Re: Garage vs. cheeseburger? (a radio history lesson)

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 03:06:30 -0500, Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com> said:

> The truth is that without audiotape, we have no real proof of who
> did what first.

Wire recorders were invented in Denmark in 1898.[1]  The *tape* recorder,
it is true, was not invented until the mid-1930s (in Nazi Germany) and
was not widely known in the free world until after the war.  The AEG
tape recorder was used by the Nazi regime to distribute propaganda
material to German radio stations for broadcast, where they were found
by Allied forces during the liberation of Europe.  The tape itself was
made by I.G. Farben, which was broken up after the war into three
pieces: Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF (which is of course still in the tape
business).

An American scientist named Marvin Camras independently reinvented the
wire recorder in the mid-1930s, but obviously this came too late to
record the early days of radio.  I'm not clear on why Poulsen's wire
recorder doesn't seem to have made it across the Atlantic.

-GAWollman

[1] An early prototype of this recorder is on display at Danmarks
Tekniske Museum in Elsinore, Denmark.

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Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
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