Recording Sound
Emile Berliner (1851-1929)
Gramophone, disc, and
"List of Plates,"
1895
Motion Picture, Broadcasting,
& Recorded Sound Division
Berliner factory after the fire,
Washington, D.C., 1897
Color digital print from original photograph
Motion Picture, Broadcasting
& Recorded Sound Division (127.2)
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In the late 1880s, German immigrant Emile Berliner (1851-1929),
working in Washington, D.C., created a new medium for sound recording
and playback, the flat disc "Gramophone." While Thomas Edison's
1877 phonograph was "a wonderful invention," in the words of a contemporary
Scientific American, in its original tinfoil form it was
impractical for common use. Edison soon devoted his energy to development
of the incandescent light. But about the same time that Berliner
was creating the gramophone, Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory
and Edison's laboratory resumed work on development of the phonograph.
(The word, "phonograph," was Edison's trade name for his device,
which played cylinders rather than discs. The cylinder invention
patented by Bell's Volta Laboratory was called the "graphophone.")
According to its donor, Mrs. Isabelle S. Sayers, this Gramophone
machine of the mid-1890s was owned by Thomas Edison himself. While
Edison probably saw little threat to his phonograph in this crude
machine, discs would far outsell cylinders by 1910. Berliner's January
1895 List of Plates, shown next to the Gramaphone, describes the
typical range of music and speech that could be heard on cylinders
as well as discs at that time.
The disc on the Gramophone seen here is the first recording of
John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," recorded for Berliner
only thirteen days after the premiere of the march. Generous descendants
of Berliner's have entrusted the Library with preservation of more
than five hundred published and unpublished Berliner discs along
with the inventor's laboratory notebooks, business and legal papers,
and personal scrapbooks.
Berliner's discs were the first sound recordings that could be
mass-produced by creating master recordings from which molds were
made. From each mold, hundreds of discs were pressed. Recording
masters and Gramophone machines were made in Berliner's Washington,
D.C. laboratory, two blocks from the White House. Fire destroyed
that laboratory in 1897. Later, Berliner's company evolved into
the Victor Talking Machine Company.
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