Emile Berliner (originally Emil) was born in Hanover, Germany on May 20, 1851. One of thirteen children born to Samuel and Sarah Fridman Berliner.
After a few years of basic schooling in Hanover, he was sent to nearby Wolfenbüttel to attend the Samsonschule which he graduated from in 1865 aged 14. This appears to have been the end of his formal schooling. He spent the next few years doing odd jobs in Hanover helping to support the large Berliner family, although two of his siblings had died in infancy. He was enticed by an offer of a clerkship in a store that was partly owned by a man named Behrend, a Hanoverian who had emigrated to the United States. Perhaps by a desire to escape the military duty that faced most young men that year (because of the Franco-Prussian War), Berliner persuaded his parents to allow him to accept the job offer and to emigrate to America in March 1870, aged 19.
In America Emile worked as a clerk in a dry-goods store in Washington, D.C. for Gotthelf, Behrend and Co. until, in 1873, he decided a better opportunity awaited him in New York City. Once there Berliner again took up onerous jobs during the day while trying to improve himself by studying privately at night at the Cooper Institute.
After a brief career as a traveling salesman for a "gents' furnishings" (men's clothing and accessories) establishment in Milwaukee, Berliner went back to New York in 1875 where this time he was most fortunate in obtaining a position as general cleanup man in the laboratory of Constantine Fahlberg, the discoverer of saccharine. This experience in a research laboratory fired Berliner's ambition, and he decided that science, research, and invention were to be his destiny.
1876 (the year of the American centennial celebrations) saw Berliner returning to what was now Behrend and Co. in Washington and resuming his clerkship there. Among the outstanding events that took place in Washington that year was a demonstration of the new telephone of Alexander Graham Bell. Berliner saw the instrument and was filled with enthusiasm. He commenced study of the telephone system, to his inquiring mind one of the instrument's weaknesses was its transmitter. Working alone in his lodgings he fashioned a new type of transmitter which he called a "loose-contact" transmitter, a type of microphone, which increased the volume of the transmitted voice. He was able to do this while still possessing only a rudimentary knowledge of electricity and physics which was quite astounding. When the members of the newly-formed American Bell Telephone Company were advised that a young and entirely unknown man in Washington had submitted a caveat (Berliner wrote it himself without the aid of a patent attorney) to the Patent Office covering a new transmitter, they could hardly believe it. Thomas Watson ('Come here Watson I need you.'), was sent to Washington to make enquiries. He returned to the ABT Co. with such a glowing report of the transmitter, and of Berliner himself, that the company offered to buy the rights to the invention and to hire Berliner as a research assistant.
For the next seven years Berliner was employed by the ABT Co., first in New York City and then, later, in Boston. During those years Berliner worked on numerous problems associated with the fledgling telephone industry and developed into a first-class theoretical electrician.
While working in Boston in 1881, Berliner became an American citizen and, that same year, married a young woman of German descent named Cora Adler.
In 1884 Berliner decided to set himself up as a private researcher and inventor, which was his cherished dream. He resigned from the American Bell Telephone Company and he and Cora left Boston and moved to Washington, D.C. In his small Washington house Berliner began working on additional improvements to Bell's telephone, selling the rights to his patents to the telephone company.
Then in 1886 he began working on the invention that was to prove his most important contribution to the world and, possibly his most famous: The Gramophone, the recording and reproduction of sound by means of disk records. Although Edison had invented a sound recorder/player and Bell devised a similar system, they used drums for the recording media and these were difficult to process and took up quite a lot of storage space. Berliner's disks (records) were the first sound recordings that could be mass-produced by creating master recordings from which molds were made. From each mold, hundreds of disks could be pressed and, because they were flat, many could be stored in a small space.
Among his other inventions were:
Emile Berliner is not known to have had any adverse relations with his inventor colleagues, in fact he appears to have been a man of remarkably even temperament. When certain slights came his way it was not Berliner but his admirers who took up arms in defense of his reputation. For instance, in the early years of the century some writers took it upon themselves to declare that it was Thomas A. Edison who had invented the loose-contact telephone transmitter. Theodore Vail, then president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, wrote a letter declaring that, to his certain knowledge, it was Emile Berliner who invented that type of microphone. Again, when Edison was presented with a statue of "Orpheus Discovering the Gramophone Record," it was not Berliner but a host of his friends who complained, as they also did when Congress was considering awarding Edison a medal for the development of the gramophone, in addition to his numerous authentic inventions. Berliner was concerned about his reputation, though, and the Library of Congress has a scrapbook apparently compiled by Berliner with articles and letters relating to Thomas Edison's receiving credit for Berliner's invention of the gramophone. Likewise, Berliner wrote in the front cover of a volume of telephone litigation that it might be necessary to preserve the book in order to protect his reputation.
The subject of children's health was very close to his heart. In 1900 his youngest daughter, Alice, became desperately ill, probably from bacteria picked up from some food or drink. Because of this illness Berliner campaigned against the high mortality rate of babies and young children. He became an advocate of clean milk and by all the ways he could he preached to mothers to "scald the milk" before serving it. He organized and founded the Society for the Prevention of Sickness in 1890 and organized the first milk conference in Washington, D.C., in 1907, about pasteurization and quality. He also fought the spread of tuberculosis, and he wrote extensively about hygiene and preventive medicine. He was also disgusted by what he perceived to be the neglect of cleanliness in children. In 1919 he and some of his associates wrote and published a book, entitled Muddy Jim, of colored drawings with accompanying rhymes illustrating what happens to children who neglect cleanliness. The book was given to schools in the Washington area and elsewhere. All the rhymes were written by Emile Berliner. The book was soon translated into French, possibly for distribution in the Canadian province of Quebec.
Emile Berliner died of a heart attack at the age of 78 on August 3 1929, and is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. alongside his wife and one of his sons.
But it is for his work with the improvements to the 'voice transmitter', or microphone, that brings Emile Berliner to these short history pages. In the words of the person that emailed the suggestion:-
"If it wasn't for him we would probably still be shouting at morse keys".