September 26, 1887 — A crucial date in the history of recorded music.

On this day in 1887, inventor Emile Berliner, then living in Washington, D.C., filed a patent application connected to his revolutionary Gramophone, a system that would help establish the flat disc as the dominant format for recorded music.

According to the original patent documentation preserved by the Library of Congress, Berliner’s original application had been filed on May 4, 1887. It was subsequently divided, with the Gramophone application filed on September 26, 1887, under Serial No. 250,721. U.S. Patent No. 372,786 was granted on November 8, 1887.

It’s where the Grammys got its name. Emile Berliner himself received a Technical GRAMMY posthumously in 2014, recognizing his contributions to recording technology and the gramophone.

A Different Way to Record Sound

Berliner was entering a field that had already been transformed by Thomas Edison’s phonograph. But Berliner’s approach to recording sound differed in an important way.

Rather than relying on the vertical, or “hill-and-dale,” method associated with early cylinder recording, Berliner’s Gramophone employed lateral recording, in which the recording stylus moved from side to side under the influence of sound waves. The original patent specifically describes this distinction.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History credits Berliner with profoundly influencing early sound-recording technology and notes that his work eventually produced a commercially successful disc record and a machine for playing it — the gramophone.

The Flat Disc Changes Everything

Berliner’s importance was not simply that he created another talking machine. The disc offered possibilities that would become enormously important to the emerging recording industry.

A master recording could be used to create a mold, from which multiple copies could then be pressed. The Smithsonian identifies this ability to reproduce recordings in quantity as an important part of Berliner’s success.

The Library of Congress records that Berliner subsequently worked on methods for reproducing his master discs, experimenting with materials including celluloid and hard rubber as the technology developed.

The Smithsonian notes that Berliner’s laterally cut disc design ultimately became an industry standard.

From the Gramophone to the Record Industry

Berliner continued improving and patenting Gramophone technology after 1887. The Library of Congress identifies Patent No. 372,786, granted November 8, 1887, and another early patent, No. 382,790, dated May 15, 1888, among his early Gramophone patents.

What followed was much bigger than one invention.

The ability to manufacture recorded discs helped create a culture in which music could be produced, duplicated, sold, collected and heard repeatedly far away from the original performance.

Over succeeding decades, disc recording developed through the shellac era and eventually into vinyl records. The Smithsonian notes that manufacturers continued using shellac-based record materials into the late 1940s, before the emergence of formats such as the vinyl 33⅓ rpm LP and 45 rpm single.

Those formats would become fundamental to popular music around the world.

A Technology That Would Eventually Transform Jamaican Music

The connection to Jamaican music came generations later, but the record became indispensable to Jamaica’s musical culture.

Records provided the physical foundation around which selectors, sound systems, record producers and record shops could operate. In the Jamaican context, the record would become more than a way of listening to music: it became part of how music was presented, promoted and performed.

The culture of playing records through powerful sound systems would eventually become inseparable from the histories of ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall.

The technologies changed dramatically from Berliner’s first experiments. Yet the basic principle of recorded sound stored in the groove of a rotating disc endured for more than a century.

The Audio Engineering Society (AES)⁠ established the Emile Berliner Award in 1953. Contemporary AES material described it as an annual award for an outstanding development in audio engineering. The first recipient was Henry C. Harrison in 1953 for inventions and developments involving sound recording and other audio technologies. 

The award continued under Berliner’s name through the 1960s. Recipients included S. J. Begun (1956), René Snepvangers (1960), Gilbert F. Dutton (1964), John T. Mullin (1965), Lawrence J. Scully (1966), and Charles F. Wiebusch (1969). 

The award no longer carries Berliner’s name. AES says it became the Silver Medal Award, which recognizes “outstanding development or achievement in the field of audio engineering.” AES’s historical account says the Berliner family originally established the award in 1953; it was subsequently transformed into the Society’s Silver Medal.