With the invention of his flat disk record (which, in 1888, replaced Thomas Edison 's more expensive and more fragile cylinder) Emile Berliner elevated the record industry to prominence in home entertainment. Born on May 20, 1851 in Hanover, Germany, Berliner studied the printing trade before immigrating to the United States at age nineteen, where he studied sound and electricity at Cooper Union in New York City. In 1877, he invented an improved voice transmitter with a variable-pressure contact for the telephone. This device, which came to be called a microphone, won him a job as chief inspector for Bell Telephone the following year. The sale of his patent made him a wealthy man, but it brought him fifteen years of court battles against Edison, who patented the same device two weeks after Berliner.

Ten years later, Berliner patented a gramophone that played a flat record. He produced records for the new...