"Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry" has been added to the Library's American Memory Web site at memory.loc.gov.
This latest addition is a selection of more than 400 items from the Emile Berliner Papers and 108 Berliner sound recordings from the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Berliner (1851-1929), an immigrant and largely self-educated man, was responsible for the development of the microphone, the flat recording disc and gramophone player.
Although the focus of this online collection is the gramophone and its recordings, it also includes much evidence of Berliner's other interests, such as information on his various businesses, crusades for public health issues, philanthropy, musical composition and even his poetry. Spanning the years 1870 to1956, the collection includes correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, scrapbooks, photographs, catalogs, clippings, experiment notes and rare sound recordings.
The American Memory site offers approximately 100 collections comprising more than 7.5 million items.
