Research Dossier — Optical Recording

The inventor of the CD

Almost every week Philips receives a request for an interview with the inventor of the CD. That would undoubtedly make an interesting story. How do you put the gramophone record out of date in such a short space of time? And had the inventor already envisaged subsequent developments like the CD-ROM and the DVD?

Unfortunately, the inventor of the CD does not exist. Nobody even invented one part of the technology alone. The CD was invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team. Emil Berliner, the founder of Deutsche Grammophon, might have been able to invent the gramophone record on his own in 1887, but the technology on which the CD is based is too complex for just one genius. "We needed all the skills that you would find in a large lab," says Piet Kramer, who at the time was head of the optical group that made a significant contribution to the CD technology. "Electronics engineers, photographic experts, mechanical engineers, control engineers, you have to bring all of these experts together, and then look to see if it can be done." The pooling of creativity like this is typical of the way in which technological progress is made nowadays.

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