Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording

Abstract

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 Telegraph [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.