Armour Research Foundation and the Wire Recorder: How Academic Entrepreneurs Fail

Abstract

Armour Research Foundation and the Wire Recorder: How Academic Entrepreneurs Fail DAVID MORTON Many recall when audio tape recorders first appeared in the mar­ ketplace at the end of World War II. Fewer, perhaps, remember the fate of a short-lived but clever competitor known as the wire re­ corder. Its name reflected the ability of this machine to capture sound in the form of magnetic impulses on a very fine steel wire. Marketed by firms such as Wilcox-Gay, Pierce, Webcor, Air King, and others long forgotten, these recorders were based on the re­ search and development effort of an equally obscure university labo­ ratory in Chicago, the Armour Research Foundation. Wire recorders wowed Americans in the postwar years by capturing voice and music on something that seemed a very unlikely recording medium. The machines could do so without the scratch and hiss of the phono­ graph, and they could even erase the sound so that the recording wire could be used again and again. But the decline of the wire re­ corder was as sharp as its rise, and by the early 1950s, the device had been completely displaced by the tape recorder, a machine with similar operating principles but a different recording medium. What, then, is the wire recorder’s historical significance? Like many new technologies, Armour’s wire recording project involved inventors and their inventions, the research and development pro­ cess, the problems ofentrepreneurial ventures, patent management, technology transfer between nations and firms, and the creation of a new industry. All these themes should be familiar to historians of technology, who are accustomed to thinking in terms of technologi­ cal systems. The wire recording project, however, was unique be­ cause it involved a group of competing systems builders rather than Dr. Morton holds a Ph.D. in the history of technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a research historian for the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University. He thanks the staff of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, for their invaluable assistance during the research for this article. This research was funded in part by grant M-28-605 from the National Science Founda­ tion.© 1998 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/98/3902-0002$02.00 213 214 David Morton a core of cooperative, key individuals. Armour’s backers were a col­ lection of corporate sponsors who lacked a shared vision for the new technology. This divisiveness fragmented the industry, and ulti­ mately Armour’s efforts to build its own system failed. A magnetic recording industry emerged anyway and carried on without waiting for the technologies of magnetic recording to stabilize through the dominance of particular firms or the setting of industry standards. The history ofthe Armour wire recorder, which examines the forma­ tive years of the industry, warns against an oversimplified interpreta­ tion of the systems-building process. This historical example may also be instructive because it does not end in success; it examines technologies that never came to dominate the field. Magnetic Recording’s Early Years Magnetic recording is a surprisingly old technology. A prominent American engineer named Oberlin Smith invented it in 1878, just after the appearance of Thomas Edison’s phonograph.1 Although Smith filed a caveat, he never actually patented his idea; instead he published it in 1888 in the pages of the journal Electrical World. The Smith recorder relied upon another new invention, the telephone, to convert sound to electrical waves. These waves, constituting the signal, traveled through wires to an electromagnet.2 When the signal passed through the coils of the electromagnet, it emitted a field of magnetism that ebbed and flowed in the space around it. This pulsat­ ing field in turn magnetized a steel wire passing close to it, and the wire retained a sort ofimage of the magnetism. This was quite differ­ ent from phonographic recording, in which a wavy groove mechani­ cally held a record of sound, or optical recording, in which a sound was stored as a visible record. When the Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen patented something similar to Smith’s idea after the turn of the century, an American...