Wire Recording - History

History

The first wire recorder was a Valdemar Poulsen Telegraphone of the late 1890s. Wire recorders for dictation and telephone recording were made almost continuously by various companies (mainly the American Telegraphone Company) through the 1920s and 1930s, but use of this new technology was extremely limited. Dictaphone and Ediphone recorders, which still employed wax cylinders as the recording medium, were the devices normally used for these applications during this period.

The brief heyday of wire recording lasted from approximately 1946 to 1954. It resulted from technical improvements and the development of inexpensive designs licensed internationally by the Brush Development Company of Cleveland, Ohio and the Armour Research Foundation of the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). These two organizations licensed dozens of manufacturers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.

These improved wire recorders were not only marketed for office use, but also as home entertainment devices that offered advantages over the home disc recorders which were becoming increasingly popular for making short recordings of family and friends and for recording excerpts from radio broadcasts. Unlike home-cut phonograph records, which could accommodate only a few minutes of audio on each side, the steel wire could be repeatedly re-recorded and allowed much longer uninterrupted recordings to be made.

The earliest magnetic tape recorders, not commercially available in the U.S. until 1948, were too expensive, complicated and bulky to compete with these consumer-level wire recorders. During the first half of the 1950s, however, tape recorders which were sufficiently affordable, simple and compact to be suitable for home and office use started appearing and they rapidly drove wire recorders from the market.

Exceptionally, the use of wire for sound recording continued into the 1960s in Protona's Minifon miniature recorders, in which the importance of maximizing recording time in a minimum of space outweighed other considerations. For any given level of audio quality, the nearly hair-thin wire had the advantage that it was a much more compact storage medium than tape. The Minifon wire recorder was designed for stealth use and its accessories included a microphone disguised as a wristwatch.

Wire recording was also used in some aircraft cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders beginning in the early 1940s, mainly for recording radio conversations between crewmen or with ground stations. Because steel wire was more compact, robust and heat-resistant than plastic-based magnetic tape, wire recorders continued to be manufactured for this purpose through the 1950s and remained in use somewhat later than that. There were also wire recorders made to record data in satellites and other unmanned spacecraft of the 1950s to perhaps the 1970s.