The Blog of Death

Joseph Zimmermann Jr.

Joseph James Zimmermann Jr. was running his own air-conditioning and heating company in 1948. He couldn't afford to hire a secretary to take calls when he was out of the office, so he invented the answering machine.

Patented in 1949, the Electronic Secretary Model R1 weighed 80 pounds. It featured a box containing a control panel with a 78 rpm record player inside. When the phone rang, the machine would lift the telephone receiver from its cradle and play a recorded greeting. A wire recorder on top of a second box would then tape messages for 30 seconds.

Zimmermann teamed up with George W. Danner to launch Electronic Secretary Industries. By 1957, they had sold more than 6,000 answering machines. General Telephone Corp., which later became GTE, purchased the company and its patent rights that year.

A Milwaukee native, Zimmerman earned an electrical engineering degree from Marquette University. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, and was one of the first soldiers to land on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day.

When he returned to the states, Zimmerman spent many hours in his basement developing useful inventions. He created a "dial-a-lecture" system that allowed college students to hear prerecorded lessons by phone, a security device that automatically dialed a phone number in case of an emergency and a magnetic recorder used to monitor heart patients.

Zimmermann died on March 31. Cause of death was not released. He was 92.