Retro Tech: The Wire Recorder

It's been a while since I looked at some

retro

tech

nology so I pulled out the old time machine and turned the dials to the past and it brings us something from over 60 years ago, let's see what the machine is. What you are seeing and hearing is a Webster Chicago

wire

recorder

, while

wire

recorder

s are largely forgotten today, they had a brief heyday that peaked in the late 1940s, so in This video let's take a closer look. Let's look at the history of

tech

nology, how machines work and find out why they became extinct so quickly. Without further ado, let's continue with the rest of the video.

A cable recorder, as the name suggests, actually records on a piece of wire. The cable is stainless steel wire and is about the same thickness as a human hair and that spool on the left, if it is 60 minutes, can hold about 1 .4 mil of material, but it is exactly the same principle as recording on magnetic tape. just plastic covered with metal powder to which you can apply a magnetic charge exactly the same as you can do with the cable so that they perform the same function, but doing it with different materials, the idea of ​​​​magnetically recording on a cable goes back to all time. the road to 1898 and the patent or patent for this was applied for in 1899 and approved in 1900, however not much was heard about the technology after then, not until World War II, you can see in this edition of the life of 1943, while the war is still going on.

There is a complete article on the new cable recorders. You see the technology improved considerably during the war and now it was a portable device and radio operators could use it to maybe play a message very quickly over the radio and then the person at the end. could slow it down, there were many uses for the technology and the inventor, as he calls himself, but it's actually some kind of improvement on the previous technology anyway, that guy suggests that after the war people might want to use this as a dictation device and that's a A very topical idea because that's exactly what happened, but before we go any further, let's look at a commercial and this one is sponsored by Spud Imperials.

Actually, this is an ad I saw in the magazine, but I wanted to share it with you because it made me laugh. It's when I switched to potatoes, the lady says when my throat feels dry, tired or too tight a potato is just what I want there is a feeling of coolness and soothing refreshment that only Gentle Touch of Menthol potatoes can impart see for yourself when I have a cold of Of course, I switch to potatoes when I have a cold, that clear, fresh menthol seems to cut through my cold-clogged taste and give me back the smoking pleasure of yesteryear, and finally, the best advice you'll hear when I develop a smoker's cough, Yes it's correct.

That's when I always switch to chips, they seem to be the only cigarette I want when I have a cough. I think this announcement is enough. Let's get back to our regular programming, so on the billboard for 1945, which is just a couple of months after the end of the war, there's an article here about the idea of ​​using Y recorders in Juke machines. Now I'm not sure if that use ever came to fruition, but this article suggests many other potential applications seen for the technology. to any company that would like to use it and some possible suggestions for things you could do with it besides dictation.

We are using them for entertainment purposes on trains, ships, planes and cars. We manufacture adapters for existing home radios. We sell stand-alone portable recorders. for scientific, research purposes and for photography, films and projectors. I mean, no wonder imaginations ran wild. This is the first time something like this has existed and this new Wonder technology had seemingly endless potential. A couple of months later, there is another one. article about why the recorders in this issue of Popular Science are called the civilian sound camera and suggest possible things you can do with them, such as recording baby's first words or famous sounds like Niagara Falls, Old Faithful, the voice of the president, all of these can be collected as autographs or stamps.

I'm not sure if the Old Faithful sound is something really worth recording, but you can see what's going on. People were very excited about cable recorders and what they could do with them a couple of years later. 1948 the excitement continues in this issue of Popular Mechanics, I have an article on how to add a cable recorder to your receiver so you can record what's on the radio and then 1950 they are mentioned here in this issue of Billboard where there is a music. school that encourages its students to buy a tape recorder so that they can record their lessons take those recordings home play them in front of their parents the parents know that the child has attended the lesson and also by its appearance the school makes a healthy mark By selling them with tape recorders, by far the most common use of cable recorders was as dictation machines and the number one name in these was Webster Chicago and this is the model that I will show you in a moment, it is the model 18 which is the model cheapest of the range, which cost less than half the price of its competitors.

This cost $137 in 1950 if we convert it to $1,365 today, that's a lot of money for those parents to spend buying them to listen to their children. playing music because of the way the instrument they were learning back then was the accordion. I wonder if they ever paid that kind of money anyway, let's take a look at my machine. It took me a couple of years to find one that was this good. in a condition like this and I think this one looks beautiful, it has an art deco type look on the front with that curved grill there, but of course it's from about 1953, this machine weighs about the same as a typewriter from the Era and takes up about the same desktop space.

Now you have controls here for play and rewind. You have to press that little silver button down to move the lever in any direction. There is no fast forward in this one. You just played. and Rewind Now, if we look at the front, we have a microphone input that could also be a line input that uses a Jones connector and then we have these four buttons here that select what we're going to do. We can record from the microphone or from the line input and then we have the option to play back through headphones or through that little round speaker that you see on the right side, now to the right of that speaker that we have. a volume control which is also your record level control and your on and off switch and underneath there is a little light which is your Vu meter looking effectively to the side we have a socket for a pedal which is for transcribing of course , to play and pause. and then on the back, which is the headphone output, on the left you'll find a metal plate that explains the detail of the model and the voltages and so on, but it also says that the back is where you'll find the tubes when you need to replace them.

Yes, we pronounce it tubes in the UK, but we tend to say valves more often, but there they are anyway, so that's where you take them out. I also have the original instruction booklet for this and there is an interesting part on the front. Here's the guy at the top who's dictating into his tape recorder and then of course you have the secretary at the bottom typing that on her typewriter, but at the top here in that top paragraph it mentions that You can easily adapt it to use it in the shot. inventory for recording meetings, but this is the important part to hide in a doctor's office, police desk in a psychiatrist's office, or any other purpose where compact size and remote control are important.

It is also mentioned at the bottom that you can use it to connect to your receiver. for recording radio and stuff, this picture shows you what would have come with it if you had bought it new in the past, so you get the microphone in a nice little standard, you also get a foot stop start control and on the The manual explains how you would use it with headphones which would have to be high impedance and also how you could use it to record a phone conversation and then it also explains how to delete one of the recordings, which is basically just recording. again, but with the sound turned down and at the back, as is usual in this period, we have a nice wiring diagram.

Now you'll have to excuse me if I don't take it apart, some people like to see it. on these things, but as you can see in this diagram here, if you took it apart it would be a completely destructive process. I would never put it back together, so I hope that's enough, let's take a look at one of these cables. This is a new, old, 15 minute cable, new in the box, so let's get it out. He's been stuck here for quite some time. You can see that you can write the information on the back or side of what you have engraved on your wire, so it comes on a metal spool which is quite heavy and with this we also have a small buckle.

Most of the stuff you used to get nowadays, of course, is on plastic spools, but these days this is a nice big, heavy steel spool. The cable starts with a cable where there is a piece of nylon thread that starts here and we just unroll it a few times and once you take it off you can see that it's tied to the cable and as I mentioned before that's about the same thickness than an incredibly thin human hair you can see my finger there you can see the fingerprint on the end very very thin hard to see with the naked eye sometimes the instruction buckle explains how you would attach it to your machine how you would tie it to the nylon leader yes If necessary, it is already tied to expose if it comes loose.

There's a lot of this that involves cutting things up and tying them up. I'll show you a little more about that later because I need to know how to do it if you have a wired recorder anyway, let's put this wire in this recorder so it goes to the left reel, but the first thing you have to do is wind the record and to the playhead here to its highest point. position so you can see that it goes up in the middle as I'm turning it, so once you have it roughly in the top position, then we can position the reel so that it's on the left side, here's a little ball bearing that it also holds it in place, the cable goes through the playhead, the nylon leader goes here, you press the center down and it grabs onto that little metal thing, it moves the timer back to the zero position switch. turn it on with a volume control, select the speaker output and press run and voila, now it would be playing something if there was anything on that cable.

Now you can see the record and the playhead moving up and down here. Now the idea of ​​that, of course. is that the cable spreads evenly along the reel instead of just bunching up in the middle or at which end you carefully move it up and down so the cable takes over the entire area of ​​the reel and you can see it in here , that's the play. head or recording head, it's the same thing how you run the cable through the back and that would of course magnetize the cable if you were recording on it or it would receive those magnetic pulses, amplify them and play them through the speaker in the Front, the Machine has an automatic stop mechanism.

When it reaches the end, these little pegs pull inward and that stops the reels from spinning. If you want to rewind, just move that lever, of course, and push it to the rewind position. Now the microphones that are in these use glass microphones and these are very good at picking up good quality sound from a distance, so you can place them quite far from your face. You could record an entire room with one of these. They use the electric worst. crystals inside this little container here and over time they lose their functionality, but this microphone works quite well p Electric crystals or crystal microphones never moved into the transistor area because they worked better with tube equipment or tube equipment or equipment of valves in any way. you want to pronounce it anyway you get the idea now I have these four different reels here now this one from Webster Chicago obviously it's going to work with my webcore machine it's the name that Webster Chicago later changed its name to so I work so I have this Airline from Montgomery w and then one from echo but when I bought my machine I didn't realize there was a standard for wire recorder spools and these all fit my machine despite being made by different people have different capabilities, but the spools are the same size now, when I bought my machine I bought some old spools including this one that says New Years 1955, so let's hear this quickly.

No good, now you have sa for Next year, you may have noticed that it runs slow and that is because it expects 60 Hz and yet my electricity supply provides 50 Hz. See?While I can convert my 230 volts to US 120 or 110 with this adapter. I didn't convert the Herz with it, so it's running too slow. Now of course you could change this by recording it and playing it back at a faster speed to a digital file, but I want to do it the old fashioned way, let me show you what's inside. we have this wheel here that moves between the rewind and play position, now the play part, that little metal shaft in the middle pushes against that spool which pushes that spool which pushes that spool which then moves around the little timer on the bottom, so in order for my 50HZ signal to move as fast as a 60HZ one, all I need to do is increase the size of this axis in the middle here.

Now this is kind of a workaround. ghetto, it's not a permanent thing, but it's just so I can listen to those reels without having to record a whole hour and then play them back at a different speed, so I just cut the top off and I have a little bit bigger shaft, let's listen, okay, We're definitely running too fast now, so all I have to do is make it a little thinner by cutting off some of my electrical tape and let's have another one. Listen carefully, now you're late for next year so I'm going to listen to everything I can and it turns out it was some people inviting their friends over to their house to listen to some music which will probably give me a copyright claim . besides playing darts and ping pong, that's something worth recording on audio, but you can still see what kind of use people had for things in the past and I have another reel here where someone was recording some music, presumably in 78, so let's go.

Listen, we read about new weapons and how fearful they are, how the destruction in the tragedy of war, so powerful in their power are the rumors that we, but still, the rra of God is the only thing we have to fear, let us pray for May it shine through this TR. earth, let's do PR, the mighty hand, let's do PR, so that reel only contained music recorded from records, you could tell there were records because you could hear the needle drop at the beginning of each track, so I guess in in a way there's a very old music pirate, which is ironic because the tunes they recorded were all very God fearing stuff about going to hell, just a little joke, please don't write and finally I have this reel here that was a reunion Lions International Annual General Meeting.

District 64, let's hear quickly Lions, the business of this, the last session of our convention, the first business of the last session is the business of unfinished business, could you, the committee members and the members who have unfinished business, present them at this time, okay, maybe it's not the most important? It's an interesting topic, but it's still fascinating to think that those voices were recorded over 60 years ago and probably haven't been heard since, so I turned the lights down so you can see what this light bulb is about if I turn on the recording machine. and turn the volume up a little bit, you can see the light comes on with my voice and the idea is to set the volume just right so that it comes on in the Peaks, but if you had it high that would be oversaturating the sound, so this is your neater recording level, as is now on the more sophisticated machines, of course you get a proper stylus or something, but since this is the budget model, they went with this light bulb type device, so I think it's time I tried recording some music of my own so I have the microphone here hanging in front of my speakers and I have something ready to play so let's turn it off and record press play and just listen.

For a moment, it would be foolish of me to try to claim that that was the best thing a wireless recorder could say, however, I hope you get enough from that demo to understand why they never released pre-recorded music on reels of wire, now that will be one of the reasons for the downfall of wire recorders, but another additional one is the fact that they are prone to breaking, not the machines, the machines still work fine, the wire reels, the problem is that when you rewind a reel of wire, this is very It's hard to say that it's going at an incredible speed and it's just a terrifying process.

You stand on it hoping it doesn't break. The reason I do it is because it breaks so often in the past that they just get stuck a little. themselves as something just gets stuck a little bit and at that speed it's probably going to break now that was a reel that got all the way to the beginning the leader passed and stopped automatically that's what you want to happen but unfortunately in the future In Too many times I've had real clicks while rewinding like this, so every time you put in a reel and rewind it feels like you're playing Russian roulette.

Now when they snap you can fix them if you can find the ends of both cables, remember how thin they are, it's very hard to find them, sometimes they get stuck inside, but it happens very often. They show you how to join the wires in the manual and you basically make a square. knot Once you've tied that tight end cut and are ready to go again, but now you have a weak spot in the cable and you have to hope this doesn't happen if you leave a rewinding machine unattended, you can go back to the room and find a disaster everywhere, which will take you a long time to solve.

Sometimes the quickest way is to take apart the take-up reel so you can get the cable out of there, which is 1.4. miles of cable that would take you a long time to manually run from reel to reel, so to summarize, the two main disadvantages of the cable recorder are reliability and sound quality and, for the final nail in the coffin, Let's go back to the World War. II for a minute because while the Americans were perfecting the cable recorder strange transmissions were being received from Nazi Germany where Hitler was transmitting from places where it was known that he was not so clearly some type of recording equipment was being used but the quality was very good.

It didn't sound like a recording in the last days of the war, the machines responsible for those transmissions were discovered and they were the German tape recorder, one of the first magnetic tape recorders, those machines found their way back to the US, where Ampex worked on producing its own. version and with a considerable investment and the purchase of several machines from Bing Crosby who wanted to use them to record his radio show so as not to have to do Live Twice for the east and west coast, the aex corporation released the model 200, the first recorder of American magnetic tape and was a huge success.

The benefits to radio studios were immediately evident. They didn't have to do everything live anymore. They could insert pre-recorded advertisements into programs and they could cut out parts that didn't. work and add laugh tracks in just a couple of years, all radio stations were using magnetic tape and of course with that level of investment and development, it was only a few years before the devices became cheap enough for the general public purchased them in 1954. There were several consumer tape machines on the market, as well as pre-recorded tapes for playing them; In fact, one of the companies that issued pre-recorded tapes from the beginning was a certain website c.

Do you remember that name from Before, yes, it was the website renamed to Chicago, they were the number one name in cable recorders and even they could see that the new magnetic tapes were the future and the writing was on the wall for cable, now cable recording made Limón for a few more. years in devices like black box flight recorders and the mini fon spy recorder, which is a small wire recorder that you hide around your body and have a microphone on a watch, but practically in the 1960s wire recording She was dead, but that's how it was.

I had one last moment in the sun in 2007 when a CD came out called Live Wire by Woody Guthrie. That CD won a Grammy that year and contains the only known live recording of Woody Guthrie in concert with Inc. It was recorded in 1949 at a Webster Chicago. wire recorder and with a lot of cleanup they managed to get it to a quality good enough to release on a CD and it makes me wonder what other Treasures are wound on a spool of wire in a cardboard box stuffed in the corner of a dusty old closet somewhere, but before you rush off to eBay to find out, all I have left to do now is to say, as always, thanks for looking.