The Hoe rotary “lightning” press.
The Hoe rotary “lightning” press.
Everywhere along the city streets of the young republic, men and women could be seen reading in public, subscription, and society libraries. People of all classes, backgrounds, and professions, reading in their every spare moment. Impressed deep in the psyche of America, the most literate society ever founded, was the idea that you could improve yourself—morally, philosophically, financially—through the written word.
America’s publishers struggled to keep up. While the Revolution had been fomented and sustained in large part by committees of correspondence, printing was still little more advanced than it had been nearly four centuries before, when that Rhenish goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg started hand-cranking Bibles.
A big change came early in the nineteenth century, when the printing press, like everything else, was run by steam power. English and German printers began building cylinder steam presses that greatly increased the speed of printing. But it was still not fast enough for the American reading public. By the 1840s, most cities boasted at least a dozen daily newspapers, many of them priced to sell at a penny a paper. These “penny dreadfuls,” as they were often called, battened on terrible or thrilling events. As news moved faster than ever, thanks to the new telegraph (see What Morse Wrought: The Electric Telegraph), they printed “extra” after extra edition to keep readers apprised of the very latest turn of events in battles, murder trials, famous deathbeds, elections, and out-and-out hoaxes.
Speed was more required than ever, and it was achieved by one Richard Hoe, son of an English immigrant and printer. Richard had gone into his father’s business at fifteen and inherited it at twenty-one. Like his father—like so many acolytes of the esoteric, now largely vanished profession of newspaper printing—he was always looking for ways to improve the process.
What he did was discard the traditional flatbed press on which newspapers were printed and make the type revolve instead. Hoe placed large rotating drums on the fixed platform of his press—something inventors before him had considered, only to be thwarted by how to get the “stereotype,” the flat plate on which the type was set, to stick on a curved drum. Hoe nearly despaired over the same problem. But working at it all through the night, he came up with an idea that would become known as “the turtle”: a curved mold of the stereotype that would fit into a curved box fitted exactly to the drums.
Made originally out of plaster of paris but soon out of papier-mâché, the turtle shot printing into the modern age. The Hoe rotary or “lightning press” was first used by a particularly lurid penny dreadful, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, where it proved an instant success, printing eight thousand sheets of paper (on one side) in the space of an hour—far faster than any press then in existence.
Hoe would go on to make 175 modifications to his original model, turning it exponentially faster and more efficient. He invented a highly successful grinding saw, to better cut the newspapers on his presses, and founded a saw company. Its factory even included free instruction for apprentices.
The “turtle”: the key to the Hoe lightning press was molded out of plaster of paris, so it could be curved to fit the drums.
Yet the next great step forward was taken by William Bullock, an orphan from upstate New York who became a printer and inventor and eventually the father of thirteen children. Understandably eager to maximize his earnings, Bullock invented a crucial automatic feed of the vast rolls of paper—sometimes as much as five miles long—that were fed into urban presses, thereby eliminating the backbreaking work of hand-feeding. His press also printed on both sides; cut each copy with an automatic, serrated knife; folded the paper; adjusted itself; and generally did everything save tuck the operator into bed at night. Bullock got his press up to thirty thousand sheets an hour. But one day at the Public Ledger, in a macabre accident, Bullock tried to give the press a “Brogan adjustment,” kicking a driving belt back into a pulley. His leg was caught and crushed, it developed gangrene, and he died on the operating table.
Hoe, meanwhile, would continue perfecting his presses until, by 1882, he produced an almost completely automated machine. With other inventions, such as linotype, newspapers would get steadily bigger, cleaner, and more easily readable, stuffed with Sunday supplements, and—after the invention of a color process—even comics, for America’s growing middle class. It had never been easier to read all about it.
Morse’s telegraph, a year after its invention and complete with ticker tape.
For all the inventions roiling the Western world in the first half of the nineteenth century, none caught the imagination of Americans like the telegraph. It was the telegraph that first destroyed traditional notions of space and time and ushered in modernity. And we owe it all to the efforts of a bombastic bigot, a corrupt congressman, and a former child actor.
The theory of an electric telegraph had been bandied about since the mid-1700s, and by the early 1800s an array of inventors throughout Europe and the United States were creating progressively more sophisticated systems of conveying information by means of electricity. William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England had even developed a commercial, rail-linked telegraphic system by 1837. Yet all of these systems were hugely cumbersome and limited, passing along electricity through galvanic fluids or requiring multiple wires to send messages by way of needles that pointed, one by one, to letters arrayed around a clockface.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a native of Charlestown, Massachusetts, was certain that he had a better idea, aided by the fact that he paid almost no attention to what anyone else in the field was doing. A windy, priggish racist, he believed fervently that God wanted slavery preserved, ran twice for mayor of New York on the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing ticket, and led a campaign against “French dancing” in theaters.
Yet Morse was also blessed with immense talents, ingenuity, and determination. An amateur inventor from an early age, a portraitist of almost the first rank, Morse was working on a painting of Lafayette in Washington, D.C., in 1825, when his wife suddenly took ill. She was dead before he could be notified and buried before he could get home, a loss that haunted him.
There had to be a way to convey news more quickly. While teaching at New York University, Morse toiled for years on making an electric telegraph but still could not produce a signal that traveled more than twenty feet.
He needed help—and he got it. A fellow congregant at his church named Alfred Vail helped him develop the “Morse code” that would replace Morse’s own unwieldy idea to assign every word in the dictionary a number. Instead, the code that Vail and Morse worked out was a sort of binary system, which is one reason why many historians refer to the telegraph as the “Victorian Internet.” The “keys” that telegraph operators tapped transmitted series of what were either dots and dashes, with a dot (or “dah”) created by taking one’s finger off the key quickly, and a dash (or “dit”) by leaving the finger down a little longer.
This made Morse’s telegraph run much faster than any existing wire system. Vail also talked Morse into replacing his telegraph’s registry pencil with a stylus that perforated paper, and the composing stick that sent messages with a “key,” a piece of metal tapping on another piece of metal. Operators could now hear messages even before they saw their marks and thus could further speed transmission. Finally, Vail talked his father into investing $2,000 in Morse’s telegraph and letting them produce a working model of it at his Speedwell Ironworks in New Jersey.
Around the same time, a fellow professor at NYU, Leonard Gale, vastly improved Morse’s circuit and introduced him to Joseph Henry. Henry, a former child actor, was a brilliant polymath who would later advise President Lincoln on science and would run the Smithsonian for decades. While teaching at the Albany Academy, in Albany, New York, he had discovered the property of self-inductance, and built the much stronger electromagnet that would be necessary for telegraphy of any distance. In 1831—well before anyone else—Henry amused his students by inventing the first operational magnetic telegraph in the world, using his electromagnet and a primitive battery to send an electrical signal around a mile of the academy’s walls until it made an armature strike a bell.
Morse’s—and Alfred Vail’s, and Leonard Gale’s—original telegraph key, which conveyed the Biblical verse “What hath God wrought!” from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.
Henry, though, had no interest in anything beyond providing his scientific discoveries to others, and he left it to Morse, Vail, and Gale to work out a commercial telegraphic system. Morse’s greatest contribution was figuring out how to use his strengthened electromagnets to continually relay the electrical charge through the wires.
“If I can succeed in working a magnet ten miles,” became Morse’s mantra, “I can go around the globe.”
He and Vail got it to go ten miles at Speedwell and began lobbying Congress for funds, bribing Rep. Francis O. J. “Fog” Smith with a one-fourth share in Morse’s enterprise. Funds for the telegraph passed the House of Representative by a margin of six votes. But as midnight approached on the last night of the March 1843 congressional session, the Senate still had not taken it up, and there were 140 bills on the calendar ahead of it. When midnight came, the session would end, and the whole effort would have to be taken up months later—if it ever was.
Morse, who had watched anxiously for days from the galleries, returned to his boardinghouse in despair. The next morning, he was amazed to learn his funds had been gaveled through with five minutes to spare.
Morse now had $30,000 to build a thirty-eight-mile demonstration line from Washington to Baltimore. He hired as contractor an acquaintance of Fog Smith’s named Ezra Cornell. Cornell was supposed to bury Morse’s wires in the ground, insulated in pipes, but they kept shorting out. With time and money running out, Cornell convinced Morse to let him string the telegraph wires between poles along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s right-of-way and insulate them with glass drawer knobs.
On May 24, 1844, Morse telegraphed the fateful biblical verse to Vail in Baltimore and received it back: “What hath God wrought!”
He had invented the first practical electrical telegraph, and it would sweep the world. Morse’s device had found its time—just as the railroads were stitching together the nation, clearing access lanes throughout the wilderness for its poles, and creating a need for a communications device to run with and ahead of the trains. The telegraph was “faster than the sun,” shrinking the great distances of America and then the world more dramatically than anything ever had, or ever quite would again.
the genius details
Morse would offer his entire invention and its patents to the US Postal Service for $100,000—a fantastic bargain, as it turned out. The government turned him down.
The famous telegraphic plea for help, “SOS,” does not actually stand for anything. Its combination of three “dots” for “S” and three “dashes” for “O” is just one of the easiest combinations to send and hear.
By 1849, there were over twelve thousand miles of telegraph wire in America, run by twenty different companies. In 1856, Hiram Sibley and Ezra Cornell consolidated most US telegraph companies into what would become Western Union. AT&T, which ran Bell Telephone, gained control of Western Union in 1908. Government antitrust efforts forced AT&T to give it up in 1913.
The telegraph was connected across America by 1861, bringing an end to the Pony Express.
The final Morse code signal was transmitted in the United States on July 12, 1999, repeating Morse’s initial biblical verse.
The USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon laying the first transatlantic cable in 1858.
By 1860, just sixteen years after the original thirty-eight miles of Morse’s wires were strung up (see What Morse Wrought: The Electric Telegraph), there were fifty thousand miles of telegraph lines in the United States, or about 40 percent of all the mileage in the world. Every year, some five million messages zipped back and forth between Americans—but it still took a ten-day ocean voyage to get any news from Europe.
Telegraph cables had recently been laid across the English Channel and New York Harbor, but deep ocean? Any cable would have to be incredibly well insulated and somehow avoid deepwater canyons and jagged rocks. Who knew if ships could even carry all the heavy coils of cable necessary, much less lower them smoothly enough that they did not snap or pile up on themselves? Who knew if telegraphic signals, without the relays available on land, could travel such a distance at all?
Cyrus Field was willing to find out. A paper magnate and art patron who, whenever he visited a foreign country, always asked first what the word for “faster” was, Field was introduced to a telegraph company owner with a scheme to lay an underwater cable across the Cabot Strait, from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. Field proposed a more audacious idea: Why not lay a cable all the way across the Atlantic Ocean?
Living up to his favorite word, Field quickly raised $1.5 million in private funds. Consulting the country’s leading oceanographer, Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, he was informed that recent deep-sea soundings indicated there was a perfect “telegraph plateau” across the North Atlantic. When most of the company’s seed money was exhausted in the unexpectedly difficult effort just to get the cable across Cabot Strait, Field rushed off to England on what would be the first of more than thirty transatlantic crossings for his baby. There British foreign secretary Lord Clarendon asked him, “Suppose you make the attempt and fail—your cable is lost at sea—then what will you do?”
“Charge it to profit and loss, and go to work to lay another,” Field replied, so impressing Clarendon that he secured for him a subsidy of £1,400 a year and the promise of a ship.
Field raised still more money from London investors, then raced back to America to lobby Congress. After two months of heated debate, backing for the cable passed by one vote in the Senate. President Franklin Pierce signed the Atlantic Cable Act into law on his last day in office, and the transatlantic cable quickly captured the imagination of America. The New York Herald called it “the grandest work which has ever been attempted by the genius and enterprise of man.”
The cable itself was manufactured in England, seven strands of copper wire connected strand by strand by riggers, with a copper penny soldered in for luck. All 2,500 nautical miles’ worth were wrapped in gutta-percha, a sort of natural plastic extracted from the sap of Malaysian trees. Too heavy for any one ship, it was carried on both the USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon.
The Atlantic would not go quietly. The cable broke the first day, was repaired, then went dead for a few hours for no perceptible reason. Then, just four hundred miles from Ireland, it snapped after a heavy wave hit the Niagara and sank in water two miles deep. They tried again the next year. But the Agamemnon nearly sank in a storm, and the cables repeatedly snapped again.
Field stayed publicly calm, but privately his resolve had begun to crack. Only the intervention of his friend and president of the company, Peter Cooper, had kept his paper business from going bankrupt during the 1857 financial panic, and now the cable had failed again.
The Niagara and the Agamemnon set off once more. All the metal aboard the Niagara made its compass go awry and pulled it off course, but the problem was discovered in time and another ship sent ahead to show the way. The Agamemnon nearly ran out of coal and had to rely on its sails to get back to Ireland. But at 1:45 on the morning of August 5, 1858, Field rowed himself up on a Newfoundland beach and woke the local telegraph operators with the announcement “The cable is laid!”
Both sides of the Atlantic erupted in joy—prematurely. Messages across the Atlantic were faint and interminably slow. Within three weeks, they had stopped altogether. The House of Commons held its first committee of inquiry on a technological matter and found that the cable was essentially “blown out” from massive electrical bursts. Field had proceeded without sufficient testing and preparation. “Faster” was too fast.
The machinery that laid the transatlantic cable from the deck of the Great Eastern, in 1866—the first cable that would remain in continuous use for more than a few weeks.
Field learned from the committee’s findings. In July 1865 he was back at it again with more investors, better cable, and a single, gigantic vessel, the Great Eastern, the largest ship yet put afloat. As it proceeded across the Atlantic from Ireland, multiple flaws were found in the cable’s connections, and each time it had to be hauled back up, as one reporter wrote, like “an elephant taking up a straw in its proboscis.” The breaks were caused by small spikes in the line, a fault in the iron sheathing around the cable. Each flaw was corrected—but during one such procedure, less than six hundred miles off Newfoundland, the cable snapped and sank. Eleven days of grappling the ocean floor failed to retrieve it.
“We’ve learned a great deal, and next summer we’ll lay the cable without a doubt,” Field announced.
He was right. On July 27, 1866, the first transatlantic cable was successfully connected.
Many more cables would follow, and communications around the world—and particularly between New York and London—were soon so fast that it was another reason why historians referred to the telegraph as the “Victorian Internet.” Phone and fiber-optic cables followed the telegraphic lines, and to this day they remain much cheaper than satellite phone connections—and vital to world finance. A privately owned cable line was installed in 2010 simply to reduce the “latency” of a call across the Atlantic from sixty-five to sixty milliseconds.
As for Field’s old cables, most of them are still down on the ocean floor, including the very first, failed ones. Ships repairing new wiring occasionally pick them up by accident, a reminder of our first connections.
the genius details
Field’s tombstone reads: “Cyrus West Field, To whose courage, energy and perseverance, the world owes the Atlantic telegraph.”
The insulation of Field’s first Atlantic cable was probably burned out by the two-thousand-volt shocks that the English surgeon Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse convinced him to use in sending messages.
Field’s first cable had three layers of gutta-percha wrapped around seven strands of copper wire. The second cable had four layers of gutta-percha and an adhesive known as “Chatterton’s compound” between the layers. Polyethylene would eventually replace gutta-percha as the main insulation of underwater cables.
The first public telegraphic message across the Atlantic, in 1858, was just ninety-nine words from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan, but it took sixteen and a half hours to transmit. Submarine cables today can transmit eighty-four billion words per second.
The initial rate in 1866 for messages was $10 a word, with a ten-word minimum.
A Western Electric dial candlestick phone, from the 1920s. In 1892, the candlestick became the first upright, desktop phone.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the idea that human communications could move well beyond the dazzling new telegraph, that the human voice could even be conveyed over long distances, was in the air. A French telegraph engineer, Charles Bourseul, had proposed the basic idea of the telephone in 1854, and six years later a German teacher named Johann Philipp Reis developed a “make and break” “telephon,” as he termed it.
Reis’s invention proved able to transmit very faint and indistinct musical notes, other sounds, and even some speech in much the same way a telegraph works, by “making” and then “breaking” the current—something that also made an actual conversation impossible.
A young language teacher on the North Shore of Massachusetts—a Scottish immigrant whose family had immigrated to the United States via Canada to escape what seemed to be a curse of tuberculosis on it—was moving in a more promising direction.
Alexander Graham Bell was the sort of man whose idea of bedtime reading was scouring the Encyclopaedia Britannica for new ideas. A prodigy, he learned to play the piano as a child with no formal training, and at twelve he invented a machine to dehusk wheat at a flour mill. By sixteen he was not only learning Greek, Latin, elocution, and music but giving classes in these subjects as well. But all his life, Alexander Graham Bell would attempt to turn his work to the betterment of mankind.
Bell’s family had long been experts in elocution, and Alexander himself taught speech to deaf students in Boston, including Helen Keller and fifteen-year-old Mabel Hubbard, who had lost her hearing to a bout of scarlet fever and who would eventually become his wife. Thanks to the sponsorship of his future father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, and the father of another pupil, Thomas Sanders, Bell was able to cut down on his teaching and concentrate on his experiments.
By May 1875, Bell thought he had “the germ of a great invention,” a way to convey the human voice over the telegraph using undulating electrical currents via reeds tuned to different frequencies. When he confided to Joseph Henry, the genius director of the Smithsonian who had contributed so much to the invention of the telegraph (see What Morse Wrought: The Electric Telegraph), that he still felt stymied by his lack of knowledge of electricity, Henry told him simply, “Get it!”
It was all the encouragement Bell needed, though much of that knowledge came in the form of Thomas A. Watson, a bright young electrical designer and mechanic whom Bell hired as his assistant. On June 2, 1875, Watson plucked one of the mobile metal reeds on their “acoustic telegraph” and transmitted the tone over the wire, making the reed on Bell’s end vibrate. It was done without “breaking” the current. Indeed, the battery did not generate the transmission at all—it only provided the magnetic field through which the magnetic-electric currents conveyed the sound.
The next month, Bell and Watson designed and built a receiver with a diaphragm of stretched goldbeater’s skin connected to a hinged armature. By the end of the year, Bell was ready to file patents in Great Britain and the United States, but he still had no real idea if his apparatus worked—he had not been able to produce anything more than indistinct “voice-like sounds” over the wires.
He received his patent on March 7, 1876—and three days later, working at their lab in Boston, Bell used his new “vibraphone” to call to Watson in another room—according to folklore, because he had spilled some acid: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” The words came through loud and clear.
It was the first time that “articulate speech,” as Bell called it, had been transmitted intelligibly over a wire by means of electricity. After a few more experiments with their new device over distances of up to four miles, Bell and his backers offered to sell their patent outright to the president of Western Union for $100,000. He said no. Bell, an able salesman, took his telephone to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it amazed visitors from around the world. Soon after, he married his Mabel (now twenty) and took her on an extended “working honeymoon” around Europe, demonstrating the phone for Queen Victoria, who deemed it “most extraordinary”—and within two years the head of Western Union was telling friends that if he could get the patent now for $25 million he would consider it a bargain.
This may have been apocryphal, as Bell and his associates still faced a stiff court fight. A number of other inventors had been working on similar devices, and these extended battles would eventually lead to the bribing of a US attorney general and all sorts of wild charges against Bell. None of this was vaguely true, and thanks to his copious record keeping and previous patent applications, Alexander Graham Bell was able to prove he had been first.
His telephone was still a rudimentary device that often required one to shout into it. Just as Bell would improve Edison’s phonograph by introducing a version that played wax records, Edison returned the favor by working with Charles Batchelor to invent a carbon button transmitter for the telephone that spared callers’ vocal cords and enabled transmission over greater distances. In January 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental phone call—this time from Lower Manhattan to Thomas Watson in San Francisco. Their 3,400-mile call was actually clearer than their first one, though Watson remarked that it would take him a little longer to come to Bell this time.
How the telephone works: sound is transmitted electrically, through wires, and then to a receiver tuned to different frequencies, made originally of reeds and later of stretched goldbeater’s skin and then carbon.
Bell’s sponsors, Hubbard and Sanders, would soon buy up Edison and Elisha Gray’s similar patents and merge Bell Telephone with Western Union, creating the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Meanwhile, though, Bell had moved on to a dozen new ways to improve the human condition. In 1880, he became the sixth man ever to be awarded the “Volta Prize,” established by Napoleon in 1801 to honor the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta (see It Started with Frankenstein: The Artificial Pacemaker). He selflessly used the $10,000 (about $250,000 in today’s money) he won with the vaunted Volta Prize to establish the Volta Bureau, which promoted “the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf,” and the Volta Laboratories, which supported promising experiments by himself but also other scientists, all of whom would keep the rights to their own patents.
The Volta Labs would inspire the creation of the famous Bell Labs, set up in 1925 by the company Bell founded, and Bell Labs would spin off in turn that amazing aggregation of world-changing intellectual energy known as Silicon Valley (see “A Computer on a Chip”: the Microprocessor).
Bell would get rich from his endeavors, but his money was soon poured back into his next set of experiments; money never was the main object. As a wedding present, Bell gave Mabel 1,487 of his 1,497 shares in the new Bell Telephone Company.
the genius details
The first words transmitted over Johann Reis’s “telephon” were “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat,” or “The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad.” Indeed.
President Rutherford B. Hayes had the first phone installed in the White House, with the number “1.”
There are roughly 6 billion telephone subscriptions in the world today, including 1.26 billion fixed-line subscriptions and 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions. The first mobile telephone call was made in 1946.
Bell considered his “greatest achievement” to be the “photophone,” a wireless telephone he invented with his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter in 1880 that could transmit human conversations and other sounds on a beam of light—the basis of fiber-optic communications, a hundred years early.
On his death in 1922, Bell’s wife, Mabel, whispered to him, “Don’t leave me,” and he signed back, “No,” before expiring. On his death, every phone in North America went silent in his honor.
The word decibel was invented in honor of Alexander Graham Bell.
Carrying the voice of Bing: the 1949 Ampex magnetic tape recorder.
Magnetic tape recording, both audio and visual, had one of the more unusual lineages of any American invention, beginning its career as a prize of war. It was made commercially viable in the United States, thanks to the contributions of two perfectly typical Americans: a former fighter pilot for the Czar of All the Russias, and one of the greatest of all radio crooners.
Alexander M. “Alexi” Poniatoff was born in 1892 near the provincial city of Kazan in the Russian Empire. His interest in mechanics led his father, a wealthy lumber merchant, to send him to Berlin for advanced degrees in engineering. Returning to Russia, he became a pilot for the Imperial Russian Navy in World War I and then for the White Russian forces in the civil war that followed. When the communists won, he fled to China to work for the Shanghai Power Company, then moved on to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1932, at the age of forty. Working at General Electric, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the Dalmo Victor Company as an electric engineer during World War II, Poniatoff perfected a line of motors and generators for airborne radar systems.
Going into business for himself in 1944, Poniatoff founded the Ampex Corporation, named for his initials plus “excellence.” Ampex set up shop in Northern California, where a sort of prototypical “Silicon Valley” sprang up after the war, centered on the defense industry and the region’s superb public universities. Poniatoff succeeded in getting some top engineers to come work for him. But competition was fierce, and Poniatoff and his small team had to search constantly for new business opportunities. They found one when they heard a demonstration of a Magnetophon, a magnetic recording device manufactured by the Telefunken corporation in Germany and literally captured in the last days of the war by Jack Mullin, a US Army major in the Signal Corps.
Mullin was an engineer in the film industry, not an Ampex employee, but he willingly shared this technology for free, believing that he had recovered it at the taxpayers’ expense and had no proprietary right over it. Mullin and Poniatoff’s team took the German machines apart, then built their own prototype. Magnetic recording had been theorized as far back as 1888 by the American engineer Oberlin Smith, and various forms of magnetic tape had been developed by European inventors over the decades. It had a bad reputation, though, thanks to early British tapes that were made of paper and painted with magnetic oxide. The Ampex engineers went with Germany’s oxide-coated plastic film, then developed superior electrical reel and capstan motors that virtually eliminated “flutter” interference.
Their new machine, the Ampex Model 200A, was a major breakthrough. But how to get it out on the market? At the time, Ampex had only seven employees. Mullin came to the rescue again, taking the new device down to Bing Crosby’s ABC studio in Hollywood. Crosby at the time was doing a live show every week on the radio—or rather two live shows, one for the East Coast audience and one for the West, three hours later. The crooner saw at once that with a recording device of this quality he could cut his workload in half. Crosby immediately ordered up twenty of the new recording devices at $4,000 apiece, with a 60 percent down payment. Soon Der Bingle, a shrewd businessman, was promoting Ampex recorders himself.
It was the sale Poniatoff’s company needed to spring ahead, going from a seven-man concern to a global electronics giant employing thirteen thousand people in the course of the next fifteen years. The company moved rapidly in pioneering multichannel (multiple-track) tapes for use by the military, by the space program, and on movie soundtracks. It also whittled down its bulky industrial models to affordable mobile tape recorders for mass consumption.
Working on an eight-channel data recorder that the army could use when it blew up stuff—tanks, trucks, half-tracks—at its Aberdeen Proving Grounds, another leading Ampex engineer, Charles Ginsburg, encountered a seventeen-year-old prodigy who helped out at the company’s Redwood City headquarters in between high school. Ray Milton Dolby, the son of a local inventor, soon proved invaluable in working on another preoccupation of Poniatoff’s and Ginsburg’s: video tape recording.
Their work was slowed when Dolby had to leave for his own two years of military service. The central challenge was that video signals require more bandwidth than audio signals. Mullin and the BBC had created systems that moved tape across a fixed tape head at very fast speeds, but these required enormous amounts of tape and still didn’t record very well. Ginsburg and Dolby’s colleague at Ampex, Walt Selsted, came up with the key innovation: four equidistant heads that would record the video signal transversely—that is, down the tape’s width—as it moved at a normal speed. The heads would be at a right angle to the tape, held there by a vacuum system to ensure that tape and heads always stayed in contact with each other.
The guts of a three-head 1964 Ampex Fine Line F-44 audio tape recorder for home use. Ampex engineers kept the oxide-coated plastic film German engineers pioneered, then added superior electrical reel and capstan motors to all but eliminate “flutter” interference.
Introduced at a convention of CBS personnel in Chicago in April 1956, the video recorder brought the house down, leaving its audience “shouting, screaming, and whistling,” and standing on chairs, according to one account. Video recording would revolutionize television, making prerecorded shows the norm and eventually making innovations such as slow motion and instant replays possible.
Weirdly, even though it had pioneered the consumer audio recorder, neither Ampex nor any other American company seemed very interested in producing a video recorder for home use—in a country whose citizens were already averaging seven hours of TV watching per day. European and especially Japanese firms were rapidly catching up in magnetic recording technology, and they would come to dominate, then monopolize, the VCR industry in the 1980s and ’90s. It was an opportunity missed by a US industry that had lost the vision and drive it possessed back when it was still just a handful of engineers in a room, trying to make Bing Crosby come through in all his glory.
the genius details
The first video recording device, BBC’s Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus, used a thin steel tape traveling at over two hundred inches per second. The amount of tape it required for even one minute of video recording made it impractical.
Ampex’s successful transverse-scan technology packed much more data on every inch of tape, allowing tape speed to be reduced from two hundred inches to fifteen inches per second.
The voice of Emperor Franz Josef, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was recorded in 1900 at the Paris Exposition on a Poulsen Telegraphone—the oldest surviving magnetic recording.
Sony marketed the first home video recorder in 1964. Ampex and RCA followed a year later with monochrome, reel-to-reel recorders for under $1,000.
Sony’s Betamax video recorder debuted in 1975—but two years later, JVC released its VHS home video recorder, which would soon come to dominate the marketplace.