Good morning,
Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a sunny day, with a high of thirty-seven degrees. Balmy.
There are teacher conferences in our public school district today, so students have no school.
Wired remembers today as a great day in science: March 4, 1877: The Microphone Sounds Much Better. Here’s why microphones started sounding better —
1877: Emile Berliner files a patent caveat for 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….
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.
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….
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 vinyl-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 vinyl 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….
