Sound Recording Technology and Its Influence on the VCR

The Telegraphone

The idea of storing information onto a magnetic tape is a fundamental concept in video technology. The beginning experiments of recording information on tape focused on the storing of sound. The first documented experiments using magnetic tape were performed by Valdemer Poulsen, a Danish engineer. In 1898, Poulsen patented the first commercial audio tape recording system, the telegraphone. The telegraphone, however, had it's problems. It used a steel wire as a recording substance which did not pick up well, and along with this telephone receivers were built in. These telephone receivers only transmitted human voice, so music could not be recorded. The final major problem with the telegraphone was that its signal could not be amplified, so the telegraphone never had commercial success.

The Magnetophon

Expanding on Poulsen's 1898 patent for the Telegraphon, a German scientist, Fritz Pfluemer experimented with recording sound on a paper tape coated with ferromagnetic coating. In 1928, Pfluemer patented a paper tape coated with iron oxide and two years later sold this patent to the Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft (AEG) company. Working with BASF (an I. G. Farben subsidiary) who made tapes using a plastic tape instead of Pfluemer's paper one, AEG was able to release the Magnetophon in 1935. The Magnetophon used a one quarter inch tape and recorded with minimal interference. Roy Armes comments that "The key step in the development of the tape recorder was the combination of a non-magnetic plastic base and an iron-oxide coating." (Armes p. 76) In fact, this fundamental principle in tape recording last until today (granted that the new digital technology has almost taken over in sound recording and beginning in film reproduction) with the only significant changes in the tapes themselves occurring from different coatings, ferric oxide, chrome dioxide, ferri-chrome&, etc. (Armes p. 76)

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