In the late s, polyvinyl chloride PVC emerged as the preferred base material for recording tape until replaced in the s by "mylar" biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate - BoPET substrates from DuPont and others. Modern tapes have moved on to improved substrate materials such as PEN polyethylene naphthalate similar to PET and aramid aromatic polyamide, a totally different Kevlar-like material. John T. Mullin, a technician with Army Signal Corps, returned to the U.
Other manufacturers, including 3M in the U. Audio recording technology was adapted to video and data storage applications in the s. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. A case of insomnia led to the introduction of tape recording — and, by extension, the entire home media business. If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. It was 2 am on a spring night in — May 14, to be exact. And thanks to the good fortune of suffering from insomnia, a curious observation by John T. Mullin, a slight and surprisingly humble man, considering his future status in the recording business, graduated from the University of Santa Clara with a B.
By , he had attained the rank of major in the U. While working late that spring night, Mullin was happy to find something pleasing playing on the radio — the Berlin Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on Radio Berlin. But Mullin was mystified: The performance's fidelity was far too fine to be a inch wax disc recording, the prevailing radio recording technology at the time.
And since there were no breaks every 15 minutes to change discs, Mullin figured it had to be a live broadcast. But it couldn't be — if it was 2 am in London, it was 3 am in Berlin.
Just not the usual kind, which is why Mullin was confused. Up until the war, the west recorded using magnetic wire. Magnetic wire recording had been invented by the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen in , then perfected, patented and commercialized by Marvin Camras in the s.
It was used by the armed forces during World War II and considered secret. As a result, magnetic tape recording had been discussed on and off in radio circles for years, but no one had managed the feat — at least as far as anyone west of the Rhine was concerned.
What individual German engineers managed this feat, we may never know. By , several of these hi-fi Magnetophons were placed in radio stations all over Germany.
Mullin ended up in Frankfurt on one such expedition. There he encountered a British officer, who told him a rumor about a new type of recorder at a Radio Frankfurt station in Bad Nauheim. Mullin didn't exactly believe the report — he had encountered dozens of low-fi DC bias recorders all over Germany.
He pondered his decision of pursuing the rumor, literally, at a fork in the road. To his right lay Paris, to the left, Radio Frankfurt. He tinkered with them a bit back in Paris and made a report to the Army. I packed up two of them and sent them home to San Francisco. Souvenirs of war. You could take almost anything you could find that was not of great value. Although effective, this construction was never made commercially available.
The development of the more modern magnetic recorder was implemented by Valdemar Poulsen in Instead of a wax-covered strip, this design used magnetic tape coated with a moveable magnetic material. To record sound, an electrical signal was produced, representing the sound, and a pattern would form on the magnetic strip. This could be played back through a reader that decoded the pattern back into sound.
It took until the s before the magnetic recorder approach began to advance the recording field. Bing Crosby, a famous movie and singer star from that time period, was tired of having to perform all of his shows live. At that time, all of radio was performed live, as the quality of recorded shows was quite low. Bing worked for two years to persuade NBC to allow him to record his show.
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