It’s no big surprise that we all love MP3 players and iPods, and all those other personal music gadgets. This is true because, well, we all love music! But we bet you’ve never wondered where the ideas for all these great gadgets come from. We’ve decided to launch a series of posts that is dedicated to the inventors and history of all the popular electronics we use on a daily basis.
For our first selection, the MP3 player! According to a report by Mary Bellis (an amateur inventor) the father of the MP3 player is German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft. She writes, “The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology - United States Patent 5,579,430 for a "digital encoding process". The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.”
During an extensive interview with researchers from Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg spoke of the MP3 taking several years to completely develop and he added that the invention itself almost failed to become a reality. Brandenburg added "In 1991, the project almost died. During modification tests, the encoding simply did not want to work properly. Two days before submission of the first version of the MP3 codec, we found the compiler error."
We also compiled this list from the “timeline” of the MP3 Player
· 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
· January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
· April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
· 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
· 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
· 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
· November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3.
· September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
· February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
· 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.
No matter how you feel about popular electronics, you have to appreciate the dedication and time it takes to develop such stellar products. Special thanks to the inventors of the MP3 player (we know we’ve all benefited) and because we believe in giving credit where it’s due, thanks to Bellis and Sundasim for extending their research!
