Emile Berliner Dies: Gramophone Inventor's Legacy Endures
Emile Berliner developed the flat disc gramophone record and the turntable system to play it, replacing Thomas Edison's fragile wax cylinders with a format that could be cheaply mass-produced from stamped shellac. His invention transformed recorded music from a novelty into a commercially viable industry by making it possible to press thousands of identical copies from a single master recording. The flat disc format dominated the audio industry for nearly a century, and Berliner's basic concept of a rotating disc read by a needle persisted through vinyl LPs and into the digital age.
August 3, 1929
97 years ago
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