Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording

Abstract

Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording MARK CLARK From 1930 to 1941, scientists and engineers at Bell Laboratories worked to perfect a practical magnetic recorder. They produced several prototypes, including one that was arguably the best in the world in the mid-1930s. Recorders designed by Bell Labs engineers were in regular service by the late 1930s in telephone central offices, and one engineering group even had a fully functioning magnetic recording answering machine attached to its telephone line for six months in 1935. Despite this early work, and the contracts for magnetic recorders that Bell and Western Electric (the manufacturing subsidiary of Bell’s parent company, American Telephone and Tele­ graph [AT&T]) filled for the United States government during World War II, Bell fell behind other companies working on magnetic recording after 1940. The Bell system did not produce a recorder comparable in quality to those of other American and German companies, and it played little role in the exploitation of American and German magnetic recording technology by American companies after the war. The work Bell engineers did in the 1930s is almost unknown today.' Dr. Clark is a graduate of the doctoral program in the history of technology at the University of Delaware, where he was a Hagley Fellow. He is currently writing the centennial history of the university’s College of Engineering. He wishes to acknowledge the assistance of David Hounshell, Sheldon Hochheiser, and Kenneth Lipartito, as well as the Technology and Culture referees, all of whom made many valuable suggestions. Work on the article was supported by fellowships from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Life Members Fund for Electrical History and the Charles Babbage Institute’s Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Processing. 'No published comprehensive scholarly history of early magnetic recording based on archival materials exists at present. See Mark Clark, “The Magnetic Recording Industry, 1878-1960: A Business and Technological History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1992). A number of popular articles and unpublished works have treated various aspects of the overall picture. Most mention the work done at Bell Laboratories only in passing, if at all. One exception to this is the work of William Lafferty. In his “The Early Development of Magnetic Sound Recording in Broadcasting and Motion Pictures, 1928—1950” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981), Lafferty describes© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3403-0007S01.00 516 Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording 517 Why? As this article will show, the impressive technical successes of Bell Labs scientists and engineers were hidden by the upper manage­ ment of both Bell Labs and AT&T. Although AT&T used magnetic recorders for central office applications, it refused to develop mag­ netic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its devel­ opment and use by others. This suppression stemmed not from technical criteria but from policy considerations that went to the heart of AT&T’s corporate culture.* 2 The following is a history of efforts at Bell Laboratories to build a practical magnetic recorder in the 1930s and of why those efforts are now largely forgotten. The Early History of Magnetic Recording Magnetic recording was not a new technology when Bell engineers first started to work with it during World War I. Oberlin Smith, inventor and owner of the Ferracute Machine Company, had first conceived of using electromagnetism to record sound in 1878, only a few months after he visited Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory and saw the newly invented phonograph. Smith believed that the phonograph had a fundamental flaw: both the recording and the reproduction of sound required physical contact. The phonograph needle moving in its groove inevitably produced noise along with the sound recorded, noise that reduced the quality of the reproduction. Smith’s conceptual leap was to record sound by subjecting a recording medium to magnetic rather than physical vibrations. A magnetic material exposed to a magnetic field retains a portion of the magne­ tism to which it has been subjected, and this leftover, or “remnant,” a number of the recorders developed by Bell Laboratories prior to 1940. However, his account is based solely on articles published by Bell scientists and engineers...