The man behind the flat gramophone record also built early helicopters
Emile Berliner gave the world the flat, laterally cut disc record, which could be stamped out in copies from a master. The same restless inventor designed an early microphone, lost a patent fight to Thomas Edison, and spent two decades building helicopters, testing a tail rotor by 1910.
Berliner was born in Hanover on May 20, 1851, into a Jewish merchant family, and trained as a merchant according to family custom while tinkering with inventions on the side. To escape the Franco-Prussian War draft he sailed for the United States in 1870 with a friend of his father's, working in that man's shop in Washington. In New York he delivered papers and washed bottles, attending physics classes at night at Cooper Union.
The telephone and phonograph caught his interest, and he devised an improved telephone transmitter, among the earliest microphones. Bell Telephone bought the patent, but Edison challenged it, and on February 27, 1901, a US appeals court declared it void, ruling that carbon transmitters were Edison's idea. Berliner had moved to Boston in 1877, becoming a citizen four years later, and stayed with Bell until 1883 before setting up as an independent researcher back in Washington.
By 1890 a German licensee was selling a toy gramophone with five-inch hard rubber discs, pressed from etched zinc masters, only in Europe because American patents were pending. Berliner wanted more than a toy, and in 1894 he talked investors into putting up $25,000 to found the United States Gramophone Company.
From 1907 to 1926 he chased vertical flight. With his assistant R. S. Moore and the engineer Fay Oliver Farwell he produced a 36-horsepower rotary engine, lighter than the inline engines of the day. In 1909 he founded the Gyro Motor Company, and The New York Times reported that a machine built with J. Newton Williams had lifted Williams off the ground three times. His single-main-rotor design with a vertical tail rotor anticipated practical helicopters of the 1940s, and on June 16, 1922, he and his son Henry flew a demonstration for the US Navy. He died on August 3, 1929.
Source: Emile Berliner
