1877: Emile Berliner invents a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner.

Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner's carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades. And they may not have been capable of surmounting such great distances, hindering one of humanity's most important advances.

Like most of today's microphones, early designs turned compressions in the air, otherwise known as sound, into electrical signals. But the results didn't sound good by any account, and the device lacked practicality for widespread use. Bell's microphone, for instance, involved suspending a diaphragm above a pool of electrified liquid.

Berliner's patent application improved on the existing design by adding a layer of carbon particles in between two contacts, one of which acted as a diaphragm for catching sound waves. Movements of the diaphragm created varying pressure on the carbon particles, allowing more or less electricity to pass between the contacts.

This process converted sound waves into electricity more accurately than any other microphone could at the time. It became commonplace in telephones, and even radio, until the appearance of the condenser microphone in the mid-1920s.

Although Berliner's microphones still sounded hissy, they proved critical not only for encoding speech into electricity, but for amplifying the signal in the wire every so often to compensate for electrical resistance. Without that amplification, Bell's telephone would have remained a mere curiosity, rather than transforming the world.

In those pre–vacuum-tube, pre-transistor days, Berliner's carbon-disk microphones were coupled to little speakers to amplify the signal mechanically over long distances. Presumably, you'd be able to eavesdrop on a conversation simply by standing near one of these mechanical repeaters.

Bell paid $50,000 for Berliner's microphone patent (about $1.1 million in today's money) and began manufacturing telephones using the technology in 1878. But controversy dogged the patent, which was eventually thrown out, much to Berliner's dismay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Thomas Edison, and not Berliner, invented the carbon microphone.

In truth, neither can claim total credit.

As Bell executive W. Van Benthuysen told The New York Times (.pdf) in December 1891, the idea of transmitting speech by varying the current between two contacts as they are affected by sound waves was common knowledge in some circles, having appeared in published works as early as 1854 – well before either Berliner or Edison (who filed a similar patent) claimed credit for the idea in 1877.

"It was known long before the date of Bell's [formerly Berliner's] patent that the resistance of a circuit is varied without being broken by variations in the intimacy of contact or amount of pressure between the electrodes in contact, from one to the other of which a current is passing," said Van Benthuysen, adding that France's Count Du Moncel had written extensively on the topic over two decades earlier.

Nonetheless, Berliner reputedly went to his grave in 1929 convinced that Edison had stolen his idea. Before that, he did receive ample credit for another crucial invention: the lateral-cut disc record, whose design is still prized by hipsters and purists alike. Before that, everybody was using Edison's phonograph cylinders, which took up much more space, and were difficult to duplicate.

Berliner's records were used in toys from 1888 until 1894, when his company began selling records using a logo of a dog cocking its ear towards a record player. Modified versions of the "His Master's Voice" logo have been used by record companies around the world, including RCA in the United States. It now forms the retail entertainment chain HMV's logo.

The saga of the carbon-button microphone comes as a reminder that while history feels the need to assign great ideas to individual people, their origins are often murky and collaborative in nature, and owe no small part to people ripping each other off.

We couldn't find any accounts of Emile Berliner's first words transmitted by microphone, but they were probably not "Ich bin ein Berliner" – as nice as that would have been.

Source: Various

Photo: Emile Berliner sits with a couple of microphones in 1927./Courtesy Library of Congress

Diagram courtesy TutorVista