Re: [ARSCLIST] Earliest recorded sound update on NPR

[AllenAmet@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/4/2009 9:59:57 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

That's  actually what Poulsen envisioned for his recorder, if I remember 
the history  correctly -- as a way to record morse code content and speed-send 
large  batches of it, to be recorded by wire at the 
other end and then played  back at speeds a man could decode.


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The speed of the wire recorder, in "normal mode," was already very  very 
fast (7 feet per second). See this excerpt from PHP  (copyrighted):
 
 
 
---------------------------- 
(Pat  51).  US 661,619        Method of Recording/Reproducing 
Sounds/Signals 
Filed  July 8, 1899     (Valdemar  Poulsen)      Issued Nov 13,  1900 


U.S.  Patent Office officials at first said of the steel-wire-wrapped,  
stationary brass-cylinder magnetic recorder (40-seconds  duration) of Valdemar  
Poulsen (1869-1942)  that the Aalleged  invention is contrary to the well 
established and universally recognized  principles of electricity and 
magnetism,...@  After several letters from reliable officials (e.g. Dr. C. W. 
Stiles, Scientific  Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin), his original 
application was divided,  with only three Claims allowed for his first patent - on 
the Method. The  remainder of the application (43 Claims for the 
Appara­tus) did not issue  until May 29, 1906 (822,222);  both patents had to be 
Avalidated@  by a Feb. 19, 1903 act of Congress as the U.S. application was 
filed a week past  the 7 months allowed after the Danish grant and the Patent 
Office had missed the  error. A mechanical method of electro-magnetic 
recording and playback had been  anticipated by Edison=s  Caveat of Mar. 8, 1878 
and a truly magnetic system was first conceived by  Oberlin Smith of 
Bridgeton, NJ, in a memorandum dated Sept. 24, 1878, which was  filed with the 
Cumberland County Clerk in NJ. However, when Smith submitted his  official Caveat 
in Washington, DC on October 1-4,  1878, he Aaccidentally@  omitted his 
reference to tempered steel wire magnetized in zones, and  substituted a non‑
magnetic filament inter­spersed with  magnetic  frag­ments;  years  
later,  in 1921/22,  Smith  also invented  a remote record changer with 50 
discs (the Autofono, 1,573,504). Some  work with magnetic recording was done in 
1887 in Germany, Holland and France by  Wilhelm Hedick (Ger. pat. 42.471 & 
Brit. pat. 569/88), and Paul Janet.  Poulsen=s  device, originally designed 
for telephon­ic record­ing, was successfully  exhibited at the 1900 
Paris Exposition with models manufac­tured by Mix  & Genest (wire 
diameter of 1/50O)  and captured the voice of Emperor Franz Joseph on Sept. 20 (the 
oldest surviving  magnetic recording), but the American Telegra­phone 
Co., formed by Stilson  Hutchins (an 1887 Graphophone supporter) in November 
1903 to exploit  Poulsen=s  patents, was a commer­cial failure; 
vacuum-tube amplifiers were not yet  invented and the high-speed (.01O  dia.) 
wire-spools became entangled at 84O/sec.  and could not be more swiftly rewound, 
while the 5.15O  discs (constant linear speed) were expensive and of limited 
capacity. D-C  biasing was accomplished by Poulsen and Pedersen in their 
873,083 (they ceased  their work after 1902), but AC high-frequency bias 
recording was not invented  until 1918 by L. F. Fuller (1,459,202),  and in 1921 
by W. L. Carlson and G. W. Carpenter of the US Naval Research  Laboratory B  
for signal transmission only (1,640,881).  The device had also been 
developed to include high-speed telegraphic recording  by Patrick B. Delany. 
However, there were rumors of hostility from  dictation-phono­graph interests 
and the company did not flourish under  President Charles D. Rood (after July 
1908), against whom charges of deliberate  non-development and treason were 
made on Mar. 10, 1932; the occasion was a  failed legislative attempt by 
16,000 AmTeleg Co. shareholders to extend G. S.  Tiffany=s  assigned 
(1909/1915) taut-wire improvement, 1,142,384, by eight years (S. 1301).  Poulsen=s  
Brit. pat. 8961 also failed of extension - in 1913. In addition, NY telephone 
 officials had somehow ascertained that one-third of their serviced 
conversations  were illicit in some way and revenue would correspondingly decline 
if these  customers feared the preservation of their words; not till 1948 did 
limited  telephone-recording attachments become legal in the U.S. Even the 
prominent  display of a steel-tape model, with the voice of Wm. J. Bryan, at 
the  (California) Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 did not ignite sales. A 
 loud-speaking  disc Telegraphone was finally developed in 1920 by Max Kohl 
A.G. of Chemnitz,  the founder of which had constructed Edison tin foil 
phonographs in 1878; an  outdoor model (with rail-embedded signals for 
locomotives) was built around 1921  by A. Nasar­isch­wily. The author of a 
later (1949)  study of magnetic recording, Semi J.  Begun, invented a more 
commer­cially successful model with removable  maga­zines called the 
Dailygraph in 1929. For connections to  sound-on-film,  see comments at 
Gaumont=s  752,394. Poulsen=s  attorney, Wm. A. Rosenbaum, who was apparently 
responsible for the original late  filing, managed to obtain a Telegraphone 
patent himself (720,621) and later  became the Secretary of the American 
Telegraphone Co. (the company=s  assets were sold off in 1936). Cf. also M. 
Camras=  later 2,351,003-011,  some of whose voice-recording work was anticipated 
by Nagai, Sasaki and Endo in  1938 (Jap. pat. 136,997)." 
------------------------ 
Allen 
_www.phonobooks.com_ (http://www.phonobooks.com)