How AT&T Shut Down the Development of Magnetic Tape

Found a couple of  articles on Bell labs and the development of magnetic tape.  One author's assertion that the decision to suppress development was based on fear of the public abandoning the use of phones was interesting.  I had always thought it had more to do with not having a reproduction device capable of producing playback of sufficient quality for any practical use - that coming to the US much later after WWII with the German tape recorders.

And, given the patent monopolies, if they sold less phones and more recorders, wouldn't Bell still have been making the money either way?


http://io9.com/5699159/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-years


http://www.neatorama.com/2010/11/26/how-att-shut-down-the-development-of-magnetic-tape/ 

Good article. 

That excerpt says Bell Lab's Hickman had an answering machine, but seems to mis-read Mark Clark's research. In fact Bell had a lot of magnetic recorders, but didn't do much with them.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3106703

Jay McKnight's recent paper is useful background:
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/mcknight_ac-bias-at-btl-1936-1939.pdf

Mag recording is OLD.

Poulsen and Pedersen were recording on iron wire, tape, and disk in 1899. The machines were exhibited and widely known. The original company seems to have been poorly managed or we might have seen more mag recorders.

Fritz Pfleumer, 1928, patented iron oxide on paper tape, commercialized by AEG in 1932.

HF bias for _telegraphic_ signals was patented by Carlson and Carpenter, filed 1921. AC for _voice_ recordings has been traced to Nagai, Japan, 1938, though generally credited to Weber and von Braunmuhl a few years later.

Brush in the US was developing steel tape recorders when war broke out and Brush's production of phonograph crystals was stepped-up.

Magnetic wire recorders (as well as instant phonograph recorders) were readily available in WWII when Allied news reporters followed the push toward Berlin. They would have been possible long before, but the market and the economics of the Depression were unfavorable.

The remaining piece, for longer recordings, is a better backer than paper-tape. Cellulose Acetate was widely used for everything in the early 20th century. That it was not used for tape recording suggests the demand for recording would not justify the development costs of slitters and binders.

I'd really like to see this "corporate memoranda..., imposing the research ban."

While Bell may have shelved their work on mag recording, they certainly could not stop mag-recording development in other shops. Tim Wu's overall argument is not well supported by this tidbit.

"Never attribute to {monopolistic} malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity!" -- Popular saying inside AT&T at least 1970s-1990.

Another paper on mag-recording history, by a GIT techie:

http://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/1853/24235/3/morton_david_l_199512_phd_438003.pdf

562 pages !! 18MB PDF file

Doug, you want to read this.

Emile Berliner declared: "there is practically no demand for a recording attachment to telephones, and, if one was needed, the method of engraving into wax is the simplest and occupies the least space for a given length of a sound record." Emile Berliner, letter to the editor. Electrical World and Engineer 36 (1900): 210.

I speculated that AT&T/Bell did not see a viable market in the 1930s. Morton opines:

"...recorder manufacturers (in addition to manufacturers of other types of home audio equipment) struggled during the 1950s to find a way to reach a broader audience."

And while there was a small 1950s-1960s fad for buying tape recorders, very few of these were used even a dozen times, and IMHO those recordings were hardly ever played. The "gee-wizz!" was bigger than the actual usefulness.

Witness how many MP3 players exist versus how many digi-recorders exist. Sales ratio must be thousands to one.

At another level, Bing Crosby and record production studios, tape was useful even at high price. However AT&T had been burned going into film-sound, anti-monopoly politics forced AT&T to spin-out (ERPI, Altec) most non-telephone work at zero profit. So why even work on mag recording except for internal use? And how many recorders could AT&T need, when their main product was real-time mouth-to-ear messaging?

"...any discussion of Bell Labs research that addresses issues of importance to historians is bound to contain a high level of conjecture...." -- Sparks of Genius: Portraits of Electrical Engineering Excellence (New York: IEEE Press, 1994)

Tape?  Let me check the new ATT phone book for some tape suppliers. . . .

Doo-doo-dweet!  The decade you dialed is not in service.  Please check your calendar and dial again.

Seriously, my long time friend is rocking, literally, with the constraint of 16 track analog while I am getting ready to light an "all digital" Euphonix room.  There is a place for everyone at the music archiving table.  Sot what AT&T did whenever.  What evil corporation kept brittle, artifact-laden digital technology from us for so long in favor of tape?  Was it the dark star Ampex or the Minnesota Mining and M?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I just wish those evil profit mongering suits had been a bit more successful back in the day ; )
Mike

Thanks for sharing those papers PRR.  Great reading.

Wow, 562 pages.  Download choked on that one a few times!  Thanks for spotting that one. 

Morton David's paper is an excellent History PhD thesis. However it has IMHO "bumps". Bell System resisted Customer dialed automatic switching. Permalloy does not have high saturation.

A good history paper but more broad-ranging than could be perfected in a grad-student's term.

Wu maybe should re-read this:

From the Morton paper  PDF 228

The American networks actively discouraged the use of recording
equipment by affiliate stations where network programs were c o n c e r n e d .
Network representatives consistently claimed that the quality of transcriptions
was so poor that they could not be used in radio, a myth that has been repeated
by historians. As late as 1948, Ned Midgley of C B S , for example, still claimed
that stations regularly refused to broadcast programming that originated from
transcription disks . 


Why such tight controls on recording? Transcriptions represented a
major threat to the viability of the networks as long as they relied on telephonic
distribution of programming. Almost as soon as transcription machines became
widely available, a few new companies began distributing programming to
stations on disk. That a transcription network was not only possible but practical
soon became glaringly obvious to the major networks


These would seem good solid factors behind the lack of promoting another recording media in addition to the lack of consumer market interest.

I'm thinking that Wu's angle is veering a little towards something I can't place an adjective for at the moment - but it's not like AT & T shared anything close to Oppenheimer's apprehensions.

Also note that after 1930, AT&T made more money from program services (radio networks) than from telephones (but less than telegraph and teletype).

Don't irritate your well organized #3 customer just to please your unorganized #4 customer.

There's also the AFM's objection to recordings taking work away.

Also AT&T had requests from law-enforcement, what we would now call wire-tapping, and foresaw that this could be an endless sinkhole of legal questions and public un-ease.

PRR said:

There's also the AFM's objection to recordings taking work away.

Click to expand...

That was huge, and I recall played heavily into the drama between ASCAP and BMI at the time.   

PRR said:

"Never attribute to {monopolistic} malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity!" -- Popular saying inside AT&T at least 1970s-1990.

Click to expand...

A version of that was told to me as Hanlon's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Now I much prefer The Cock-Up Theory:

"Cock-up before conspiracy" - Sir Bernard Ingham