[78-L] Pressed in WHAT material...

[Dan Van Landingham]

On the subject of recording material:can anyone shed some light for me on a substance
called "Vitrolac".I have some circa 1933 long playing 10 inch recordings.RCA called them
Electrical Transcriptions.I once saw some ETs in an antique store in Winston,Oregon;what
I saw was one that was a disc that was by a symphony orchestra recording under the aus-
pices of either the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration.Also,
in a book I had read on the history of Atlantic Records,by Charles Green,the Phillipsburg,
New Jersey based National Records(owned by one Al Green)got into the record business
by furnishing discs that were made out of some conglomeration by a National employee
to other companies-until Green decided to cash in on the AFM recording ban by agreeing
to the AFM's terms of recording royalties.He lasted until about 1951 but had a rather imp-
ressive roster which included Big Joe Turner,Pete Johnson,Billy Eckstine and Eileen Bar-
ton who had a hit recording of If I Knew You Were Coming(I'd Have Baked a Cake).Nation-
al's first A&R man was Herb Abramson who helped Ahmet Ertugen start Atlantic in 1947.




From: Kristjan Saag <saag at telia.com>
Subject: Re: [78-L] Pressed in WHAT material...
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Date: Monday, November 16, 2009, 2:37 PM


Michael Biel wrote:

> I do want to add that Berliner used celluloid for his discs in the early
> 1890s before shellac -- possibly by 1889 but definitely in 1892 thru 94.
> There should be some additional research done on whether Berliner
> really used hard rubber at all.  I tend to think that some might have
> mistaken the celluloid pressings for hard rubber because hard rubber is
> mentioned in passing in a Berliner letter (I think).  I seem to think
> that he might have experimented in having pressings made but found them
> lacking.
---
The additional research has been done and it surprises me that Mike Biel 
doesn't know, or want to know about it. It was presented by Stephan Puille 
at the 2004 German IASA meeting and is based on FTIR (Fourier transform 
spectroscopy) analyses. It clearly shows that Berliner used celluloid for 
the first pressings at The Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik 
Neckarau-Mannheim (no commercial pressings whatsoever before the end of 
1890), but after a few month changed to hard rubber, which was used for all 
succeeding German pressings.
This has also been said a few times on this list, and I'm seriously 
beginning to doubt whether our collective efforts would do much better than 
Wikipedia, whose contributors, at least, seem to read each other postings.
See
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:GszaHTLD7j4J:www.iasa-online.de/files/2003_Berliner.pdf+%22puille%22+berliner+celluloid&hl=en&gl=se&sig=AFQjCNH-6_XvNXYDJlQBUQ9_As32O0Jqlw
and
http://www.iasa-online.de/bericht_2004.html

Kristjan 

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