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March 4, 1877 - Emile Berliner invents the microphone.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and Thomas Edison first invented sound recording and then playback on the phonograph which then sparked the music recording industry; but neither of Bell's or Edison's inventions would have progressed much past being novelties in their workshops and laboratories and into everyday life without a means to capture sound.

On this day in 1877, Emile Berliner, a young mostly self-taught German immigrant to America, would present an improvement to Bell's telephone transmitter, effectively the first microphone. Bell would purchase the rights to the new microphone and recruit Berliner to work at his Boston laboratory for the next six years. Berliner then returned to Washington D.C. and continued experimenting with sound and recording.

Berliner's improvements on the telephone transmitter followed on the heels of improvements Edison had made to Bell's invention a year earlier. It was while working on Bell's telephone that Edison was inspired to capture and reproduce sound through recording and playback, which ultimately became the phonograph in 1877. Ten years later in 1887, Berliner would patent a new type of phonograph called the Gramophone. The Gramophone would utilize a spinning flat disk for the recording instead of the cylinder used by Edison's phonograph. Despite the superior fidelity of Edison's cylindrical recordings, Berliner's disks would become the preferred recording medium due to simpler manufacturing and ease of storage.

Berliner would continue to make improvements to the microphone and the Gramophone. He would found first the Berliner Gramophone Company and then with one of his chief engineers Eldridge Johnson they would start the Victor Talking Machine Company, notable for its " his Master's voice" logo with Nipper listening to a Gramophone. In 1929 the Victor Talking Machine Company would be purchased by the Radio Corporation of America - RCA.

Quote for ToDay:
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Niels Bohr