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Maxed Out: The Forgotten Magnetic Wire Recorder
September 19, 2012 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Do you recall my waffling on in previous columns (here and here) about the way things used to be when I was a young lad (which really is not all that long ago in the grand scheme of things, thank you very much) with regard to telephones (we had only one big black rotary phone in our house) and televisions (we had only one small black-and-white set)?
Well, my nostalgia mode was reactivated a couple of days ago when I received a small package in the post. But before I tell you what was in that package, let us first ponder the evolution of audio recording technology.
I'm sure that we are all at least vaguely aware that one of the first methods of recording sound was Thomas Edison’s cylinder-based phonograph circa 1878 as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. A cylinder-based phonograph.
In this case, the recording media was a cylinder covered with an impressionable material such as tin foil, lead, or wax on which a stylus etched grooves. Interestingly enough, it was variations in the depth of the groove that were used to record the sound. This means that it was very difficult to mass-produce or even reproduce copies of an original recording.
Eventually, the cylinder-based phonograph was replaced by the disk-based gramophone, which was patented by Emile Berliner in 1887, and which eventually evolved into what my generation would call a "record player." As an aside, I would love to have a time machine and to be able to bring people like Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner to the present time to show them how their original inventions have evolved beyond all recognition.
Now, if I were to ask you what came after the gramophone, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you said, "Surely it would be the tape recorder." Ha! I knew you'd say that, but you would be wrong. The world's first practical magnetic tape recorder, the “K1,” was created by engineers at AEG and was demonstrated in 1935. This was followed by Compact Cassette, commonly called a Cassette Recorder, which was introduced to the market circa 1963, and then the Eight-Track (also known as an "Eight-Track Cartridge," "Eight-Track Tape," or "Stereo 8"), which arrived on the scene in 1964.
Figure 2. An early magnetic tape recorder.
The thing is that, before the magnetic tape recorder appeared in our lives, there were things called magnetic wire recorders. I'm sure that as soon as you hear this you can visualize what I'm talking about. Instead of a magnetic tape, the recording medium was a spool of wire.
I first heard about these little beauties a year or two ago when I guy from England e-mailed me to tell me about his experiences with these devices. As I recall, he had found a box containing spools of wire in the loft, and when he had asked other family members, he was told that his grandfather had built his own wire recorder in the 1940s.
Unfortunately, his grandfather's original wire recorder had gone "missing in action," so this guy acquired and adapted an old Webster-Chicago wire recorder to play back the spools. When he did so, he found all sorts of things, like recordings of radio shows and his grandfather and his friends. More importantly, he got to hear recordings of his great-grandparents, and also of his mother as a little girl.
These days we are so used to having audio and video recording devices at our fingertips that we forget how rare they were for home use in the not-so-distant past. Actually, all sorts of technology was scarce for many people. For example, my mother, who was born in 1930, once told me that they didn’t get electricity in their house until 1943 when she was 13, so you can bet she didn’t have access to any form of recording device. The more I think about this, the more I realize that I would love to have an audio recording of my mother when she was a young girl (back to the drawing board for the time machine).
And why am I waffling on about this now? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of this column, a couple of days ago I received a small package in the post. When I opened this package I found a letter from my friend Rick saying that he and his wife Cynthia had been wandering around a flea market when they saw a seller about to throw away a spool of magnetic recording wire because he didn’t know what it was. Since Rick knows how much I love this sort of thing, he very kindly dropped the spool in the post. In Figure 3 we see the spool in the upper right, the box in the lower left, and a small pamphlet in the lower right.
Figure 3. The contents of my package: A spool of recording wire, its box, and a pamphlet explaining how it all worked.
The thing that is really interesting is that the box is marked with a hand-written note on the back saying something about "Recording" with a date of "1954" (three years before I was born). I have to admit that I would love to know what this recording is all about.
But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about (grin).
As usual, I am bobbing along like a cork on a sea of information. Every day I see interesting tidbits of trivia and nuggets of knowledge flash before my eyes. For example, you know the general idea of the science fiction Warp Drive that causes a spaceship to travel faster than light (think Star Trek). Well, it seems that such a drive might be less impossible than was previously thought.
The first idea for a real-world warp drive was suggested by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 (click here for more details), but it was originally thought that – even if theoretically possibly – such a drive would require prohibitive amounts of energy. Well, it now appears that a new version of the drive could be powered by the energy of a mass of as little as 500 kg. Although this is still a honking amount of energy, it's not outside the bounds of possibility (click here for more details).
Just imagine being on the first human voyage to the stars. I for one would jump at the chance if asked. But, of course, there are always so many considerations, such as what one should wear. This would be especially important if one were to meet a race of intelligent aliens, because it would be important to make the right impression. Thus, if I were to be selected, I think it would be safe to say that I would go equipped with a Beard Beanie as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. A Beard Beanie. You know you want one too.
I don’t know if this would make the “right” impression (it's so difficult to say with aliens), but it would certainly make "an" impression. Apart from anything else, it would give them something to think about and let them know that I was not a man to be trifled with.
Until next time, have a good one!
Clive (Max) Maxfield is founder/consultant at Maxfield High-Tech Consulting. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics) and How Computers Do Math featuring the pedagogical and phantasmagorical virtual DIY Calculator. To contact Max, click here.