[78-L] Record your voice!

[Michael Biel]

Donna Halper wrote:
>> Michael wrote--
>> You can make a quality recording on a dictaphone.  These discs can't
>> make a recording that can really be heard (see my other post.)  I'd like
>> to see those newspaper stories since this is the subject of my Ph.D
>> dissertation.
>>     
>
>   

> I love that dissertation. 

Thanks.  It is great having fans!
>  I am quoting from it as I get closer to 
> finishing my own PhD.  I doubt this list allows me to post a jpeg 
> scan of a newspaper article, so I'll either send them to you 
> off-list, or summarize the ones that are not scannable-- the 
> not-scannable ones come from 1922, and 1927-- in 1927, evidently, 
> several station program managers used the dictaphone to make 
> recordings of shows in order to critique them.
>
>   

I had found one item like this in Broadcasting magazine around 1934 I 
think, and there was a photo.  It should be quoted in the dissertation 
somewhere.  I would think it would have been an obvious thing for 
announcers to do since all of then should have known by then that you 
don't sound the same as you sound to yourself.  But I don't think that 
too many did it because these articles seem to think it is an unusual 
practice.  The 1934 article you scanned for me showed that Joe Cook 
practiced his routines on a dictaphone.  On the other hand Fred Allen 
hated it when his sponsors asked him to review the airchecks of his 
early programs like Linit Bathclub Review in 1932.  He described it as 
being like "breathing yesterday's air." 

The real interesting one is the Feb 6, 1915 article about a group of 
Hartford Conn. hams making recordings of code stations using a 
three-stage deForest amp, including some from British warships with the 
comments that some could not have ordinarily been heard without the 
amp.  This needs to be further researched for many reasons.  This was 
around the time that Armstrong discovered the feedback circuit and wowed 
David Sarnoff with reception of stations thousands of miles away  -- 
just like was described in this article.  But deForest was using a 
cascade system that fed one tube into another and that into another 
etc.  Armstrong did much more with one tube by feedback, but deForest 
insisted a while later that feedback didn't work.  The famous instance 
of the use of recordings of a code station was the recordings later in 
1915 by Charles Apgar in New Jersey of the German Telefunken station on 
Long Island which was transmitting speeded up code recordings by the 
Telegraphophone magnetic wire recorder.  Apgar's dictaphone recordings 
could be slowed down and it was discovered the German station was 
sending spy messages.  Your article from earlier in the year described 
the British warship transmissions as "the mysterious wireless messages 
which startled Connecticut operators about two months ago and gave rise 
to all sorts of speculations as to their origin".  But that is similar 
to how the news reports described the high-speed German coded signals.   
Maybe what was recorded in Conn was not British warships, but the German 
spy station!  Some of the Apger recordings exist -- I wonder if these 
from Conn do.
> Am I correct in saying that very few original (not fake, not 
> re-creations) recordings of radio shows from the early 20s have ever survived?
>
>   

Elizabeth's web site describes the ones I talked about in my 
dissertation and a few others that have been found since.  There are 
others, such as the Western Electric test recordings of NY Phil-Sym 
broadcasts that Lennick and I discussed here a few weeks ago, but none 
of those had announcers recorded, just musical excerpts.  Other than 
those, I don't think there are others before 27 that she and I don't 
list.  More syndicated discs have been found from 28 thru 32 in the past 
couple of years and many have been discussed on this list.  But from the 
early 20s, there is very, very little.

Mike Biel   mbiel at mbiel.com