Abstract
Conventional wisdom assumes that magnetic recording, today an integral aspect of both film and broadcast technology, is a post-World War II phenomenon arising solely out of German wartime technical progress appropriated by the victorious Allies.' This assumption obscures the actual origin of magnetic recording within both film and broadcast history: within the economic and technological turmoil caused by the motion picture industry's full-scale adoption of sound between 1927 and 1930, the communications and broadcasting industries discovered the viability of magnetic recording as an efficacious alternative to photographic and mechanographic sound recording processes. Although magnetic recording in conjunction with sound motion pictures had been proposed at least as early as 1913, the first concrete attempt to implement magnetic recording in film production occurred in 1929 when a relatively obscure German producer working in England proposed magnetic recording as an alternative to the cumbersome disc and costly photographic sound recording and reproduction methods then revolutionizing film production and exhibition. Ludwig Blattner's attempt to interest the film industry in magnetic recording failed, but his efforts, with those of his partner Curt Stille, represent an important initial step in the innovation of a nascent technology, a step which directly led to the intense technical research and development which would, by the eve of World War II, provide the bases for today's ubiquitous magnetic recorders and media. Early Attempts to Implement Magnetic Recording in Sound Films. As early as 1878 Thomas Edison had considered the properties of magnetism to provide the sound record for his original tin-foil gramophone; by 1881 Alexander Graham Bell's associate Charles Sumner Tainter, working under contract from the Edison interests to develop an efficient recording medium for Edison's later gramophones, also considered experimentally the use of magnetism.2 The proposal historians generally cite as heralding the birth of magnetic recording appeared in an American technical journal in 1888 when a Cincinnati metallurgist, Oberlin Smith, suggested the recording of sound through purely electrical means (as opposed to the
Published Version
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