To avoid being drafted in the Franco-Prussian War, Berliner migrated to the United States of America in 1870 with a friend of his father's, in whose shop he worked in Washington, D.C.[4] He moved to New York and, living off temporary work such a paper route and cleaning bottles, he studied physics at night at the Cooper Union Institute.

On February 27, 1901, the United States Court of Appeals would declare Berliner's patent void and awarded Edison full rights to the invention.

In practice, Berliner opted for the disc format, which made the photoengraving step much less difficult and offered the prospect of making multiple copies of the result by some simpler process such as electrotyping, molding, or stamping.

[citation needed] The difficulty in using early hand-driven Gramophones was getting the turntable to rotate at an acceptably steady speed.

Engineer Eldridge R. Johnson, the owner of a small machine shop in Camden, New Jersey, helped Berliner develop a suitable low-cost wind-up spring motor for the Gramophone, then to manufacture it.

Following various legal maneuvers, Johnson founded the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901 and the trade name "Gramophone" was soon abandoned in the U.S., although its use continued in the UK and elsewhere.

By 1910, Berliner was experimenting with the use of a vertically mounted tail rotor to counteract torque on his single-main-rotor design, a configuration that led to practical helicopters of the 1940s.

[9] The building used for these operations exists at 774 Girard Street NW, Washington, D.C., where its principal facade is in the Fairmont-Girard alleyway.

He also advocated for women's equality and, in 1908, established a scholarship program, the Sarah Berliner Research Fellowship, in honor of his mother.

[citation needed] On August 3, 1929, Berliner died of a heart attack at his home at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78.