Emile Berliner: The Invention Of The Gramophone

Although the gramophone is sometimes perceived as a minor stepping stone in the evolution of music playing devices, the gramophone was, in all reality, a very important milestone in the evolution of music. The gramophone improved on the sound quality and play time of Edison's phonograph, while the use of disks gave other inventors a starting point to improve upon and evolve the design of playing and recording machines. Although it wasn’t the very first recording and music playing device, it was the first that was popularized and adopted into worldwide culture and is responsible for modern day music recording and listening methods.
Emile Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone, was born in 1851 in Germany. He started working and inventing at a young age, getting his first job at 14 years old. He migrated into America in 1870 at the age of 29 in hopes to avoid enlistment into the Prussian Army. Seven years after moving to America, he invented a
carbon microphone transmitter, which he sold to the Bell Telephone Company. In 1881, he returned to Germany and created one of the first telephone companies with his brother Joseph. 2 years later, in 1883, Berliner returned to America and worked in the Washington Laboratory. There, he worked with Thomas Edison and Charles Croz on recording technology. Before Berliner's invention of the gramophone, voices were recorded on foil covered cylinders. These cylinders had a short recording time and poor quality. The demand of higher recording quality caused Berliner to create the gramophone in 1887. Berliner continued making inventions, creating one of his last inventions; a flying helicopter, in 1919. Berliner died in Washington DC in 1929. The gramophone was almost an exact copy of Edison's phonograph, but had few adjustments made to improve it. While both inventions used a horn, membrane, and needle to record and play sounds, Berliner's model had a longer playing time and better sound quality. Berliner's first model was powered by a hand crank just like Edison’s phonograph. However, In 1896, Eldridge R. Johnson created a wind up spring motor to replace the original hand crank. Thanks to the use of disks instead of cylinders, the sound quality of the gramophone surpassed that of the phonograph. The disks each measured 25-30 centimeters wide, allowing more room to record and play on. The original disks were made of dirt and Shellac. Shellac is a resin that female Lacca beetles disperse on trees in Thailand and India. Each disk had to be recorded individually, forcing musicians to play the same song over and over again to record enough disks. In 1895, the use of wax paper as a transfer enabled one recording re-creation. The negative record made on the wax paper would be electroplated to a disk to enable easier re-creation. This process saved a lot of time and allowed more copies to be made. Emile Berliner invented the Gramophone between 1883-1887 during his time in Washington Laboratory where he worked with Edison and Croz. He was greatly influenced by Croz and Edison, using Edison's original model, as well as some of Croz's research. In 1888 it was displayed in Franklin Institute of Philadelphia. It was popular in America and Germany before spreading globally, becoming a cultural phenomenon. Berliner and RCA Records recorded artists globally. Some famous artists that Berliner recorded on his disks were Buffalo Bill Cody, Cal Stewart, Len Spencer, Arthur Collins, Vess Ossman, and Harry Macdonough. These musicians created genres such as "Tin Pan Alley" and "Ragtime". The invention of the gramophone not only improved Edison's phonograph, but allowed a starting point for further creation of sound recording and playing devices.
After the gramophone came the record player. The record player changed the model and the disk type slightly. The LP or Long Playing record that evolved from the disks created by Berliner were invented by Peter Carl Goldmark in 1948. After the creation of the LP record and the Record Player, inventors worked to create a more portable device that allowed people to listen to music on the go. After countless stepping stone inventions, inventors finally came up with the Compact Disk, or CD and the CD player in 1988. After the CD and CD player were invented, the further need for a more portable music playing device pushed scientists to create the MP3 player, which was first introduced in Japan in 1997 and then in the United States just a year later. The music playing device is now involved in almost every piece of modern day technology from phones to computers and
beyond.