Wire recording

First US patent issued 1900 for a magnetic wire recorder by inventor Valdemar Poulsen

The first wire recorder was invented in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen, who gave his product the trade name Telegraphone. Wire recorders for dictation and telephone recording were made almost continuously by multiple companies (mainly the American Telegraphone Company) through the 1920s and 1930s, but use of this new technology was extremely limited. Dictaphone and Ediphone recorders, which still employed wax cylinders as the recording medium, were the devices normally used for these applications during this period.

The peak of wire recording lasted from approximately 1946 to 1954. It resulted from technical improvements and the development of inexpensive designs licensed internationally by the Brush Development Company of Cleveland, Ohio and the Armour Research Foundation[3] of the Armour Institute of Technology (later the IIT Research Institute of the Illinois Institute of Technology). The two organizations (Brush and Armour) licensed dozens of manufacturers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Examples are Wilcox-Gay,[3] Peirce,[3] Webcor,[3] and Air King.[3] Sales elsewhere encouraged Sears to provide a model,[4] and some authors to prepare specialized manuals.[5][6][7]

These improved wire recorders were not only marketed for office use, but also as home entertainment devices that offered advantages over the home acetate disc recorders which were increasingly sold for making short recordings of family and friends and for recording excerpts from radio broadcasts. Unlike home-cut phonograph records, the steel wire could be reused for new recordings and allowed much longer uninterrupted recordings to be made than the few minutes of audio per side possible with disc recorders.

The earliest magnetic tape recorders, not commercially available in the United States until 1948, were too expensive, complicated, and bulky to compete with these consumer-level wire recorders.[1] During the first half of the 1950s, however, tape recorders which were sufficiently affordable, simple, and compact to be suitable for home and office use started appearing and they rapidly superseded wire recorders in the marketplace.[1][3]

Exceptionally, the use of wire for sound recording continued into the 1960s in Protona's Minifon miniature recorders, in which the importance of maximizing recording time in a minimum of space outweighed other considerations. For any given level of audio quality, the nearly hair-thin wire had the advantage that it was a much more compact storage medium than tape. The Minifon wire recorder was designed for stealth use and its accessories included a microphone disguised as a wristwatch.[8]

Wire recording was also used in some aircraft flight recorders beginning in the early 1940s, mainly for recording radio conversations between crewmen or with ground stations. Because steel wire was more compact, robust, and heat-resistant than magnetic tape (which is plastic-based), wire recorders continued to be manufactured for this purpose through the 1950s and remained in use somewhat later than that. There were also wire recorders made to record data in satellites and other uncrewed spacecraft of the 1950s to perhaps the 1970s.

To facilitate handling as the user threaded the wire across the recording head and affixed it to the take-up spool, some manufacturers attached a strip of plastic to each end of the wire. This was designed to press-fit snugly into either spool. To prevent the wire from piling up unevenly on the spool as it was recorded, played or rewound, on the majority of machines the head assembly slowly oscillates up and down or back and forth to distribute the wire evenly. On some machines, moving wire guides perform this function. These are similar to mechanisms that distribute line across a fishing reel. After recording or playback, the wire has to be rewound before any further use can be made of the machine. Unlike reel-to-reel tape recorders, the take-up reel on most wire recorders is not removable.

A break in the wire is repaired by tying the ends together and trimming. When such a repair is made to an existing recording, a jump in the sound results during playback, but because of the high speed of the wire the loss of an inch due to tying and trimming is trivial and might pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, if the wire breaks it can easily become tangled, and snarls are extremely difficult to fix. Sometimes the only practical solution is to carefully cut the tangled portion away from the spool—an operation which runs the risk of endlessly enlarging the problem—and discard it. The difficulty of handling the wire itself when necessary is arguably the only serious shortcoming, among several definite advantages, of steel wire as a monophonic recording medium.

Editing is accomplished by cutting and splicing. As the knot of each splice passes through the head during playback, a very brief loss of normal contact is inevitable and the resulting dropouts can make editing musical recordings problematic. Although wire is not as suitable for editing as magnetic tape (a plastic-based material) would prove to be, in the field of radio broadcasting it offered tremendous advantages over trying to edit material recorded on transcription discs, which was usually accomplished by dubbing to a new transcription disc with the aid of multiple turntables and stopwatches. The first regularly scheduled network radio program produced and edited on wire was CBS' Hear It Now with Edward R. Murrow.

SEAC magnetic wire drives and cartridges

In 1944–1945, the 3132 Signal Service Company Special of the U.S. Army's top secret Ghost Army used wire recorders to create sonic deception on the Western Front in the Second World War. Multiple battlefield scenarios were recreated using military sounds recorded at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The wire-recorded audio, which was played back through powerful amplifiers and speakers mounted on vehicles, was used to conceal real Allied deployments, locations and operations.[10]

In 1944 at the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh used wire recorders as a tool to compose music.[11]

In 1946, David Boder, a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using an early wire recorder from the Armour Research Foundation, Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length.[12]

In 1946, Norman Corwin and his technical assistant, Lee Bland, took a wire recorder on their One World Flight, a round-the-world trip subsidized by friends of Wendell Willkie and patterned after Willkie's own 1942 trip. Corwin documented the post-war world and used his recordings in a series of 13 broadcast documentaries on CBS—which were also among the first broadcast uses of recorded sound allowed by the radio networks.[13][14]

In 1947, Maya Deren, an American experimental filmmaker, purchased a wire recorder from her Guggenheim Fellowship funds to record Haitian Vodou ceremonies for her documentary: Meditation on Violence.[15]

In 1949 at Fuld Hall in Rutgers University, Paul Braverman made a 75-minute recording of a Woody Guthrie concert using a wire recorder. The recording only came to light in 2001, and appears to be the only surviving live recording of Woody Guthrie; it was restored over several years and released on CD in 2007. The CD, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, subsequently won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album.[16]

One of the world's first stored-program computers, SEAC, built in 1950 at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, used wire recorders to store digital data.

In 1952, the Harvard University physics department's musical variety show The Physical Revue, written by Tom Lehrer and performed by a cast including Lehrer, Lewis M. Branscomb and others, was recorded on wire by a later winner of the Nobel Prize, Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. This recording was recently rediscovered and made available online.[17]

Wire recorders sometimes appear in motion pictures made during the time of their widest use. For example, in office scenes in the original 1951 version of The Thing, a typical Webster-Chicago unit is plainly visible on a small table by the window. In some shots (e.g., at 0:11:40 on the 2003 DVD release), its detached lid, carrying two extra spools of wire, is also visible. In this instance the recorder is simply "set dressing" and is not shown in operation. Ann Robinson's character in the 1954 Dragnet feature film carried and used a Protona Minifon wire recorder to gather evidence in a pivotal scene.[18] The 1958 spy thriller Spy in the Sky! uses a wire recording as a plot device. In the episode "The Relaxed Informer" (S1E24) of Danger Man the spy courier is smuggling a recording made on wire secreted inside the handle holding a puppet's strings. The recording wire is later shown being played in an office using a wire player. In episode 2.18 of Adventures of Superman, "Semi-Private Eye", PI Homer Garrity has a wire recorder he uses to surreptitiously record his clients.

The fictional Allied officers of Hogan's Heroes used a wire recorder to record a meeting in Kommandant Klink's office on a device that was disguised as a sewing box made of wooden thread spools. A wire recording was the subject of a 1966 Mission Impossible episode titled "A Spool There Was". The Department S episode "A Cellar Full of Silence" revolves around a blackmail recording on a wire disguised as part of another object. A wire recorder is also used as a plot device in Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman.

Similarly, in the 1990 film Dick Tracy, set in the 1930s, Warren Beatty, in the title role, is shown manipulating a wire on which the voice of "Mumbles" (played by Dustin Hoffman) is recorded, in order to decipher the otherwise unintelligible speech of the fictitious criminal.

In the 1990 film The Two Jakes, set in 1948, the plot centers around a wire recording made in a divorce-case-turned-homicide.

In the TV series Bones, Series 10, Episode 2, "The Lance to the Heart", an old wire recording of JFK is found in the house of a former agent of J. Edgar Hoover.

• Oberlin Smith
• Webster-Chicago

• Bannerman, R. LeRoy (1986) (book), On A Note of Triumph: Norman Corwin and the Golden Years of Radio. University of Alabama Press.
• Hickman, Reginald Elwick Beatty (1958) (book), Magnetic Recording Handbook: Theory, practice and servicing of domestic and professional tape and wire recorders, hardcover, 176 pp., 2nd edition; George Newnes (publisher), London, England [also later edition, 1962].
• Sams, Howard W. (1947) (book), Automatic Record Changer Service Manual: Including Wire, Ribbon, Tape and Paper Disc Recorders, hardcover, 1st edition (1947); Sams, Indianapolis.
• Ehrlich, Matthew C. (2006) (journal article), "A Pathfinding Radio Documentary Series: Norman Corwin's One World Flight", American Journalism, 23(4):35–59, 2006. doi:10.1080/08821127.2006.10678037.
• Morton, David (April 1998). "Armour Research Foundation and the Wire Recorder: How Academic Entrepreneurs Fail". Technology and Culture. Society for the History of Technology. 39 (2): 213–244. doi:10.2307/3107045. JSTOR 3107045.
• Holley, Joe (July 8, 2006). "Louis Dalton Porter; Used Artistic Skills to Trick German Army". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286(newspaper).{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Judge, G. R. (1950) (manual), Wire Recorder Manual, Bernards Radio Manuals No. 88, softcover (cardstock covers), 48 pp.; Bernards Publishers Ltd., London, 1950.
• Sears Roebuck Co. (c. 1949) (pamphlet manual), Parts List and Instructions for Installing & Operating Your Silvertone Superheterodyne Radio Receiver with Wire Recorder, softcover, 14 pp., Sears Roebuck Co., circa 1949.

• Media related to Wire recorders at Wikimedia Commons