There was a story this week in Tablet about Emile Berliner, who in 1870 emigrated to the USA at age 19 to avoid being drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Over his first few years in the USA, he worked a number of different jobs, but his true interest was in sound reproduction. While Alexander Graham Bell received the initial patent on the telephone, Bell’s phone was not commercially practical. As explained in the Tablet article, in the original Bell telephone,
“Speech was not all that discernible due to the weak electrical current that the magneto-electric induction force of Bell’s proto-microphone transmitted across conductive wires; over any significant distance, the metal diaphragm in the receiver which reproduced the sound would barely vibrate, turning what was once a joyous shout into a muted murmur.”
Hence,
“Berliner worked tirelessly for months to come up with a feasible solution which would render the telephone viable. His breakthrough came inadvertently after a friend, who worked as a telegraph operator, explained that the signal of a message varied with the pressure applied to the contact switch. Using this principle of increased pressure, Berliner eventually created a working prototype for both the loose-contact transmitter (the first working microphone), as well as for a transformer (which prevented electrical signals from fading over long distances).”
He applied for a patent in 1877, and by the end of the year the Bell Telephone Company bought his patent rights for $50,000, equivalent to about $1.3 million today. Thus, from a technological standpoint, it was Berliner’s improvement that enabled the success of Bell Telephone. (This is one of Berliner's patents, though I think it's a follow-on to his earlier microphone patent: Download US0241912 berliner).
Berliner wasn’t done, though. What he is best remembered for is the invention of the gramophone. Although he preceded by both Thomas Edison and by Bell in the invention of sound recordings (Edison with his phonograph using a vertical tinfoil cylinder, Bell with his “graphophone” that used a vertical wax cylinder), the quality of the sound was poor, the duration of the recordings was limited, and the recording on the cylinders could not be reproduced. Berliner recorded instead on a horizontal disk, which used gravity to advantage (rather than needing to resist it) as the stylus cut into the recording medium. Instead of using a recording medium of pure wax, which could be difficult to cut, he found that mixing beeswax with alcohol resulted in a softer, easier-to-score material, which he applied on top of a zinc disk. And by pouring acid into the areas the stylus had cut, he was able to etch grooves into the zinc disk below. By creating positive inverse from this disk, the positive could serve as a template against which copies could be made (in his case, from rubber or shellac). Hence was born not only the gramophone but the sound recording industry. It is in honor of Berliner’s invention that the Grammy Awards are named.
Then there was the obituary in the New York Times of Martin Pope, a professor emeritus at NYU who died this week at age 103. He was born Isidore Poppick to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He earned a degree in chemistry from CCNY in 1939, and after serving in the Pacific in WWII, returned to New York where he got a job working at Balco Research Laboratory. As reported in the NYT obituary,
“In 1938, as an undergraduate at the City College of New York studying physical chemistry, the 20-year-old Isidore Poppick published a research paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“After serving as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces in World War II, he sought employment. Aware of an undercurrent of antisemitism, Dr. Pope applied in 1946 for a position at the American Cyanamid Company using two names: Isidore Poppick, with the published paper listed on his résumé, and Martin Pope, with no such record.
““Martin Pope received an application, and Isidore Poppick received a notice that no positions were available,” Dr. Pope said. “I decided to use Martin Pope as my new name.””
He eventually earned a PhD from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and began his career at NYU in 1956. Pope also received several patents. Download US2727731 pope