7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

at hand. Lilienthal broke his back in a glider crash on

Aug. 9, 1896, and died in a Berlin hospital the next day.

Emil Berliner

(b. May 20, 1851, Hannover, Hanover [now in Ger.]—d. Aug. 3, 1929,

Washington, D.C., U.S.)

E

mil (or Emile) Berliner, a German-born American

inventor, made important contributions to micro-

phone technology and developed the gramophone, the

first viable disc-type record player.

Berliner immigrated to the United States in 1870. In

1877, a year after Alexander Graham Bell invented the

telephone, Berliner, while working as a clerk in Washington,

D.C., developed a transmitter employing a loose metal

contact separated by a layer of carbon. The device did not

perform well as a telephone transmitter, as Berliner was

later to admit. Nevertheless, the rights to the invention

were purchased by the Bell Telephone Company, which

used it to develop the carbon microphone—thus earning

Berliner a dubious reputation as “inventor of the

microphone.”

In 1884, after several years’ association with Bell

Telephone, Berliner established his own independent lab-

oratory in Washington. There he made another contribution

of major significance: the flat recording disc, on which a

spiral recording groove was inscribed by a stylus that moved

laterally, rather than vertically, thus producing excellent

sound on a surface that could be manufactured more effi-

ciently than Edison-type cylinder recordings. Berliner

patented his invention, which he called the Gramophone,

in 1887. He then embarked on a series of efforts to establish

gramophone businesses in North America and Europe, all

the while working on methods to improve the recording