capital is transformed then into laboratory of electricity. After many weeks of research (going even until placing a telephone between its apartment and that of its landlady), Berliner discovers a new principle, it develops a good transmitter functioning whatever the distance separating the transmitter from the receiver. A patent is deposited the June 4th 1877. The “beautiful Telephone” contacts the German inventor immediately and proposes to him a large amount of money as well as a monthly income in exchange of the use of the invention. A few years later, Emile leaves the company and returns to settle in Washington, it buys a house there where it installs his laboratory of study.

He then invents there a Gramophone but also a matrix to print the horizontal discs. It is by this patent that it will become famous. He presents for the first time in public this project of gramophone to May 1888 to Franklin Institute in the same town of his beginnings, Philadelphia. He then starts to manufacture discs in significant amounts. He also records for many artists.
The gramophone is marketed for the first time in 1893 by a company founded by Berliner and some friends, it takes the name of United States Gramophone Company .

Two years passed when a new company is born on the initiative of important business men, they are the beginnings of the Berliner Gramophone Company . Unfortunately, the sales of the gramophone are relatively low and the company must, at all costs, modernize the gramophone. What is made the same year, the system with crank is replaced by a spring engine. But little by little, the invention of Mr Berliner will circulate with hands in hands, each one wanting to adapt the most significant part. Thus three companies manage the invention: the Berliner Gramophone Company (Manufacture the gramophone and the horizontal disc), the United States Gramophone Company (Manages substantive patent law) and finally the Seaman' S National Gramophone (Marketing and publicity).
The beginning of the XX° century is marked by many troubles for the Germanic inventor. Seaman tries to adapt the sales and by a series of handling, it manages to make withdraw the gramophone sales with the the United States.

Berliner leaves then the the United States and its town of Philadelphia to go to settle with Montreal (choice far from being pain-killer since the connections with Philadelphia was frequent). The company then knows a kind of apogee until reaching two million discs sold during the year 1901. Following the First World War, the company knows a formidable expansion and the factory of Berliner constitutes one of most modern of Montreal. In 1924, the Victor Talking Machine repurchases the company. Berliner is prize winner of the Franklin Médaille in 1929 in reward of its work in the field of the recording of the sound.

Emile Berliner will die of the continuations of an cardiac arrest the August 3rd 1929. At the 78 years age.

External bonds

Museum of the waves Emile Berliner

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