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54-510: The magnetic tape on VHS-C cassettes is wound on one main spool and used a gear wheel which moves the tape forward. It can also be moved by hand. This development hampered the sales of the Betamax system somewhat, because the Betamax cassette geometry prevented a similar development. VHS-C cassettes have a switch to inhibit recording of a cassette. Not all adapters propagate the state of this switch to

108-406: A fishing reel . After recording or playback, the wire has to be rewound before any further use can be made of the machine. Unlike reel-to-reel tape recorders, the take-up reel on most wire recorders is not removable. A break in the wire is repaired by tying the ends together and trimming. When such a repair is made to an existing recording, a jump in the sound results during playback, but because of

162-464: A 1966 Mission Impossible episode titled " A Spool There Was ". The Department S episode "A Cellar Full of Silence" revolves around a blackmail recording on a wire disguised as part of another object. A wire recorder is also used as a plot device in Arthur Miller 's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman . Similarly, in the 1990 film Dick Tracy , set in the 1930s, Warren Beatty, in the title role,

216-511: A 75-minute recording of a Woody Guthrie concert using a wire recorder. The recording only came to light in 2001, and appears to be the only surviving live recording of Woody Guthrie; it was restored over several years and released on CD in 2007. The CD, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 , subsequently won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album . One of the world's first stored-program computers, SEAC , built in 1950 at

270-440: A feature known as SQPB, or SuperVHS Quasi-PlayBack, but did not make a significant impact on the market as the arrival of MiniDV as a consumer standard made low-cost, digital, near- broadcast quality video widely available to consumers, and rendered analog camcorders largely obsolete. Early VHS-C cassettes did not have a mechanism to ratchet or lock the supply reel when not in use, making them susceptible to spilling tape inside

324-399: A model, and some authors to prepare specialized manuals. These improved wire recorders were not only marketed for office use, but also as home entertainment devices that offered advantages over the home acetate disc recorders which were increasingly sold for making short recordings of family and friends and for recording excerpts from radio broadcasts. Unlike home-cut phonograph records,

378-431: A reduced level. Magnetic wire recording was replaced by magnetic tape recording by the 1950s, but devices employing one or the other of these media had been more or less simultaneously under development for many years before either came into widespread use. The principles and electronics involved are nearly identical. The first wire recorder was invented in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen , who gave his product

432-441: A strip of plastic to each end of the wire. This was designed to press-fit snugly into either spool. To prevent the wire from piling up unevenly on the spool as it was recorded, played or rewound, on the majority of machines the head assembly slowly oscillates up and down or back and forth to distribute the wire evenly. On some machines, moving wire guides perform this function. These are similar to mechanisms that distribute line across

486-532: A thin steel wire using varying levels of magnetization. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen . The first magnetic recorder to be made commercially available anywhere was the Telegraphone, manufactured by the American Telegraphone Company, Springfield, Massachusetts in 1903. The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head which magnetizes each point along

540-461: A wire player. In episode 2.18 of Adventures of Superman , "Semi-Private Eye", PI Homer Garrity has a wire recorder he uses to surreptitiously record his clients. The fictional Allied officers of Hogan's Heroes used a wire recorder to record a meeting in Kommandant Klink's office on a device that was disguised as a sewing box made of wooden thread spools. A wire recording was the subject of

594-570: Is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film . It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic tape can with relative ease record and play back audio, visual, and binary computer data. Magnetic tape revolutionized sound recording and reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. Since

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648-423: Is a system for storing digital information on magnetic tape using digital recording . Tape was an important medium for primary data storage in early computers, typically using large open reels of 7-track , later 9-track tape. Modern magnetic tape is most commonly packaged in cartridges and cassettes, such as the widely supported Linear Tape-Open (LTO) and IBM 3592 series. The device that performs

702-570: Is found in the house of a former agent of J. Edgar Hoover . More recently in a UK Sky History TV series "U-boat Wargamers", in the last episode Captain Gilbert Roberts CBE debriefs the German U-boat Admiral Eberhard Godt using a Wirex Electronics Ltd of Edgware, London model B1 wire recorder to record the debrief (the machine is shown running). He secretly uses a second machine, hidden in an attache case, to record

756-478: Is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal . Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocassette recorders (VCRs) and camcorders . Videotapes have also been used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram . Some magnetic tape-based formats include: Magnetic-tape data storage

810-428: Is not as suitable for editing as magnetic tape (a plastic-based material) would prove to be, in the field of radio broadcasting it offered tremendous advantages over trying to edit material recorded on transcription discs , which was usually accomplished by dubbing to a new transcription disc with the aid of multiple turntables and stopwatches. The first regularly scheduled network radio program produced and edited on wire

864-406: Is possible on a spool less than 3 inches (76 mm) in diameter because the wire was very fine, having a diameter of .004 to .006 in (0.10 to 0.15 mm) for later models, an improvement over Poulsen's Telegraphone of 1898 which used .01-inch (0.25 mm) wire. Smaller 30- and 15-minute lengths of wire were employed by the majority of recorders made after 1945. Some heavy-duty recorders use

918-566: Is shown manipulating a wire on which the voice of Mumbles (played by Dustin Hoffman) is recorded, in order to decipher the otherwise unintelligible speech of the fictitious criminal. In the 1990 film The Two Jakes , set in 1948, the plot centers around a wire recording made in a divorce-case-turned-homicide. In the TV series Bones , Series 10, Episode 2, "The Lance to the Heart", an old wire recording of JFK

972-464: The LaserDisc system. Although DV video was ported to 8-mm hardware in 1999 to become Digital8 , D-VHS was never adapted to a compact VHS format. A higher quality version of VHS-C was released, based on S-VHS , known as S-VHS-C , that competed against Hi8 , the higher quality version of Video8. The arrival on the market of inexpensive S-VHS-C camcorders led to the inclusion on many modern VCRs of

1026-530: The 1950s, however, tape recorders which were sufficiently affordable, simple, and compact to be suitable for home and office use started appearing and they rapidly superseded wire recorders in the marketplace. Exceptionally, the use of wire for sound recording continued into the 1960s in Protona's Minifon miniature recorders, in which the importance of maximizing recording time in a minimum of space outweighed other considerations. For any given level of audio quality,

1080-488: The 1954 Dragnet feature film carried and used a Protona Minifon wire recorder to gather evidence in a pivotal scene. The 1958 spy thriller Spy in the Sky! uses a wire recording as a plot device. In the episode "The Relaxed Informer" (S1E24) of Danger Man the spy courier is smuggling a recording made on wire secreted inside the handle holding a puppet's strings. The recording wire is later shown being played in an office using

1134-419: The 1980s, 20-minute VHS-C cassettes were the norm. In 1989 JVC increased the run time to 30 minutes by using thinner tape. Later, JVC offered 45-minute and 60-minute cassettes. For comparison, 120-minute 8-mm cassettes became available in the late 1985 and quickly became the norm. Later, 150-minute and 180-minute 8-mm cassettes were offered as well. The later Hi8 and S-VHS-C systems both have a quality similar to

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1188-487: The Armour Research Foundation, Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length. In 1946, Norman Corwin and his technical assistant, Lee Bland, took a wire recorder on their One World Flight, a round-the-world trip subsidized by friends of Wendell Willkie and patterned after Willkie's own 1942 trip. Corwin documented

1242-617: The U.S. National Bureau of Standards , used wire recorders to store digital data. In 1952, the Harvard University physics department's musical variety show The Physical Revue , written by Tom Lehrer and performed by a cast including Lehrer, Lewis M. Branscomb and others, was recorded on wire by a later winner of the Nobel Prize , Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. This recording was recently rediscovered and made available online. Wire recorders sometimes appear in motion pictures made during

1296-562: The VCR itself, so accidental erasure of a write-protected cassette is possible if the adapter's write protect lug or switch allows it. To reduce the size of cameras, the VHS-C mechanism uses a two-thirds size head drum (41.3 mm diameter instead of the original VHS drum size of 62 mm). The wrap angle is 270 degrees instead of VHS's 180 degrees. The drum rotates at a proportionately higher speed, and four rotary video heads are used to trace out exactly

1350-433: The VCR's takeup sprocket, which connected to a gear train to drive the VHS-C cassette takeup gear. VHS end of tape is normally detected by a light in the VCR that inserts into the full-size cassette body, and detected by sensors in the VCR located at the far outer corners of the front of the cassette. Because the width of VHS-C is narrower than a full-size VHS cassette and does not align with the full-size end of tape sensors,

1404-405: The adapter has a guide roller swing arm to pull tape out of the VHS-C cartridge out to the far right edge where it would normally be located in a full-size cassette. When the VHS-C cartridge is to be removed from the adapter, a geared retraction system pulls in the excess loose tape when the swing arm retracts. VHS-C had similar video quality as Video8 , but a significantly shorter run time. During

1458-734: The development of inexpensive designs licensed internationally by the Brush Development Company of Cleveland, Ohio and the Armour Research Foundation of the Armour Institute of Technology (later the IIT Research Institute of the Illinois Institute of Technology ). The two organizations (Brush and Armour) licensed dozens of manufacturers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Examples are Wilcox-Gay, Peirce, Webcor , and Air King. Sales elsewhere encouraged Sears to provide

1512-492: The early 1950s, magnetic tape has been used with computers to store large quantities of data and is still used for backup purposes. Magnetic tape begins to degrade after 10–20 years and therefore is not an ideal medium for long-term archival storage. The exception is data tape formats like LTO which are specifically designed for long-term archiving. Information in magnetic tapes is often recorded in tracks which are narrow and long areas of information recorded magnetically onto

1566-486: The end of the war. It was only after the war that Americans, particularly Jack Mullin , John Herbert Orr , and Richard H. Ranger , were able to bring this technology out of Germany and develop it into commercially viable formats. Bing Crosby , an early adopter of the technology, made a large investment in the tape hardware manufacturer Ampex . A wide variety of audiotape recorders and formats have been developed since. Some magnetic tape-based formats include: Videotape

1620-425: The high speed of the wire the loss of an inch due to tying and trimming is trivial and might pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, if the wire breaks it can easily become tangled, and snarls are extremely difficult to fix. Sometimes the only practical solution is to carefully cut the tangled portion away from the spool—an operation which runs the risk of endlessly enlarging the problem—and discard it. The difficulty of handling

1674-447: The larger Armour spools, which can contain enough wire to record continuously for several hours. Because the wire is pulled past the head by the take-up spool, the actual wire speed slowly increases as the effective diameter of the take-up spool increases. Standardization prevented this peculiarity from having any impact on the playback of a spool recorded on a different machine, but audible consequences can result from substantially altering

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1728-424: The nearly hair-thin wire had the advantage that it was a much more compact storage medium than tape. The Minifon wire recorder was designed for stealth use and its accessories included a microphone disguised as a wristwatch. Wire recording was also used in some aircraft flight recorders beginning in the early 1940s, mainly for recording radio conversations between crewmen or with ground stations. Because steel wire

1782-428: The noticeable background hiss that characterized tape recordings before the advent of noise reduction systems. The Magnecord Corp. of Chicago briefly manufactured a high-fidelity wire recorder intended for studio use, but soon abandoned the system to concentrate on tape recorders. To facilitate handling as the user threaded the wire across the recording head and affixed it to the take-up spool, some manufacturers attached

1836-405: The original length of a recorded wire by excisions or by dividing it up onto multiple spools. The audio fidelity of a wire recording made on one of these post-1945 machines is comparable to a contemporary phonograph record or one of the early tape recorders, given a microphone or other signal source of equal quality. Because of its homogeneous nature and very high speed, wire is relatively free of

1890-528: The post-war world and used his recordings in a series of 13 broadcast documentaries on CBS—which were also among the first broadcast uses of recorded sound allowed by the radio networks. In 1947, Maya Deren , an American experimental filmmaker, purchased a wire recorder from her Guggenheim Fellowship funds to record Haitian Vodou ceremonies for her documentary: Meditation on Violence . In 1949 at Fuld Hall in Rutgers University , Paul Braverman made

1944-419: The reel's turntable and teeth above the shell, allowing it to rotate freely when in use. If a tape with slack was loaded into a VHS-C adapter, the tape could sit on the wrong side of a tape guide when the adapter loaded. The result would be a tape and cassette combination that would not play in a video deck, and would damage the tape to some extent when being unloaded. Magnetic tape Magnetic tape

1998-408: The same helical recording path as a standard sized VHS drum. By adding more heads, the same small VHS-C drum can record and playback FM Hi-Fi audio that is also fully compatible with a standard sized Hi-Fi video drum VHS-C cassette was larger than Video8 cassette, but was compatible with VHS tape recorders, using a special adapter cassette. The adapter contains a standard full-size engagement hub for

2052-445: The shell. Consequently, manufacturers placed a label on their camcorders and adapters to warn the user to check that the tape is not slackened before inserting a cassette. The user could dissipate the slack by manually turning the take-up gear. Later cassettes corrected this problem by adding teeth to the supply reel to lock it in place when no upward pressure is applied. The spindle of the camcorder or VCR supplies pressure to float

2106-399: The spacing that exists between adjacent tracks. While good for short-term use, magnetic tape is highly prone to disintegration. Depending on the environment, this process may begin after 10–20 years. Over time, magnetic tape made in the 1970s and 1980s can suffer from a type of deterioration called sticky-shed syndrome . It is caused by hydrolysis of the binder in the tape and can render

2160-458: The steel wire could be reused for new recordings and allowed much longer uninterrupted recordings to be made than the few minutes of audio per side possible with disc recorders. The earliest magnetic tape recorders , not commercially available in the United States until 1948, were too expensive, complicated, and bulky to compete with these consumer-level wire recorders. During the first half of

2214-670: The tape unusable. Since the introduction of magnetic tape, other technologies have been developed that can perform the same functions, and therefore, replace it. Such as for example, hard disk drives in computers replacing cassette tape readers such as the Atari Program Recorder and the Commodore Datasette for software, CDs and MiniDiscs replacing cassette tapes for audio, and DVDs replacing VHS tapes. Despite this, technological innovation continues. As of 2014 Sony and IBM continue to advance tape capacity. Magnetic tape

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2268-452: The tape, which are separate from each other and often spaced apart from adjacent tracks. Tracks are often parallel to the length of the tape, in which case they are known as longitudinal tracks, or diagonal relative to the length of the tape in helical scan . There are also transverse scan and arcuate scanning, used in Quadruplex videotape . Azimuth recording is used to reduce or eliminate

2322-435: The time of their widest use. For example, in office scenes in the original 1951 version of The Thing , a typical Webster-Chicago unit is plainly visible on a small table by the window. In some shots (e.g., at 0:11:40 on the 2003 DVD release), its detached lid, carrying two extra spools of wire, is also visible. In this instance the recorder is simply set dressing and is not shown in operation. Ann Robinson 's character in

2376-619: The trade name Telegraphone. Wire recorders for dictation and telephone recording were made almost continuously by multiple companies (mainly the American Telegraphone Company) through the 1920s and 1930s, but use of this new technology was extremely limited. Dictaphone and Ediphone recorders, which still employed wax cylinders as the recording medium, were the devices normally used for these applications during this period. The peak of wire recording lasted from approximately 1946 to 1954. It resulted from technical improvements and

2430-433: The two poles of the record/replay head on opposite sides of the wire. The wire is thus magnetized transversely to the direction of travel. This method of magnetization was quickly found to have the limitation that as the wire twisted during playback, there were times when the magnetization of the wire was at right angles to the position of the two poles of the head and the output from the head fell to almost zero. The recorder

2484-414: The wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal being supplied to the recording head at that instant. By later drawing the wire across the same or a similar head while the head is not being supplied with an electrical signal, the varying magnetic field presented by the passing wire induces a similarly varying electric current in the head, recreating the original signal at

2538-414: The wire itself when necessary is arguably the only serious shortcoming, among several definite advantages, of steel wire as a monophonic recording medium. Editing is accomplished by cutting and splicing. As the knot of each splice passes through the head during playback, a very brief loss of normal contact is inevitable and the resulting dropouts can make editing musical recordings problematic. Although wire

2592-421: The writing or reading of data is called a tape drive . Autoloaders and tape libraries are often used to automate cartridge handling and exchange. Compatibility was important to enable transferring data. Magnetic wire recording Wire recording , also known as magnetic wire recording , was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage . It recorded sound signals on

2646-577: Was CBS ' Hear It Now with Edward R. Murrow . In 1944–1945, the 3132 Signal Service Company Special of the U.S. Army 's top secret Ghost Army used wire recorders to create sonic deception on the Western Front in the Second World War . Multiple battlefield scenarios were recreated using military sounds recorded at Fort Knox , Kentucky . The wire-recorded audio, which was played back through powerful amplifiers and speakers mounted on vehicles,

2700-407: Was improved by placing the two poles on the same side of the wire so that the wire was magnetized along its length or longitudinally. Additionally, the poles were shaped into a V so that the head wrapped around the wire to some extent. This increased the magnetizing effect and also increased the sensitivity of the head on replay because it collected more of the magnetic flux from the wire. This system

2754-546: Was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany. Because of escalating political tensions and the outbreak of World War II, these developments in Germany were largely kept secret. Although the Allies knew from their monitoring of Nazi radio broadcasts that the Germans had some new form of recording technology, its nature was not discovered until the Allies acquired German recording equipment as they invaded Europe at

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2808-421: Was more compact, robust, and heat-resistant than magnetic tape (which is plastic-based), wire recorders continued to be manufactured for this purpose through the 1950s and remained in use somewhat later than that. There were also wire recorders made to record data in satellites and other uncrewed spacecraft of the 1950s to perhaps the 1970s. Poulsen's original Telegraphone and other very early recorders placed

2862-400: Was not entirely immune to twisting but the effects were far less marked. Compared to tape recorders, wire recording devices have a high media speed, made necessary because of the use of the solid metal medium. Standard postwar wire recorders use a nominal speed of 24 inches per second (610 mm/s), making a typical one-hour spool of wire 7,200 feet (approx. 2200 m) long. This enormous length

2916-567: Was used to conceal real Allied deployments, locations and operations. In 1944 at the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh used wire recorders as a tool to compose music. In 1946, David Boder , a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using an early wire recorder from

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