Stewart Wolpin | Vox

Tape recording was introduced 70 years ago today

2016-05-16T10:00:10-04:00

A tape from BASF’s first trial production in 1932. | BASF

It was 2 am on a spring night in 1944 — May 14, to be exact. And thanks to the good fortune of suffering from insomnia, a curious observation by John T. “Jack” Mullin led to the introduction of tape recording and, by extension, the entire home media business.

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.S. in electrical engineering in 1937, then worked for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in San Francisco until the war started. By 1944, he had attained the rank of major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and was attached to the RAF’s radar research labs in Farnborough, England.

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 16-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.

Mullin was right — the orchestra wasn’t up late, and it was a recording. Just not the usual kind, which is why Mullin was confused.

The unveiling of the Ampex video tape machine at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) confab in 1956.

Up until the war, the west recorded using magnetic wire. Magnetic wire recording had been invented by the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, then perfected, patented and commercialized by Marvin Camras in the 1930s. 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.

In 1934, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), the German division of General Electric, began manufacturing a tape recorder called the Magnetophon, which used plastic tape coated with magnetic particles and was manufactured by BASF. What individual German engineers managed this feat, we may never know. But over the next few years, AEG engineers expanded the Magnetophon’s fidelity from low-fi using DC bias to hi-fi using AC bias. By 1941, several of these hi-fi Magnetophons were placed in radio stations all over Germany.

With the possible exception of GE, no one had any knowledge of the technology.

Magnetophon discovery

After the war, Mullin was assigned to the Technical Liaison Division of the Signal Corp in Paris. “Our task, amongst other things, was to discover what the Germans had been working on in communications stuff — radio, radar, wireless, telegraph, teletype,” explained Mullin.

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.

Fortuitously for the future of the home media business, Mullin turned left.

He found four hi-fi Magnetophons and some 50 reels of red oxide BASF tape. He tinkered with them a bit back in Paris and made a report to the Army. “We now had a number of these lying around. 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. (And) anything Germany had done was public domain — it was not patentable.” He also sent himself the 50 reels of the red-oxide coated tape.

When Mullin returned home, he started tinkering to improve the Magnetophons. On May 16, 1946, exactly 70 years ago today, Mullin stunned attendees at the annual Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) conference in San Francisco by switching between a live jazz combo and a recording, literally asking the question “Is it live or…?” None of the golden ears in the audience could tell. It was the world’s first public demonstration of audio tape recording.

Bing Crosby on the road to video

Bing Crosby hated doing live radio. And he hated recording his shows on wax records because the fidelity sounded terrible to the noted aural perfectionist performer. When Crosby’s engineers heard about Mullin and his Magnetophons, they quickly hired him and his machine. In August 1947, Crosby became the first performer to record a radio program on tape; the show was broadcast on October 1.

The team at Bing Crosby Enterprises attempting to invent the first video tape recorder. Left to right: John T. “Jack” Mullin, who introduced audio tape recording to the U.S., BCE publicist Frank Healey, engineer Wayne Johnson and Bing Crosby. Mullin and BCE would lose the VTR race to Ampex.

Crosby wasn’t the only one interested in Mullin’s Magnetophons. Up in Redwood City, Calif., a small company called Ampex was looking for something to replace the radar gear they’d been producing for the government. Ampex hooked up with Mullin and, in April 1948, perfected and started selling the first commercially available audio tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200.

Crosby, Mullin, Ampex and electronics titan RCA all sort of formulated the same follow-up thought at around the same time: If you could record audio on tape, why not video?

Crosby and Mullin teamed up. Ampex formed a team that included a high school student named Ray Dolby. And David Sarnoff gave his engineers their marching orders. A highly-public race began to see who could invent the video tape recorder.

But Ampex had a leg up on its more well-heeled competition. It had a deal with a Chicago research consortium called Armour Research Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology. Working for Armour was none other than wire recording maven Marvin Camras, who solved the most vexing problem facing all the video tape inventor wannabees: Tape speed.

Audio recording is accomplished by pulling tape past a stationary recording head. Video, however, is a far fatter signal, which meant tape had to be pulled past the recording heads at ridiculous speeds. A two-foot wide reel of tape could hold, tops, 15 minutes of video — not exactly practical.

So instead of spinning the tape, Camras, who got the idea from watching vacuum cleaner brushes, figured he’d spin the recording heads instead. Once Ampex got ahold of this key, its engineers shot past Crosby/Mullin and RCA.

Even with the spinning head secret, it took five years for Ampex’s sometimes part-time six-member team to get things right. On April 14, 1956 — 60 years ago last month — Ampex introduced the desk-sized Mark IV, the first commercial video tape recorder, to a stunned group of TV execs and engineers at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) confab in Chicago. To say that this machine changed the world is an obvious understatement.

The Ampex engineering team and the first commercial video tape recorder. Left to right: Fred Pfost, Shelby Henderson, Ray Dolby, Alex Maxey, Charlie Anderson and team leader Charlie Ginsburg.

It would take almost another 10 years before Philips reduced audio tape to a cassette and ignited the home audio recording craze, and another nearly 10 years before Sony introduced the Betamax and won a Supreme Court case to allow us to legally record TV shows at home and create the home video business.

But it was the introduction of Jack Mullin’s rebuilt Magnetophons that were the first shots fired in the home media revolution, 70 years ago today.

Technology historian Stewart Wolpin has been reviewing consumer electronics for more than 30 years and writes about consumer technology for eBay. Reach him @stewartwolpin.

From tape to digital: The future of music

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Happy 125th Birthday, David Sarnoff (David Who?)

2019-03-06T05:39:53-05:00

Take Steve Jobs. Add CBS chairman Leslie Moonves. Toss in a little GE chairman Jeffrey R. Immelt, and flavor with a smidgen of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. Mix vigorously. The result?

You’d get David Sarnoff, who would have been 125 years old today.

Wait, David who?

Today, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, perhaps a few more people will now know who he was and his importance to our tech-centric world.

It’s a bit shocking that David Sarnoff‘s name isn’t as recognizable as any of those mentioned above, or as Henry Ford’s or even Thomas Edison’s, at least among the tech cognoscenti.

Like Jobs, Sarnoff was not an engineer but a technology and media visionary, mogul and all-powerful — often merciless — titan. He knew what he wanted, and he drove his troops toward his idea of perfection.

For more than 40 years, until 1970, Sarnoff led RCA in the development and domination of:

Radio: In the fall of 1915, while working at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Sarnoff wrote a memo to his bosses: “I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless … ”

His bosses, running what was then a purely wireless telegraph message company, filed the memo and forgot about it. But a few years later, RCA invented AM radio and, under Sarnoff, became both the leading seller of consumer radios — including the first factory-installed in-dash car radio — and was the medium’s leading broadcaster with two radio networks, NBC and what would become ABC.

Music: RCA was both the leading maker and seller of both record players (Victrolas) and records via its RCA Victor Records label, the second-oldest record label in the U.S. The label released the first recordings on 33 1/3 discs, invented the 45 RPM “single,” and released the first records in stereo. RCA Victor’s most famous artist was Elvis Presley. So you could say Sarnoff helped mainstream rock ‘n’ roll.

Television: In April 1923, less than two years after Idaho farm boy Philo T. Farnsworth sketched out his idea for electronic television, Sarnoff wrote: “I believe that television, which is the technical name for seeing as well as hearing by radio, will come to pass in due course … the instrument will make it possible for those at home to see as well as hear what is going on … ” Sarnoff pushed TV’s development in both black-and-white and color, coast-to-coast broadcasts via NBC, and made RCA the leading seller of TV sets for decades.

In other words, the Sarnoff-led RCA pioneered and dominated the three major forms of home entertainment hardware and the content for each. It manufactured all its own products and pressed its own records, primarily in Camden, N.J., and its radio and later TV studios originated from its own studios, the RCA Building, part of its “Radio City” at the heart of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

This is a skimpy oversimplification of how Sarnoff and RCA monopolized the consumer hardware and content businesses, as well as industrial, government, military (air, land and sea) and aerospace communications components and products, for an enormous chunk of the 20th century. Sarnoff also pushed RCA to developed color videotape-recording technology, movie sound (and was the “R” in RKO Studios, which produced Citizen Kane), computers, car phones (the precursor to cellphones) and satellites. RCA was the only consumer electronics maker among the Fortune Top 30 companies during Sarnoff’s tenure, increasing its revenue and profit nearly every year.

Visionary or villain?

Born into abject poverty on Feb. 27, 1891, in Russia, and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan from the age of 9, Sarnoff fought his way to success. His march began when he got a job at Marconi and taught himself telegraphy. Sarnoff switched his focus to leading rather than serving when he moved to RCA a year after the company was established in 1919. He served in increasingly important executive positions until he was named president of RCA in 1930. He could now turn his visionary ideas into reality.

But like many other business titans, Sarnoff was hardly a corporate saint. In fact, he could be downright coldhearted.

Throughout his life he actively promoted the fiction that he had been the first wireless operator to receive messages from the doomed Titanic on April 14, 1912.

RCA was an early booster of FM radio until Sarnoff determined that the static-free radio technology posed too big a threat to AM. He and FM’s inventor, Howard Armstrong, engaged in a long-running legal battle that culminated in Armstrong’s suicide in January 1954. “I did not kill Armstrong,” the imperious Sarnoff supposedly stated upon hearing the news of his old friend’s death.

Virtually by force of will, and backed by RCA’s enormous engineering, legal and lobbying muscle, Sarnoff pushed the FCC into accepting RCA’s color technology, NTSC, in 1953, as the industry standard, forcing the abandonment of the earlier-adopted CBS color system. NTSC remained the U.S. standard until analog TV broadcasts ended in June 2009, replaced by the digital standard, ATSC — which the David Sarnoff Research Center helped develop.

For his leadership in creating and supplying communications technology and equipment during World War II, and for his service as part of General Dwight Eisenhower’s communications staff during the June 1944 D-Day operations, Sarnoff was made a brigadier general. For the rest of his life, Sarnoff reveled on being referred to as “General.” A virulent anticommunist, Sarnoff also was a supporter of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and allowed blacklisting at RCA.

Sarnoff’s steely patent tug-of-war with Philo T. Farnsworth, the business-naive inventor of television, has been the subject of many books and, in 2007, an Aaron Sorkin-penned Broadway play, “The Farnsworth Invention,” starring Hank Azaria of “The Simpsons” fame as Sarnoff. A broken and alcoholic Farnsworth died in March 1971, nine months before Sarnoff.

But as cynics would dismissively philosophize, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. David Sarnoff may have been ruthless, but he was also prescient, determined and brilliant, the individual primarily responsible for the success of the three foundational home entertainment technologies that still occupy the center of our leisure lives.

Today, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, perhaps a few more people will now know who he was and his importance to our tech-centric world.

Technology historian Stewart Wolpin has been reviewing the latest consumer electronics for more than 30 years and writes about consumer technology for eBay. Reach him @stewartwolpin.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Edison (Nikola Tesla Fans Exempted)

2019-03-06T05:17:11-05:00

Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla? Tesla or Edison? Which side are you on, nerds, which side are you on?

It has become a geek parlor game to argue over which inventor was “better” or more relevant, genius or lucky, evil or nuts.

It has become, figuratively and literally, a geek parlor game to argue over which inventor was “better” or more relevant, genius or lucky, evil or nuts. For instance, a Tesla vs. Edison: War of the Currents board game recently came out of a successful Kickstarter campaign. At the CES expo in Las Vegas last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office entered the realm of AC/DC when it featured giant blowups of the two electrical standards combatants at its small booth as part of its Inventor Cards series. And you can compare and contrast the two tech titans on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Edison vs. Tesla page, as well.

The switch on this electric innovator debate is sure to be thrown again this week as we commemorate what would have been Edison’s 169th birthday on Feb. 11, a day that President Ronald Reagan also proclaimed would be National Inventors’ Day in the U.S. in 1983.

Back in the late 19th century, Edison and Tesla played the single biggest roles in determining the future of our technological world. But Edison is the unquestioned forefather; after all, Tesla wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t quit Edison’s company in a fit of pique after “the wizard of Menlo Park” welched on a promised (or misunderstood) $50,000 bonus.

Edison perfected the incandescent bulb in 1879, five years before he hired the fresh-off-the-boat Serbian immigrant. This triggered the development of our entire electronics infrastructure.

Edison’s light bulb continues to be the oldest consumer electronics device still in mass use. He also had a hand in the electric chair, the tattoo gun, General Electric — and the movies.

“Perfected” is the right word; while the idea of the incandescent bulb wasn’t his (it was Joseph Swan’s), Edison’s light bulb continues to be the oldest consumer electronics device still in mass use. Just imagine what the world would look and feel like without electric light. Not only does this essential device look and work pretty much the same as it did nearly 140 years ago — remarkable in and of itself — but the threaded metallic bottom is still called the Edison base.

It’s no wonder that the light bulb remains the universal symbol for a bright idea.

Yes, it was Tesla’s (and George Westinghouse’s) AC power scheme that eventually emerged successfully from the nearly decade-long battle with Edison’s DC, during which Edison electrocuted all manner of living things, including an elephant and human beings (yes, Thomas Edison was a force behind the electric chair) to demonstrate the danger of AC. But the success of the light bulb spurned three other non-device Edison advances that are still significant today.

The first of these is General Electric — yes, that General Electric. Originally called the Edison General Electric Company, GE was founded to manufacture and sell Edison’s DC power distribution stations and light bulbs, and many of Edison’s inventions endure as integral aspects of what remains one of the largest, most valuable and oldest continually operating technology companies in the world.

More important was Edison’s whole idea of how gadgets are invented and brought to market.

Starting in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and later 30 miles north in West Orange, Edison invented and perfected the R&D lab. Edison hired people who were mostly, if not all, scientifically smarter than he was — Edison’s formal education ended after only three months, so he could churn out new gadgets and innovations.

Edison lab-produced advances include the first practical batteries for the electric car, the electronic stenciling pen that later morphed into the A.B. Dick mimeograph machine and was slightly modified to become the modern tattooing tool, more durable cement used to build the original Yankee Stadium and, most famously, motion pictures. Edison’s churn-’em-out R&D concept provided the template for how technology has been developed and brought to market ever since.

Edison’s third influential advance was actually inadvertent.

While mucking with his incandescent lamp, Edison noticed a strange electron flow within his experimental bulbs. Since Edison wasn’t an educated scientist, he didn’t understand the import of that electron flow. So he simply made a note of it.

On Feb. 11, we commemorate what would have been Edison’s 169th birthday, a day that President Ronald Reagan also proclaimed would be National Inventors’ Day in the U.S. in 1983.

Two decades later, more enlightened (forgive the pun) and educated engineers including John A. Fleming and, later, Lee De Forest turned what became known as the Edison effect into the electron or vacuum tube. The vacuum tube is the foundation upon which radio, the transistor, television, the microchip, the personal computer and all modern electronics are based.

Perhaps thanks to Elon Musk’s car company and the successful Indiegogo campaign to turn the only remaining Tesla lab into the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, out on northern Long Island, Tesla has become the “cooler” of the two tech titans. Edison haters may continue to gripe about his over-celebrated legacy, but hopefully they’ll take some satisfaction from commemorating his Serbian rival’s 160th birthday on July 10.

For this week at least, let’s at least acknowledge Edison’s ongoing contributions to our lives. Turn off a light in honor of (arguably) the greatest and (not arguably) most famous inventor in world history.

Technology historian Stewart Wolpin has been reviewing the latest consumer electronics for more than 30 years and writes about consumer technology for eBay. Reach him @stewartwolpin.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Smart LED Lights — Not the Brightest Bulbs Yet, but Getting Smarter

2019-03-06T06:07:06-05:00

You enter a room, you flip a switch and the light comes on.

For more than 130 years, the oldest electronic technology has astoundingly remained largely unchanged — until the recent advent of the “smart” LED bulb.

LED bulbs are essentially PCs in a socket. As such, an LED bulb is a tabula rasa, a blank slate for clever programmers and engineers to create something more than a simple illumination device.

Instead of flipping a switch, you whip out your smartphone or tablet to wirelessly, via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, turn your smart LED lights on or off. But that’s not the “smart” part. With the smart bulb app, you can schedule your lights to go on or off on a programmed schedule and, in some cases, change color or tone to suit or create a mood.

But let’s get back to that first “smart” bit. How, exactly, is whipping out your smartphone to turn your lights on or off easier — or “smarter” — than simply flipping a switch?

It isn’t. If you think about it, the technology may be cool, but the function is purely Rube Goldberg.

Smart bulbs sometimes make controlling your lights more confusing. If you turn on a smart LED from a wall switch or the lamp itself, your smart bulb app may not be able to turn it off — you have to complete the on/off cycle either from the wall/lamp switch or from the app, not one from Column A and one from Column B. This switch/app control issue multiplies if you have multiple smart LED bulbs and some are on and some are off.

Despite this annoyance, smart LED bulbs will probably catch on anyway. After all, the light bulb is still the universal sign of a brilliant idea, and brilliant ideas are exactly what some LED bulb engineers are hatching for the next generation of “smart” LED bulbs. And one brilliant idea may eliminate light switch and smartphone on/off control entirely.

A bulbous PC

Unlike ancient incandescent and cold fluorescent, LED bulbs do not use chemical processes to create light. LEDs are light-emitting diodes, and use solid-state circuitry to create illumination.

LED bulbs are essentially PCs in a socket. As such, an LED bulb is a tabula rasa, a blank slate for clever programmers and engineers to create something more than a simple illumination device. Product designers are drooling over the opportunity to incorporate capabilities into an LED bulb currently performed by separate devices.

For instance, there have been a handful of LED bulbs that double as either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth speakers. Sengled, a 10-year-old Chinese LED firm, is selling its Bluetooth Sengled Pulse Solo and, early next year, the Wi-Fi Flex. Like the Pulse, Flex will have JBL speakers built into them, but also will be able to wirelessly access personal music libraries and Internet radio stations through Sengled’s iOS and Android app. Sengled also sells the Boost, a smart LED bulb with a built-in Wi-Fi repeater.

Other smart tricks

Sengled is adding more than speakers to LED bulbs. For instance, coming soon is the Sengled Snap. Essentially a DropCam in a bulb, Snap is an overhead flood with an integrated 140-degree wide-angle 1080p video camera.

There’s really no reason that an LED bulb has to be bulb-shaped; it’s merely a matter of maintaining form familiarity.

A two-year-old Cambridge, Mass., startup called BeON is taking a more intriguing approach: A modular smart LED. Instead of a traditional bulb-shaped bulb — there’s no reason an LED bulb has to be bulb-shaped; it’s merely a matter of maintaining form familiarity — BeON has gone all Henry Moore on us. Its “bulbs” have a rectangular hole through their middle into which can be inserted specific function modules.

BeON’s first modular smart LED bulb product is the Home Protection System, a three-bulb kit with yellow modules with built-in microphones so the bulb can hear what’s going on around it and react. For instance, BeON’s LED lights can flash in a preprogrammed sequence if they hear the smoke alarm, CO2 alarm or the doorbell ring.

The BeONs also can supply four hours of emergency lighting in case of power outage, thanks to an integrated e-battery that charges whenever you turn your lamp on.

Along with speakers, cameras, Wi-Fi repeaters and microphones, it won’t be long before smart bulbs incorporate smoke and CO2 detectors, air fresheners, sonic pest repellents, cell signal boosters, or any other single or combination of heretofore dedicated-function devices.

Its master’s voice

There still remains the on/off-switch/app conundrum. If these LED bulbs are so smart and can include microphones, why can’t we just tell them to turn on or off?

You can, sort of. You can tell both the Hue and Insteon smart lights to turn on and off via new hubs that create separate connections to Apple’s HomeKit, Android’s Cortana and Amazon Echo’s Alexa voice-control systems. Just enunciate the appropriate command to one of these voice systems, and after a few seconds of communicating with their respective cloud intelligence, your lights come on or turn off.

But why should smart bulbs need a Cyrano? Soon they won’t. At the upcoming CES, Sengled will announce Sengled Voice, a Wi-Fi smart LED bulb with dual microphones and dual JBL speakers — essentially Siri, Cortana and Alexa in a socket. You’ll be able to speak to the Voice bulb to not only control its lighting, but get answers to questions, listen for alarming sounds such as breaking glass or crying babies, or perform other as-yet unspecified smart home tasks, all with no additional third-party system required.

The idea of integrating all these smarts into a device you’re already using is … well … smart, and may illuminate the future of LED bulbs.

Consumer electronics expert Stewart Wolpin reviews the latest technologies, attends CES annually and is a freelance writer for eBay. Reach him @stewartwolpin.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.