When we think of the inventors of modern recording and communication, two names come to mind: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.  But when it comes to recording, both were eclipsed by a man who made their inventions accessible to the public: Emile Berliner.

Emile Berliner was a German émigré and inventor living in the U.S.  He became interested in recording in 1886 after working for Bell Telephone and inventing one of the first early microphones.

At the time, the dominant recording technology was Edison’s phonograph.  It worked by recording grooves into a cylinder coated with soft tinfoil.  To play back the sound, a needle was drawn through the rotating cylinder, and the vibrations it produced were magnified.

Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter improved the technology by making the cylinder from a roll of wax-coated paper.  The cylinders were more durable and recorded high-pitched vibrations better, but they didn’t solve the major problem with Edison’s invention: they couldn’t be mass-produced.

Emile Berliner changed that.  Instead of a cylinder, he used a flat, circular disc with grooves that varied horizontally, not vertically.  The disc was placed on a turntable and rotated at a steady speed while a needle was drawn across the grooves.  The turntable relied on clockwork to keep the speed constant, and it was operated with a hand crank.

Berliner and his partner, engineer Eldridge L. Johnson, teamed up to start the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901.  For the first time, gramophones became accessible and affordable to the general public—and they were quite popular.  In 1906, the company started marketing the Victrola, a gramophone with the turntable and horn inside a wooden cabinet.  It was designed to look like furniture, and it became a best seller.

Berliner remained an inventor, despite his commercial success.  His other inventions include the helicopter, acoustic tiles, and a loom machine for mass-production of cloth.