September 12, 2022 • 48 mins
One challenge with data preservation is that the way we store information changes rapidly. In this episode, we look at some media formats that are now obsolete, including some that Jonathan had never heard about before!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hedude,
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Radio and how the tech
are you? You know? I recently started buying DVDs and
blue rays and vinyl records again, partly because I'm tired
(00:27):
of titles disappearing from various streaming platforms. You know, you
you count on something being there, and then you log
into your account and realize, Hey, that thing I wanted
to experience isn't on this service anymore. So that's part
of the reason. Another part is because I actually have
this tiny little house in the middle of nowhere that
(00:47):
has like no connectivity, and so I wanted to get
some media that doesn't require an Internet connection because I
can only watch the lizards and squirrels for so long
before I start criticizing their lack of narrative of they
do not take direction well. Anyway, I thought it might
be fun to talk about some older forms of media
(01:08):
that have passed out of favor or even gone completely obsolete.
And this is more than just an episode where we
look back and make goofy jokes about old forms of media.
I've talked before about how data preservation is a real challenge,
and and this is part of it. There are a
lot of different challenges associated with the preservation of information.
(01:33):
Sometimes we commit data, whether that's computer code, or it's
an audio recording or video or digital documents or anything else,
and we commit to a medium that subsequently loses support,
and at that point, the information that's stored on this
old format is on borrowed time. We need to either
(01:56):
port the information over to another format, one that at
least has support today, or we have to resign ourselves
to eventually losing those older copies. Now, in some cases,
like popular TV shows or movies or albums, we might
not need to worry too much about the whole thing disappearing,
(02:18):
but we might lose certain instances of that thing. For example,
let's say that you were you bought an early DVD
and had an amazing commentary track on it, and you
really thought it was entertaining, and you've since lost it,
and now when you start searching for a DVD of
(02:40):
this same thing, all the current ones don't have that
commentary track. That's one example of the sort of stuff
you can lose even with things that continue to have
at least some support in in current media. So this
is a tricky thing. And let me give you an
example of just lost media entirely. There's a popular television
(03:04):
series called Doctor Who, and this is an English TV
series if you're not familiar with it. It's been on
forever since nineteen sixty three, actually, though not consistently since
nineteen sixty and it was broadcast by the BBC, which
is effectively a state backed broadcast network in the UK.
(03:25):
And at the time, the BBC's normal method of operation
was to broadcast content and if they started to run
low on real to real tapes where they would store
this stuff, they would just white older programs in order
to put something else on that tape. So instead of
buying new tape and figuring out where to store it
(03:46):
and all that kind of stuff, they just say, hey,
let's just erase this old thing. No one who's who's
going to care? Because I mean, that was the thought was.
It wasn't preservation, it was just it was transmission of entertainment,
and then you moved on. No one was really thinking
ahead two uh, you know, documenting this stuff and keeping
it in a library and then further down the line,
(04:08):
opening it up for home consumption. That just wasn't even
remotely in the cards when people were thinking about this.
In fact, I want to say that Eric Idol of
Monty Python argued with the BBC and made certain that
he got possession of the tapes after they produced the
TV show so that the original Monty Python broadcasts would
(04:30):
not subsequently get wiped because other shows had met that fate.
So as a result, several of the early seasons of
Doctor Who have missing episodes or entire missing seasons. And
now and again you'll hear someone happening across an old
copy of a previously lost episode, and that's a big deal.
And because all forms of storage media have a limited lifespan,
(04:53):
as time passes, the chances of finding a good copy
of a previously missing episode decrease because the actual material
that the the broadcast is saved upon will deteriorate over time.
So yeah, data preservation is an important thing for us.
To preserve things like like work of cultural significance, art information,
(05:19):
you know, being able to document changes in public perception
even like these are all important things, and they're made
more difficult by the fact that we have these various
forms of media that can go obsolete over time. Now,
in the case of the BBC, the media isn't missing
because we no longer support the format right real to
(05:40):
real tape is still something that we have, you know,
working equipment that can you that can actually access that.
But you know, it is likely that you can grasp
that when formats evolve, we can end up leaving data
on previous formats behind. And again, as someone who is
back to buying optical disks for tell television and movies
(06:01):
and vinyl records for my albums, I frequently encountered the
problem of looking for specific titles only to find out
that the version I want is out of publication, or
that the addition I wanted has long been unavailable, and
anything that I can find on the market today is
not exactly what I was looking for. So let's get
(06:21):
a look at some formats that either no longer exist
or they have such limited support that they might as
well be obsolete. One type of recording that was very
nearly lost for good was the phone autograph. So this
is the in fact, one of the earliest, possibly the
earliest example of recording an audio signal UH to a
(06:45):
different medium. So a French inventor named Edward Lyone Scott
built the phonotograph way back in eighteen fifty seven. This
predates Edison in the phonograph and as the names just,
this device was meant to quote unquote right down sound.
(07:05):
As I said, this is the earliest version of recorded
sound that we have not for reproducing sound, our programming sound.
We'll touch on that as well in this episode. Because
there were ways where you could program sound for a
device like an organ for example, but you couldn't just
(07:27):
record audio and play it back. Now Scott, unlike Edison,
he wasn't concerned with playing audio back. That wasn't what
he was thinking of at all, So his methodology wasn't
meant to allow playback. His plan was to use the
phone autograph to record audio for study, with the perhaps
(07:47):
ultimate goal of creating a speech to text methodology. That is,
you could use the phone autograph to record speech, and
then by studying the record the thing that was produced
by the phone autograph, then another person who was skilled
in the art would be able to recreate what was said,
(08:09):
or to reproduce what was said or read what had
been said. So the record left behind would be distinct
enough to know what words had been spoken, but it
would take a lot of study to learn which phonemes
produced particular shapes. And as it turned out, it's way
more complicated than what Scott was thinking, but it was
(08:29):
an interesting line of thought. So by shapes, I'm talking
about patterns drawn on smoke blackened glass or paper. So
let's say you get a pane of glass. It's it's
coated with lamp black. So there's this thin black coating
on the surface of the glass, and the stylists that
(08:49):
they would use was actually some bristles, and those bristles
connected to a diaphragm that itself was at the narrow
end of an acoustic trump It not the musical instrument trumpet,
but the trumpet shape. So you have the big open
side and then on the narrow side you've got this little, thin,
sensitive diaphragm. Connected to that are these bristles that can
(09:14):
just barely make contact with the lamp blacked surface of
this piece of glass. This acoustic trumpet would mimic the
human ear, So if you look at a human ear,
you're like, oh, I see the ear is the opening
of the trumpet the canal. Is this narrowing to the
ear drum is the same as this little diaphragm. So
(09:36):
in sound waves would enter the acoustic end of this trumpet,
the open end of this trumpet, I should say, and
then travel down the narrow pathway. It would cause the
diaphragm to vibrate. The glass would move across the bristles
at a regular speed, at an unbroken regular speed, and
(09:59):
the bristles would have vibrate with the vibration of the
diaphragm which came from the speaking. So the idea was
that because the time was was constant, the travel time
for the glass was constant, you could look at the
wiggly line created by these bristles and that would represent
(10:19):
the sound that entered into the trumpet. And theoretically, if
you were able to really study this, you should be
able to tell what someone said based solely upon that
squiggly line tracing the lampblack on the glass. And you know,
that was a really interesting idea. Scott's work wasn't fully successful.
(10:42):
Like he he was able to create the device and
the device worked, but figuring out what was said based
upon what was recorded turned out to be way harder
than what he expected. It was just much more difficult
to really suss all that out, and Scott's work plunged
into obscurity for many years and was in danger of
(11:03):
just being forgotten entirely, and then the narrative would just
be Edison as the father of recorded sound. Now, in
two thousand eight, a project called First Sounds found phone
autograms these recordings that were made from Scott's invention, and
through the use of digital scanning and some clever programming,
they were able to recreate the sound that was originally recorded.
(11:26):
Since the phone autogram could only record in two dimensions,
the amount of information it captured was somewhat limited, but
they could actually create uh simulated playback of this recorded sound.
Elements of the phone autograph would actually make their way
into devices like the grammophone, and this would aim to
(11:46):
record audio for the purposes of playback rather than scientific studies.
So this was taking Scott's idea but then expanding it
specifically for the purposes of playback. So the grammo phone
and then Edison phonograph technology would create the foundation for
what would ultimately evolve into vinyl records much further into
(12:07):
the future. So While the phone autograph itself is obsolete,
its influence lives on today for those of us who
still have a soft spot for turntables and LPs. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
i'll talk about another super cool but obsolete form of media. Okay,
(12:35):
we're back, and I want to talk about organets. This
one's a little tricky because tracing the history of organets
can take you down a very long rabbit hole. Uh. First,
let's start off with what an organet actually is. So
it is a device that plays back music, instrumental music,
(12:56):
and specifically, it's a read instrument. It that will play
back music and you can't just play any tune on it.
It's not like a keyboard that blows air through reads
or anything like that. Instead, you would program music using
a perforated surface, very much like a player piano. Right.
(13:17):
So it might be a long strip of paper that
has perforated holes at specific points that represent specific notes
and the duration of those notes. Or it might be uh,
strips of cardboard, which was also very common, Or it
could even be metal disks that have perforations in them
(13:38):
so air can flow through those perforations. And thus ultimately
allow reads to play, either by blowing directly across the
reads are or allowing a valve to open and do that.
But there's a lot more going on than just that.
If we were to trace the history of pipe and
read organs which pre eight Oregon nets, uh, that history
(14:03):
takes us really far back um. In fact, it takes
us all the way back to ancient Greece with a
musical device called the hydrau liss, and this was essentially
an organ that used air pressure and water pressure to
play notes through pipes. So the organ head different pipes
(14:27):
that were built to tune to specific notes, and if
you were to force air through this pipe, it would
produce the note it had been tuned to. And you
would have keys that you could press down, and if
you press on a key, it would essentially allow a
valve to open for that specific pipe, and air would
(14:47):
then be able to pass through. But where did the
air come from? Right? Yes, if you press the key,
it opens up this air path and that would allow
a note to play for air to force through the pipe,
But the air has to come from somewhere. Well. The
air came courtesy of a chamber that was partly filled
with water, and a bellows like pump would force air
(15:08):
into this chamber, so the air would actually start to
push the water down, and the water would have this
regular pressure on the air inside valve would stop the
air from just flowing right back out towards where the
bellows were, where the pump was, and when you pressed
down a key, it would allow the air and escape route,
(15:29):
so it would go out and go through the pipe,
And by continuing to pump the bellows, you would continue
to maintain pressure inside this chamber that also had water
in it, so that you could continue to play the instrument.
And this thing is thousands of years old. It was
before a common era when this was invented. It's it's
(15:50):
incredibly ingenious. I would love to do a full episode
about um pipe organs and reed organs and their history
because it is really fascinating. It's also a little complicated
to talk about without the use of visual aids, so
it's a daunting principle. But anyway, this basic idea would
(16:11):
evolve over time and we would get pipe and read
organs that you might be more familiar with. In fact,
once upon a time I actually owned some bellows organs,
some pump organs where I could move the foot pedals
to pump air into the organ and then play um
musical notes, and you had to keep on pumping if
(16:32):
you wanted to maintain that pressure. To be able to
do that, it was really neat. So then we get
to devices similar to the organets that would take advantage
of this air pressure idea, but they would remove the
human player from the experience. UH. One of these, a
(16:54):
predecessor to the organet was the barrel organ or roller oregan.
So with a barrel organ, you have a pump or
bellows that provides air power. You have musical notes that
get produced through pipes or reads, but instead of a keyboard,
the valves for these pipes connect to little levers, and
(17:15):
you program music on a cob or barrel. So this
is a cylinder and has various little projections on it,
like a little spike or sometimes kind of staples, similar
to what you might see with a music box. If
you've ever looked into a music box and seeing the
little barrel turning has a little projections on it. So
these little protrusions would come into contact with these levers
(17:38):
connected to the valves, and when they would. It would
make the valve open, which would allow air to escape
the chamber of the instrument through a read or pipe,
and a note would play. So as the cylinder rotates,
it hits these levers to produce pre programmed music. The
(17:58):
quality of the music depends largely on the quality of
the pre programmed barrel. If you did a poor job
placing the pens and staples on the barrel, then the
songs just not gonna sound right. The staples, by the way,
would hold a valve open longer than just one of
the little projections would, so if you needed a sustained note,
you would use these staples to do that. Now, if
(18:19):
you've ever encountered an organ grinder, like a person who
plays one of these on the street, or you've seen
one in movies or whatnot, you have seen a version
of the barrel organ. They are typically cranked by hand,
and the hand crank powers both the bellows and the
rotation of the barrel itself. And again, I would need
to do a full episode to talk about the technology
(18:41):
behind this, the various gears that allow this to happen,
because it's really fascinating stuff. But let's finally get too orcadets,
so rather than using a barrel with these little projections
or a cob like the organ grinder and barrel organ devices,
they would use referred of material through which air could
(19:02):
flow freely. Some organets depended upon forcing air through the holes,
like blowing air through the holes in order to engage
with reads and play a note. Others would create a
vacuum so they would pull air through the holes and
essentially do the same. It's really not that different from
how a harmonica works. Like if you ever play to harmonica,
you know that if you blow air, you will make
(19:24):
the reads vibrate and get a certain sound. If you
suck air in, the reads will vibrate and you'll get
a slightly different sound. So anyway, the solid bits of material,
like the solid bits of of the paper or the
disc block airflow right. Air cannot flow through solid paper
or solid metal, So in those cases like no note
(19:47):
plays because it has it can't go through the material.
A hole allows a note to play out. Now, most
organets had between fourteen and forty or really more frequently
thirty nine reads, so your media would have to match
the instrument to play properly. Right, if your player only
had fourteen reads and you had a paper roll designed
(20:13):
for a thirty nine read device. It won't work because
you can't line things up properly and you have to
line up the whole's just right, or else the wrong
notes are gonna play, or you're gonna destroy the recording
now or the program, I should say, it's not even
a recording, it's a program. One version of the organ
at used metal discs, which were not this similar to
(20:36):
record albums, except these had holes punched in them as
opposed to grooves cut into them, and you would align
them properly on the organette. You would turn a crank
and this would turn the disc and wind would go
through it and through to the reads, and you would
play the pre program music. And it's pretty impressive stuff.
Their videos on YouTube where you can watch people demonstrating
(20:59):
how Gannett's work, including these metal disc versions, and some
of them sound really nice, like they're tuned really nicely
and they're producing nice notes. But the rise of the
phonograph would reduce organets to curiosities. And while they are
highly sought after today by collectors, at the time when
phonographs were starting to rise in popularity, most folks were
(21:22):
just putting their organ ets away and not thinking about
them anymore. These days, I could arguably talk about film
being a nearly obsolete medium, almost completely replaced by video,
but that seems particularly harsh and it's not completely true.
I mean, there are still filmmakers who are using actual
(21:42):
film in their and their projects. Photographic and cinematic film
has been around for more than a century. Basically, it
all has to do with a strip of plastic film
coded in photoreactive chemicals. When these are exposed to light,
the chemicals on the film react. And if you were
to put such a film in a device that can
direct light to the film using a lens and a
(22:05):
shutter to control when the light can come through and
when it can't, you can make yourself a fancy schmancy
film camera and capture images. It will capture whatever the
light captured when it was entering the lens and hit
the film. At that point you have to develop the film,
create a negative image, and then transfer that over to
new film to get your positive image. But then you've
(22:25):
got your cinematic masterpiece. Now Here in the States, film
enthusiasts became familiar with eight millimeter sixteen millimeter and Super
eight formats, So the millimeter refers to essentially the width
of the film, the strip of film. So an eight
millimeter film is shot on a strip of film that's
approximately eight millimeters wide. Now it could be really really long,
(22:49):
but it's eight millimeters wide. Super eight is also eight
millimeters wide. But it allows the image to take up
a little bit more of the space on that film,
a little more of the width of the film. And
you might wonder, well, how is that even possible? What
has to do with the way that film gets pulled
through a camera or a projector. See, film has these
(23:11):
little perforations, and eight millimeter has these perforations down one
side of the film, and you you get these little
perforations hooked into a sprocket in the camera or the projector,
and it engages the perforations. So when the sprocket begins
to turn, it pulls the film along and you can
(23:31):
either record with a camera or playback with a projector.
Super eight makes these perforations smaller than the older eight
millimeter film did. That means you don't need as much
space around the perforations. You can actually dedicate more of
that space to the image itself and get a bigger
image out of super eight than you would out of
regular old eight millimeter film. Uh. Anyway, while you can
(23:55):
still find super eight film and the occasional place to
develop it, which is getting harder to do all the time,
there's another format that never really took off here in
the United States, but it was popular in other parts
of the world, and that's nine point five millimeter film,
which first emerged in the nineteen twenties in Europe. So yeah,
this film is a little bit wider than eight millimeter,
(24:16):
and it also used a different approach to those perforations.
So instead of having the perforations to the side of
the image the way eight millimeter does, the nine point
five millimeter film has perforations that are between the individual
frames the images themselves. So think of a film strip
as really just a series of still photographs one after
(24:39):
the other. When you play them back fast enough, you
have the illusion of movement. Well, this means that between
say photo one and photo two, right in the middle
between the two you have a perforation, and then below
photo two and above photo three you've got another perforation.
So instead of to the side it's above and below
the images. Now, the benefit of that is you can
(25:01):
dedicate even more of the width of your film to
capturing an image. And the actual image area of nine
point five five millimeters isn't that less, not much less
than what we get with a sixteen millimeter camera, So
in ways it was superior to eight millimeter. Now, the
(25:22):
nine point five millimeter format technically still exists, but it
caters to a pretty small group of hobbyists and enthusiasts.
And in the world of film, you're looking at a
world that's slowly dying or at least diminishing, and nine
point five millimeter occupies a special place in this overall
(25:43):
community that's slowly becoming more and more obscure. The format
means you need a special projector to play it back
where else you risk damaging the film itself. Uh And
those centered perforations really are what caused the problems there. Okay,
we've got some more obsolete forms of media to talk about,
(26:03):
but before we jump into all that, let's take another break.
You know, when I was looking into different types of
obsolete formats, I came across the couple I had never
heard of before, and that's always fun for me and
(26:25):
one of the ones that I had never heard before,
but it you know, some of my listeners y'all might
have heard of it, especially if you come from or
lived in Germany. Is the tef I phone, and that
was developed in the mid nineteen thirties but really saw
a limited success on the market in Germany in the
late forties and into the nineteen fifties. Uh. It gives
(26:46):
me large nerd drunk Collider vibes. And if you don't
know what large ner droun Collider is, it's a podcast
that I co host with my friend Ariel, and one
of the things we do is we typically take two
unrelated pop culture concepts and we mashed them together to
find out what they make, usually for comedic effect. The
taffy phone kind of mashes up two different media formats
(27:08):
and creates something of its own. So it's kind of
like a cross between a vinyl record and an eight
track tape, which is another mostly obscure piece of technology
we could talk about, but I've talked about when plenty
of other episodes, so we won't cover it here. So
the teff E phone has uh the capacity to play
special cartridges it's a cartridge playing media device. Now, the
(27:32):
cartridge itself contains a reel of plastic tape, and it's
it's an endless loop reel, meaning you don't have a
point where the beginning of the real attaches or the
beginning of the tape attaches to the real and the
end of the tape attaches to the reel. Uh. It's
kind of like a rubber band. It's it's a long loop.
(27:56):
It does wrap around the reel several times, but it
allows you to just it all the way through. So,
this plastic tape does not store audio in magnetic form.
That's what audio cassettes and a tracks do. They have
a plastic strip of tape that's coated with magnetic material
(28:18):
or ferro magnetic material that when you apply a magnetic
field to it, you can record audio. Right, That's not
how these cartridges work. Instead, the plastic tape inside the
taffy phone cartridge has grooves in it, just like a
(28:38):
vinyl record. Right. So imagine that you lay out a
long length of tape horizontally. Let's say that you got
one of these cartridges and for some reason you decided
to cut the tape out so that you just have
one long strip that stretches out in front of you horizontally.
(28:58):
You would see that there is a there is a
series of grooves across that tape on the horizontal plane,
so that if you were to put a stylus inside
that groove, it would travel all the way down that length,
and if you had not cut the tape, you would
see that at the far right end of the tape.
(29:19):
It would then move down on the left end, and
the groove would continue because it's spirals when it's a
loop if you haven't cut the tape into one long strip,
so this groove spirals across the entire length of this tape,
and that means that you put a stylus into that
groove and you push play, and it travels down the
(29:41):
groove just like a record player stylus would, and you
can listen to audio that's been recorded in that that
format and it'll play for as long as that tape lasts.
The tape came in different lengths. You had some cartridges
that could hold fifteen minutes of audio, some that could
hold an hour worth of audio, and the large ones
(30:02):
could hold up to four hours of audio. So, yeah,
the players stylus settles onto the tape. Usually this is
out of you. It's under a cover where you can't
mess with stuff. Uh, though sometimes depending on the model,
you could see what was happening, and the stylus vibrates
as it travels to the groove. Those vibrations cause a
(30:23):
little electro magnet to produce a tiny electric charge, which,
when amplified and sent to speakers, can play back the
recorded sound. Now, as I said, the tape is a
closed loop. If you were to listen to a recording
from the beginning, or at least as close as you
could get to the beginning, you would start with the
stylus in the top position along the the width of
(30:45):
this tape. Remember, if we were to lay it out horizontally,
we're looking at the the width of the tape, and
you would want it at the top of that width,
and the stylus would sell into a groove and it
would continue on until it got to the end. Once
it got to the end, by the way, it would
enter a closed circle of tape where it would just
(31:07):
play a chime over and over again rather than spiral.
So like the stylus would never come off the groove.
It would just enter into a repeating circle that would
play a chime that would alert you that you've reached
the end of the recording and that you need to
turn off the player or reset it to a higher
uh part of the groove. You could adjust where the
(31:29):
stylus was using a little control. The control would let
you adjust the height of where the stylus was along
uh with respect to the tape. But you couldn't just
choose a track to play, because again, it's recorded on
this endless loop. You could get kind of close, but
you might hear like, oh, this is in the middle
(31:49):
of the song I wanted to hear, So you would
actually have to move the stylus up a notch and
listen to the end of a previous bit of music
before it would get to whatever it was he wanted
to hear. It was not a super user friendly approach
to listening to music, but it was incredibly clever and
I had never seen this before. I didn't realize that
there were these devices that could record grooves onto tapes
(32:12):
similar to what you would find with a record. So yeah,
pretty fascinating taffy phone. I I would love to get
my hands on one, although there's very limited media available
for taffy phone. One of the reasons why the teff
e phone ultimately failed. Um, most of the media is
in German. There are a lot of covers of songs
(32:33):
sung by German singers, so like famous songs coming out
of America would be covered by Germans, so you would
get a German speaking version of like two D Fruity,
that kind of stuff. But the reason why there wasn't
that much content for the taffy phone is that a
lot of the established artists had signed exclusive deals with
(32:56):
music record labels and they weren't allowed to record for
any other foreim factors, so that never really took off.
And while you can still find old taffy phone players
and cassettes on like used markets and stuff. Um. Like
I said, I never even encountered it before I did
(33:17):
my research for this, and then as as soon as
I saw when I thought I really wish I had
one of those, they look super neat. I would need
so much extra equipment to be able to play them
because they have all the fittings for nineteen fifties era
German outlets and German sound systems, and I don't have
any of that, so it would be a heck of
(33:37):
a lot of work to get one to a point
where I could listen to it. But it's a fascinating
variation of technology that I'm otherwise familiar with. Then let's
talk really quickly about wire recorders, because these were the
predecessors too real to real magnetic tape recorders, and then
(33:59):
those of or sur predecessors to cassette recorders. These wire
recorders used stainless steel wire, and this idea originated out
of the tail into the nineteenth century, but it actually
take a few decades before enough improvements in technology made
it a viable option. Um it became a useful tool
(34:21):
during World War Two, and uh a consumer product that
saw limited success. So the idea is pretty simple. You've
got a magnetic head that generates a magnetic field in
response to an electric current, which could be coming from
say a microphone. You run this magnetic wire or the
(34:41):
steel wire pass this magnetic head at a good clip,
and the magnetic head magnetizes the steel wire point by point.
This magnetic field is fluctuating both in polarity and in intensity,
so the wire carries all that right as the wire
passes by the polarity and intensity determines how that part
(35:05):
of the wire is magnetized. And so this variation in
the magnetic field, coupled with the speed of the wire
passing below this this right head creates a record of
those fluctuations. When you run the wire back across a
similar head that can pick up these magnetic fluctuations that
(35:28):
are now held by the wire itself, the process can reverse.
It will generate an electric signal that is a duplicate
of the original electric signal that made the recording in
the first place. And you feed that signal to an
amplifier and some speakers and viola, you got yourself playback sound.
So to imagine what one of these looks like, you
(35:50):
can think of kind of like the old real to
real magnetic tape recorders, if you've seen one of those.
So you've got a device has got two spindles on it,
and this is where you can put two eels on
to these spindles, one reel per spindle. One of those
reels is wound up with this magnetized wire that's got
your recording on it. The other reel is empty, and
(36:12):
you feed the free end of your magnetized wire through
the wire playback machine, and then you secure that end
to the empty reel that's on the opposite side of
the machine. When you turn the machine on and you
initiate playback, the empty spindle or the empty reel on
(36:35):
the spindle begins to turn and pulls the wire through
the machine, and the reed head picks up on the
magnetic fluctuations and the wire and plays back the sounds.
So yeah, exact same principle as real to reel tape machines,
except it was using a steel wire rather than plastic
tape coated with magnetic material on it. Tape recorders were
(37:00):
in development by the time the wire recorder tech was
good enough to actually put on the market, and once
tape recorders became affordable, then the industry pretty much dumped
wire recorders and switched strictly to tape. The use of
wire recorders still was something that some places would rely on,
but it did fade over time, essentially becoming a curiosity
(37:22):
by the late nineteen sixties. Speaking of magnetic tape, let's
talk about a couple of video cassette formats that predated
both Beta max and VHS. This is where we'll wrap
up for this episode. Now, before VHS and Beta Max
would wage format wars with each other, which was a
(37:45):
big thing in the seventies and into the early eighties,
we had other formats. We had the u Matic cassette,
which came from Sony. The company had been working on
the technology in the late nineteen sixties and was ready
to debut it in the nineteenes seventies, and this was
one of the first cassette formats for video tape. So
(38:06):
before the video cassette, the go to was the real
to real tapes, which worked on a very similar principle
to the wire recorders I just talked about. You would
attach a reel of tape to one spindle on a player,
feed the tape through the device, connect that into the
tape to the empty reel on the other side. The
empty reel would rotate when you started to record or playback,
(38:27):
and the tape would be pulled past the rewrite head.
So same thing as the wire recorder, just using tape
instead of wire, but reels meant that the tape was
a little bit vulnerable to the environment. Plus it was
possible for the tape to unspool off the reel, like
if you held it the wrong way, you might start
like dropping tape everywhere, and that was a heck of
(38:48):
a mess to fix um. And the idea behind the
cassette was that the tape would be protected by the
cassette's body. It would be unable to come unspooled under
normal circumstances anyway, and it was protected from dust and
other stuff, and it could be stored really easily and
organized really easily, much easier than real to real tape.
(39:10):
When it took up less space, it was easy to find,
so it had a lot of pros going for it. Now,
the umatic was mostly used in broadcast stations. It was
originally intended to be a consumer product. It just didn't
quite make it, but it did make it within the
TV industry. The cassettes came in two different sizes, but
(39:31):
the full size measured eight and five eight inches by
five and three eighth inches by one and a half inches,
and that made them larger than VHS and beta cassettes
that would come out later on. So these were big cassettes.
They are kind of bulky. The machines that you needed
to play them on were also big and heavy and bulky.
(39:53):
And the Umatic was called the umatic because if you
could look through a machine while it cassette was being played,
you would see that the tape inside the cassette was
being pulled out and moved through a U shape as
it passed over the video head device. Also, oddly enough,
(40:14):
unlike every other cassette that I'm aware of, the reels
would turn an opposite directions, Like if you look at
an old audio cassette, if real on the left is
turning counter clockwise, the reel on the right is also
turning counter clockwise. Not so much with the U matics.
If the reel on the left is turning counterclockwise, the
reel on the right is turning clockwise. This is because
(40:35):
of how the tape was fed through the cassette and
looped around the video head. But yeah, the first time
I saw that in action, I thought, how the heck
is this working? Because you would think it would reach
a point where it's like a tug of war, But no,
it's because the way the tape is fed through Anyway.
Sony reportedly wanted the you Matic to be a consumer product,
like I said, but the costom manufacturing was so high
(40:58):
that the sales price of the machines was just prohibitively
expensive for the average consumer. But the broadcast industry adopted
Umatic as a relatively inexpensive upgrade from real to real tapes,
and it would let them store these cassettes much more easily,
and that was great for broadcast TV, where you might
need to go back into the archives and pull something
(41:20):
so that you can reference it in, say a new broadcast.
So it really saw a lot of use in television stations,
even though it didn't really ever emerge in the consumer market. Ultimately,
even TV stations moved away from you matic over time,
though there's still a lot of stations I'm told that
have a Umatic player and still have Umatic tapes just
(41:44):
in the off chance that they ever need to play
archived footage and they just haven't transferred that over to
a newer medium. So that's interesting. And finally, the other
video cassette kind of precursor I want to talk about
is a format again. They came out three years I
think before VHS and Beta are really beta because VHS
(42:05):
came later. And I'm talking about the Cartra vision system.
A guy called Frank Stanton created the Cartridge Television Incorporated
company that produced the cart Re Vision Cartridge Television Incorporated
was a subsidiary to a subsidiary. It gets down a
crazy rabbit hole. I tried to track it down, and
ultimately I said, you know what, this doesn't matter as
(42:27):
far as the actual format concerned, So I abandoned it.
But apparently it was part of like a aerospace company
at some point, which in itself was part of a
former textile company. This has got crazy anyway. The idea
behind cart revision was to create a system that included
both a television and a cartridge based playing system, with
(42:49):
cartridges containing content like movies and shows, but also record
ability like you could get a blank cartridge and record
TV programs to your blank cartridge so you can watch
them back later, all the basic function of later VCRs.
So you might wonder why did the cart revision disappear
(43:12):
when later formats like Beta and VHS managed to succeed. Well,
there are a few reasons. A big one was that
because this was a combination television and player. Uh was
that this was a big, bulky and expensive piece of technology.
(43:32):
Depending upon what source you look at, the cost was
anywhere between thirteen hundred and sixteen hundred bucks. Way back
in nineteen two, So that puts it somewhere between nine thousand,
five hundred dollars and eleven thousand, three hundred fifty bucks today.
That's wicked price for a little bit of consumer home technology.
But the concept for cartrovision for saw some interesting stuff
(43:57):
like movie rentals. Cartridge tele Vision was renting out movies
to customers. They came in special red cartridges. Most cartridges
were black with like a label on them that reflected
whatever the content was. The rental ones were red, red
plastic cartridges, and they would send these cartridges via ups
(44:17):
to customers and then the customers would be able to
watch the movie and they were supposed to send it
back via ups. And interestingly, these rental cartridges were rigged
to only play once for a customer, So there'll be
no reason for you to keep your rental, right because
you can only watch it once, you could not get
any more use of it, so you might as well
(44:38):
send it back. That was the thinking, and the way
it works was these cartridges had essentially what amounted to
a breaking system, like like pumping the brakes on a car,
that would prevent customers from being able to rewind the cartridge.
It would not rewind in a consumer card division system,
so you'd be able to watch through the rental one time,
(45:01):
but you couldn't rewind it to watch it again, so
you would have to send the cartridge back. And then
the Cartridge Television Incorporated had devices that could actually rewind
the rented cartridges and then send them back out to
the next rental customer, but the rental system wasn't convenient.
Folks were not crazy about the idea of not being
able to watch something more than once, or even be
(45:24):
able to rewind a cartridge briefly in case they missed
something while they were watching a film, so that was
another strike against the format. But a truly huge problem
was that the initial batch of cartridges went bad. They
had been stored in warehouses that had poor environmental controls,
(45:45):
and apparently as a result of humidity, there was massive
problems with the tape degrading inside the cartridges, which effectively
rotted out the cartridges. They were useless. They could even
you know, jam up a working system, so there was
a recall on all those cartridges, and that meant that
(46:07):
now you had this playback device that had no content,
you could play back on it and by the time
the company was trying to get things back in the
right direction, it was already too late. The marketplace was unforgiving.
Wall Street downgraded the company severely. The whole project folded.
(46:27):
Only a couple of thousand units were reportedly sold in
the first place. Collectors still seek out systems and cartridges
to this day, but it is definitely an obsolete format.
It did not stand the test of time like VHS,
which of course is also obsolete at this point, but
you know, it at least had a longer moment in
the spotlight than cartridge Television managed with their car division
(46:51):
or cart revision. All right, that's enough for this episode.
There's obviously lots of other examples. My beloved Seat E
D is a great one. I have one sitting right
next to me, and that's an obsolete format, if ever
there was one, But I've talked about it before. I'll
probably talk about it again. If you have suggestions for
(47:13):
topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff,
whether it's obsolete media or something entirely different, let me know.
One way to do that is to download the I
Heart Radio app. It's free to download, and news you
can navigate over to tech Stuff. Click on that little
icon that has the microphone on it. You can leave
a voice message up to thirty seconds and links for me,
or you can drop me a message on Twitter. The
(47:35):
handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(47:55):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Zero
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hedude,
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Radio and how the tech
are you? You know? I recently started buying DVDs and
blue rays and vinyl records again, partly because I'm tired
(00:27):
of titles disappearing from various streaming platforms. You know, you
you count on something being there, and then you log
into your account and realize, Hey, that thing I wanted
to experience isn't on this service anymore. So that's part
of the reason. Another part is because I actually have
this tiny little house in the middle of nowhere that
(00:47):
has like no connectivity, and so I wanted to get
some media that doesn't require an Internet connection because I
can only watch the lizards and squirrels for so long
before I start criticizing their lack of narrative of they
do not take direction well. Anyway, I thought it might
be fun to talk about some older forms of media
(01:08):
that have passed out of favor or even gone completely obsolete.
And this is more than just an episode where we
look back and make goofy jokes about old forms of media.
I've talked before about how data preservation is a real challenge,
and and this is part of it. There are a
lot of different challenges associated with the preservation of information.
(01:33):
Sometimes we commit data, whether that's computer code, or it's
an audio recording or video or digital documents or anything else,
and we commit to a medium that subsequently loses support,
and at that point, the information that's stored on this
old format is on borrowed time. We need to either
(01:56):
port the information over to another format, one that at
least has support today, or we have to resign ourselves
to eventually losing those older copies. Now, in some cases,
like popular TV shows or movies or albums, we might
not need to worry too much about the whole thing disappearing,
(02:18):
but we might lose certain instances of that thing. For example,
let's say that you were you bought an early DVD
and had an amazing commentary track on it, and you
really thought it was entertaining, and you've since lost it,
and now when you start searching for a DVD of
(02:40):
this same thing, all the current ones don't have that
commentary track. That's one example of the sort of stuff
you can lose even with things that continue to have
at least some support in in current media. So this
is a tricky thing. And let me give you an
example of just lost media entirely. There's a popular television
(03:04):
series called Doctor Who, and this is an English TV
series if you're not familiar with it. It's been on
forever since nineteen sixty three, actually, though not consistently since
nineteen sixty and it was broadcast by the BBC, which
is effectively a state backed broadcast network in the UK.
(03:25):
And at the time, the BBC's normal method of operation
was to broadcast content and if they started to run
low on real to real tapes where they would store
this stuff, they would just white older programs in order
to put something else on that tape. So instead of
buying new tape and figuring out where to store it
(03:46):
and all that kind of stuff, they just say, hey,
let's just erase this old thing. No one who's who's
going to care? Because I mean, that was the thought was.
It wasn't preservation, it was just it was transmission of entertainment,
and then you moved on. No one was really thinking
ahead two uh, you know, documenting this stuff and keeping
it in a library and then further down the line,
(04:08):
opening it up for home consumption. That just wasn't even
remotely in the cards when people were thinking about this.
In fact, I want to say that Eric Idol of
Monty Python argued with the BBC and made certain that
he got possession of the tapes after they produced the
TV show so that the original Monty Python broadcasts would
(04:30):
not subsequently get wiped because other shows had met that fate.
So as a result, several of the early seasons of
Doctor Who have missing episodes or entire missing seasons. And
now and again you'll hear someone happening across an old
copy of a previously lost episode, and that's a big deal.
And because all forms of storage media have a limited lifespan,
(04:53):
as time passes, the chances of finding a good copy
of a previously missing episode decrease because the actual material
that the the broadcast is saved upon will deteriorate over time.
So yeah, data preservation is an important thing for us.
To preserve things like like work of cultural significance, art information,
(05:19):
you know, being able to document changes in public perception
even like these are all important things, and they're made
more difficult by the fact that we have these various
forms of media that can go obsolete over time. Now,
in the case of the BBC, the media isn't missing
because we no longer support the format right real to
(05:40):
real tape is still something that we have, you know,
working equipment that can you that can actually access that.
But you know, it is likely that you can grasp
that when formats evolve, we can end up leaving data
on previous formats behind. And again, as someone who is
back to buying optical disks for tell television and movies
(06:01):
and vinyl records for my albums, I frequently encountered the
problem of looking for specific titles only to find out
that the version I want is out of publication, or
that the addition I wanted has long been unavailable, and
anything that I can find on the market today is
not exactly what I was looking for. So let's get
(06:21):
a look at some formats that either no longer exist
or they have such limited support that they might as
well be obsolete. One type of recording that was very
nearly lost for good was the phone autograph. So this
is the in fact, one of the earliest, possibly the
earliest example of recording an audio signal UH to a
(06:45):
different medium. So a French inventor named Edward Lyone Scott
built the phonotograph way back in eighteen fifty seven. This
predates Edison in the phonograph and as the names just,
this device was meant to quote unquote right down sound.
(07:05):
As I said, this is the earliest version of recorded
sound that we have not for reproducing sound, our programming sound.
We'll touch on that as well in this episode. Because
there were ways where you could program sound for a
device like an organ for example, but you couldn't just
(07:27):
record audio and play it back. Now Scott, unlike Edison,
he wasn't concerned with playing audio back. That wasn't what
he was thinking of at all, So his methodology wasn't
meant to allow playback. His plan was to use the
phone autograph to record audio for study, with the perhaps
(07:47):
ultimate goal of creating a speech to text methodology. That is,
you could use the phone autograph to record speech, and
then by studying the record the thing that was produced
by the phone autograph, then another person who was skilled
in the art would be able to recreate what was said,
(08:09):
or to reproduce what was said or read what had
been said. So the record left behind would be distinct
enough to know what words had been spoken, but it
would take a lot of study to learn which phonemes
produced particular shapes. And as it turned out, it's way
more complicated than what Scott was thinking, but it was
(08:29):
an interesting line of thought. So by shapes, I'm talking
about patterns drawn on smoke blackened glass or paper. So
let's say you get a pane of glass. It's it's
coated with lamp black. So there's this thin black coating
on the surface of the glass, and the stylists that
(08:49):
they would use was actually some bristles, and those bristles
connected to a diaphragm that itself was at the narrow
end of an acoustic trump It not the musical instrument trumpet,
but the trumpet shape. So you have the big open
side and then on the narrow side you've got this little, thin,
sensitive diaphragm. Connected to that are these bristles that can
(09:14):
just barely make contact with the lamp blacked surface of
this piece of glass. This acoustic trumpet would mimic the
human ear, So if you look at a human ear,
you're like, oh, I see the ear is the opening
of the trumpet the canal. Is this narrowing to the
ear drum is the same as this little diaphragm. So
(09:36):
in sound waves would enter the acoustic end of this trumpet,
the open end of this trumpet, I should say, and
then travel down the narrow pathway. It would cause the
diaphragm to vibrate. The glass would move across the bristles
at a regular speed, at an unbroken regular speed, and
(09:59):
the bristles would have vibrate with the vibration of the
diaphragm which came from the speaking. So the idea was
that because the time was was constant, the travel time
for the glass was constant, you could look at the
wiggly line created by these bristles and that would represent
(10:19):
the sound that entered into the trumpet. And theoretically, if
you were able to really study this, you should be
able to tell what someone said based solely upon that
squiggly line tracing the lampblack on the glass. And you know,
that was a really interesting idea. Scott's work wasn't fully successful.
(10:42):
Like he he was able to create the device and
the device worked, but figuring out what was said based
upon what was recorded turned out to be way harder
than what he expected. It was just much more difficult
to really suss all that out, and Scott's work plunged
into obscurity for many years and was in danger of
(11:03):
just being forgotten entirely, and then the narrative would just
be Edison as the father of recorded sound. Now, in
two thousand eight, a project called First Sounds found phone
autograms these recordings that were made from Scott's invention, and
through the use of digital scanning and some clever programming,
they were able to recreate the sound that was originally recorded.
(11:26):
Since the phone autogram could only record in two dimensions,
the amount of information it captured was somewhat limited, but
they could actually create uh simulated playback of this recorded sound.
Elements of the phone autograph would actually make their way
into devices like the grammophone, and this would aim to
(11:46):
record audio for the purposes of playback rather than scientific studies.
So this was taking Scott's idea but then expanding it
specifically for the purposes of playback. So the grammo phone
and then Edison phonograph technology would create the foundation for
what would ultimately evolve into vinyl records much further into
(12:07):
the future. So While the phone autograph itself is obsolete,
its influence lives on today for those of us who
still have a soft spot for turntables and LPs. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
i'll talk about another super cool but obsolete form of media. Okay,
(12:35):
we're back, and I want to talk about organets. This
one's a little tricky because tracing the history of organets
can take you down a very long rabbit hole. Uh. First,
let's start off with what an organet actually is. So
it is a device that plays back music, instrumental music,
(12:56):
and specifically, it's a read instrument. It that will play
back music and you can't just play any tune on it.
It's not like a keyboard that blows air through reads
or anything like that. Instead, you would program music using
a perforated surface, very much like a player piano. Right.
(13:17):
So it might be a long strip of paper that
has perforated holes at specific points that represent specific notes
and the duration of those notes. Or it might be uh,
strips of cardboard, which was also very common, Or it
could even be metal disks that have perforations in them
(13:38):
so air can flow through those perforations. And thus ultimately
allow reads to play, either by blowing directly across the
reads are or allowing a valve to open and do that.
But there's a lot more going on than just that.
If we were to trace the history of pipe and
read organs which pre eight Oregon nets, uh, that history
(14:03):
takes us really far back um. In fact, it takes
us all the way back to ancient Greece with a
musical device called the hydrau liss, and this was essentially
an organ that used air pressure and water pressure to
play notes through pipes. So the organ head different pipes
(14:27):
that were built to tune to specific notes, and if
you were to force air through this pipe, it would
produce the note it had been tuned to. And you
would have keys that you could press down, and if
you press on a key, it would essentially allow a
valve to open for that specific pipe, and air would
(14:47):
then be able to pass through. But where did the
air come from? Right? Yes, if you press the key,
it opens up this air path and that would allow
a note to play for air to force through the pipe,
But the air has to come from somewhere. Well. The
air came courtesy of a chamber that was partly filled
with water, and a bellows like pump would force air
(15:08):
into this chamber, so the air would actually start to
push the water down, and the water would have this
regular pressure on the air inside valve would stop the
air from just flowing right back out towards where the
bellows were, where the pump was, and when you pressed
down a key, it would allow the air and escape route,
(15:29):
so it would go out and go through the pipe,
And by continuing to pump the bellows, you would continue
to maintain pressure inside this chamber that also had water
in it, so that you could continue to play the instrument.
And this thing is thousands of years old. It was
before a common era when this was invented. It's it's
(15:50):
incredibly ingenious. I would love to do a full episode
about um pipe organs and reed organs and their history
because it is really fascinating. It's also a little complicated
to talk about without the use of visual aids, so
it's a daunting principle. But anyway, this basic idea would
(16:11):
evolve over time and we would get pipe and read
organs that you might be more familiar with. In fact,
once upon a time I actually owned some bellows organs,
some pump organs where I could move the foot pedals
to pump air into the organ and then play um
musical notes, and you had to keep on pumping if
(16:32):
you wanted to maintain that pressure. To be able to
do that, it was really neat. So then we get
to devices similar to the organets that would take advantage
of this air pressure idea, but they would remove the
human player from the experience. UH. One of these, a
(16:54):
predecessor to the organet was the barrel organ or roller oregan.
So with a barrel organ, you have a pump or
bellows that provides air power. You have musical notes that
get produced through pipes or reads, but instead of a keyboard,
the valves for these pipes connect to little levers, and
(17:15):
you program music on a cob or barrel. So this
is a cylinder and has various little projections on it,
like a little spike or sometimes kind of staples, similar
to what you might see with a music box. If
you've ever looked into a music box and seeing the
little barrel turning has a little projections on it. So
these little protrusions would come into contact with these levers
(17:38):
connected to the valves, and when they would. It would
make the valve open, which would allow air to escape
the chamber of the instrument through a read or pipe,
and a note would play. So as the cylinder rotates,
it hits these levers to produce pre programmed music. The
(17:58):
quality of the music depends largely on the quality of
the pre programmed barrel. If you did a poor job
placing the pens and staples on the barrel, then the
songs just not gonna sound right. The staples, by the way,
would hold a valve open longer than just one of
the little projections would, so if you needed a sustained note,
you would use these staples to do that. Now, if
(18:19):
you've ever encountered an organ grinder, like a person who
plays one of these on the street, or you've seen
one in movies or whatnot, you have seen a version
of the barrel organ. They are typically cranked by hand,
and the hand crank powers both the bellows and the
rotation of the barrel itself. And again, I would need
to do a full episode to talk about the technology
(18:41):
behind this, the various gears that allow this to happen,
because it's really fascinating stuff. But let's finally get too orcadets,
so rather than using a barrel with these little projections
or a cob like the organ grinder and barrel organ devices,
they would use referred of material through which air could
(19:02):
flow freely. Some organets depended upon forcing air through the holes,
like blowing air through the holes in order to engage
with reads and play a note. Others would create a
vacuum so they would pull air through the holes and
essentially do the same. It's really not that different from
how a harmonica works. Like if you ever play to harmonica,
you know that if you blow air, you will make
(19:24):
the reads vibrate and get a certain sound. If you
suck air in, the reads will vibrate and you'll get
a slightly different sound. So anyway, the solid bits of material,
like the solid bits of of the paper or the
disc block airflow right. Air cannot flow through solid paper
or solid metal, So in those cases like no note
(19:47):
plays because it has it can't go through the material.
A hole allows a note to play out. Now, most
organets had between fourteen and forty or really more frequently
thirty nine reads, so your media would have to match
the instrument to play properly. Right, if your player only
had fourteen reads and you had a paper roll designed
(20:13):
for a thirty nine read device. It won't work because
you can't line things up properly and you have to
line up the whole's just right, or else the wrong
notes are gonna play, or you're gonna destroy the recording
now or the program, I should say, it's not even
a recording, it's a program. One version of the organ
at used metal discs, which were not this similar to
(20:36):
record albums, except these had holes punched in them as
opposed to grooves cut into them, and you would align
them properly on the organette. You would turn a crank
and this would turn the disc and wind would go
through it and through to the reads, and you would
play the pre program music. And it's pretty impressive stuff.
Their videos on YouTube where you can watch people demonstrating
(20:59):
how Gannett's work, including these metal disc versions, and some
of them sound really nice, like they're tuned really nicely
and they're producing nice notes. But the rise of the
phonograph would reduce organets to curiosities. And while they are
highly sought after today by collectors, at the time when
phonographs were starting to rise in popularity, most folks were
(21:22):
just putting their organ ets away and not thinking about
them anymore. These days, I could arguably talk about film
being a nearly obsolete medium, almost completely replaced by video,
but that seems particularly harsh and it's not completely true.
I mean, there are still filmmakers who are using actual
(21:42):
film in their and their projects. Photographic and cinematic film
has been around for more than a century. Basically, it
all has to do with a strip of plastic film
coded in photoreactive chemicals. When these are exposed to light,
the chemicals on the film react. And if you were
to put such a film in a device that can
direct light to the film using a lens and a
(22:05):
shutter to control when the light can come through and
when it can't, you can make yourself a fancy schmancy
film camera and capture images. It will capture whatever the
light captured when it was entering the lens and hit
the film. At that point you have to develop the film,
create a negative image, and then transfer that over to
new film to get your positive image. But then you've
(22:25):
got your cinematic masterpiece. Now Here in the States, film
enthusiasts became familiar with eight millimeter sixteen millimeter and Super
eight formats, So the millimeter refers to essentially the width
of the film, the strip of film. So an eight
millimeter film is shot on a strip of film that's
approximately eight millimeters wide. Now it could be really really long,
(22:49):
but it's eight millimeters wide. Super eight is also eight
millimeters wide. But it allows the image to take up
a little bit more of the space on that film,
a little more of the width of the film. And
you might wonder, well, how is that even possible? What
has to do with the way that film gets pulled
through a camera or a projector. See, film has these
(23:11):
little perforations, and eight millimeter has these perforations down one
side of the film, and you you get these little
perforations hooked into a sprocket in the camera or the projector,
and it engages the perforations. So when the sprocket begins
to turn, it pulls the film along and you can
(23:31):
either record with a camera or playback with a projector.
Super eight makes these perforations smaller than the older eight
millimeter film did. That means you don't need as much
space around the perforations. You can actually dedicate more of
that space to the image itself and get a bigger
image out of super eight than you would out of
regular old eight millimeter film. Uh. Anyway, while you can
(23:55):
still find super eight film and the occasional place to
develop it, which is getting harder to do all the time,
there's another format that never really took off here in
the United States, but it was popular in other parts
of the world, and that's nine point five millimeter film,
which first emerged in the nineteen twenties in Europe. So yeah,
this film is a little bit wider than eight millimeter,
(24:16):
and it also used a different approach to those perforations.
So instead of having the perforations to the side of
the image the way eight millimeter does, the nine point
five millimeter film has perforations that are between the individual
frames the images themselves. So think of a film strip
as really just a series of still photographs one after
(24:39):
the other. When you play them back fast enough, you
have the illusion of movement. Well, this means that between
say photo one and photo two, right in the middle
between the two you have a perforation, and then below
photo two and above photo three you've got another perforation.
So instead of to the side it's above and below
the images. Now, the benefit of that is you can
(25:01):
dedicate even more of the width of your film to
capturing an image. And the actual image area of nine
point five five millimeters isn't that less, not much less
than what we get with a sixteen millimeter camera, So
in ways it was superior to eight millimeter. Now, the
(25:22):
nine point five millimeter format technically still exists, but it
caters to a pretty small group of hobbyists and enthusiasts.
And in the world of film, you're looking at a
world that's slowly dying or at least diminishing, and nine
point five millimeter occupies a special place in this overall
(25:43):
community that's slowly becoming more and more obscure. The format
means you need a special projector to play it back
where else you risk damaging the film itself. Uh And
those centered perforations really are what caused the problems there. Okay,
we've got some more obsolete forms of media to talk about,
(26:03):
but before we jump into all that, let's take another break.
You know, when I was looking into different types of
obsolete formats, I came across the couple I had never
heard of before, and that's always fun for me and
(26:25):
one of the ones that I had never heard before,
but it you know, some of my listeners y'all might
have heard of it, especially if you come from or
lived in Germany. Is the tef I phone, and that
was developed in the mid nineteen thirties but really saw
a limited success on the market in Germany in the
late forties and into the nineteen fifties. Uh. It gives
(26:46):
me large nerd drunk Collider vibes. And if you don't
know what large ner droun Collider is, it's a podcast
that I co host with my friend Ariel, and one
of the things we do is we typically take two
unrelated pop culture concepts and we mashed them together to
find out what they make, usually for comedic effect. The
taffy phone kind of mashes up two different media formats
(27:08):
and creates something of its own. So it's kind of
like a cross between a vinyl record and an eight
track tape, which is another mostly obscure piece of technology
we could talk about, but I've talked about when plenty
of other episodes, so we won't cover it here. So
the teff E phone has uh the capacity to play
special cartridges it's a cartridge playing media device. Now, the
(27:32):
cartridge itself contains a reel of plastic tape, and it's
it's an endless loop reel, meaning you don't have a
point where the beginning of the real attaches or the
beginning of the tape attaches to the real and the
end of the tape attaches to the reel. Uh. It's
kind of like a rubber band. It's it's a long loop.
(27:56):
It does wrap around the reel several times, but it
allows you to just it all the way through. So,
this plastic tape does not store audio in magnetic form.
That's what audio cassettes and a tracks do. They have
a plastic strip of tape that's coated with magnetic material
(28:18):
or ferro magnetic material that when you apply a magnetic
field to it, you can record audio. Right, That's not
how these cartridges work. Instead, the plastic tape inside the
taffy phone cartridge has grooves in it, just like a
(28:38):
vinyl record. Right. So imagine that you lay out a
long length of tape horizontally. Let's say that you got
one of these cartridges and for some reason you decided
to cut the tape out so that you just have
one long strip that stretches out in front of you horizontally.
(28:58):
You would see that there is a there is a
series of grooves across that tape on the horizontal plane,
so that if you were to put a stylus inside
that groove, it would travel all the way down that length,
and if you had not cut the tape, you would
see that at the far right end of the tape.
(29:19):
It would then move down on the left end, and
the groove would continue because it's spirals when it's a
loop if you haven't cut the tape into one long strip,
so this groove spirals across the entire length of this tape,
and that means that you put a stylus into that
groove and you push play, and it travels down the
(29:41):
groove just like a record player stylus would, and you
can listen to audio that's been recorded in that that
format and it'll play for as long as that tape lasts.
The tape came in different lengths. You had some cartridges
that could hold fifteen minutes of audio, some that could
hold an hour worth of audio, and the large ones
(30:02):
could hold up to four hours of audio. So, yeah,
the players stylus settles onto the tape. Usually this is
out of you. It's under a cover where you can't
mess with stuff. Uh, though sometimes depending on the model,
you could see what was happening, and the stylus vibrates
as it travels to the groove. Those vibrations cause a
(30:23):
little electro magnet to produce a tiny electric charge, which,
when amplified and sent to speakers, can play back the
recorded sound. Now, as I said, the tape is a
closed loop. If you were to listen to a recording
from the beginning, or at least as close as you
could get to the beginning, you would start with the
stylus in the top position along the the width of
(30:45):
this tape. Remember, if we were to lay it out horizontally,
we're looking at the the width of the tape, and
you would want it at the top of that width,
and the stylus would sell into a groove and it
would continue on until it got to the end. Once
it got to the end, by the way, it would
enter a closed circle of tape where it would just
(31:07):
play a chime over and over again rather than spiral.
So like the stylus would never come off the groove.
It would just enter into a repeating circle that would
play a chime that would alert you that you've reached
the end of the recording and that you need to
turn off the player or reset it to a higher
uh part of the groove. You could adjust where the
(31:29):
stylus was using a little control. The control would let
you adjust the height of where the stylus was along
uh with respect to the tape. But you couldn't just
choose a track to play, because again, it's recorded on
this endless loop. You could get kind of close, but
you might hear like, oh, this is in the middle
(31:49):
of the song I wanted to hear, So you would
actually have to move the stylus up a notch and
listen to the end of a previous bit of music
before it would get to whatever it was he wanted
to hear. It was not a super user friendly approach
to listening to music, but it was incredibly clever and
I had never seen this before. I didn't realize that
there were these devices that could record grooves onto tapes
(32:12):
similar to what you would find with a record. So yeah,
pretty fascinating taffy phone. I I would love to get
my hands on one, although there's very limited media available
for taffy phone. One of the reasons why the teff
e phone ultimately failed. Um, most of the media is
in German. There are a lot of covers of songs
(32:33):
sung by German singers, so like famous songs coming out
of America would be covered by Germans, so you would
get a German speaking version of like two D Fruity,
that kind of stuff. But the reason why there wasn't
that much content for the taffy phone is that a
lot of the established artists had signed exclusive deals with
(32:56):
music record labels and they weren't allowed to record for
any other foreim factors, so that never really took off.
And while you can still find old taffy phone players
and cassettes on like used markets and stuff. Um. Like
I said, I never even encountered it before I did
(33:17):
my research for this, and then as as soon as
I saw when I thought I really wish I had
one of those, they look super neat. I would need
so much extra equipment to be able to play them
because they have all the fittings for nineteen fifties era
German outlets and German sound systems, and I don't have
any of that, so it would be a heck of
(33:37):
a lot of work to get one to a point
where I could listen to it. But it's a fascinating
variation of technology that I'm otherwise familiar with. Then let's
talk really quickly about wire recorders, because these were the
predecessors too real to real magnetic tape recorders, and then
(33:59):
those of or sur predecessors to cassette recorders. These wire
recorders used stainless steel wire, and this idea originated out
of the tail into the nineteenth century, but it actually
take a few decades before enough improvements in technology made
it a viable option. Um it became a useful tool
(34:21):
during World War Two, and uh a consumer product that
saw limited success. So the idea is pretty simple. You've
got a magnetic head that generates a magnetic field in
response to an electric current, which could be coming from
say a microphone. You run this magnetic wire or the
(34:41):
steel wire pass this magnetic head at a good clip,
and the magnetic head magnetizes the steel wire point by point.
This magnetic field is fluctuating both in polarity and in intensity,
so the wire carries all that right as the wire
passes by the polarity and intensity determines how that part
(35:05):
of the wire is magnetized. And so this variation in
the magnetic field, coupled with the speed of the wire
passing below this this right head creates a record of
those fluctuations. When you run the wire back across a
similar head that can pick up these magnetic fluctuations that
(35:28):
are now held by the wire itself, the process can reverse.
It will generate an electric signal that is a duplicate
of the original electric signal that made the recording in
the first place. And you feed that signal to an
amplifier and some speakers and viola, you got yourself playback sound.
So to imagine what one of these looks like, you
(35:50):
can think of kind of like the old real to
real magnetic tape recorders, if you've seen one of those.
So you've got a device has got two spindles on it,
and this is where you can put two eels on
to these spindles, one reel per spindle. One of those
reels is wound up with this magnetized wire that's got
your recording on it. The other reel is empty, and
(36:12):
you feed the free end of your magnetized wire through
the wire playback machine, and then you secure that end
to the empty reel that's on the opposite side of
the machine. When you turn the machine on and you
initiate playback, the empty spindle or the empty reel on
(36:35):
the spindle begins to turn and pulls the wire through
the machine, and the reed head picks up on the
magnetic fluctuations and the wire and plays back the sounds.
So yeah, exact same principle as real to reel tape machines,
except it was using a steel wire rather than plastic
tape coated with magnetic material on it. Tape recorders were
(37:00):
in development by the time the wire recorder tech was
good enough to actually put on the market, and once
tape recorders became affordable, then the industry pretty much dumped
wire recorders and switched strictly to tape. The use of
wire recorders still was something that some places would rely on,
but it did fade over time, essentially becoming a curiosity
(37:22):
by the late nineteen sixties. Speaking of magnetic tape, let's
talk about a couple of video cassette formats that predated
both Beta max and VHS. This is where we'll wrap
up for this episode. Now, before VHS and Beta Max
would wage format wars with each other, which was a
(37:45):
big thing in the seventies and into the early eighties,
we had other formats. We had the u Matic cassette,
which came from Sony. The company had been working on
the technology in the late nineteen sixties and was ready
to debut it in the nineteenes seventies, and this was
one of the first cassette formats for video tape. So
(38:06):
before the video cassette, the go to was the real
to real tapes, which worked on a very similar principle
to the wire recorders I just talked about. You would
attach a reel of tape to one spindle on a player,
feed the tape through the device, connect that into the
tape to the empty reel on the other side. The
empty reel would rotate when you started to record or playback,
(38:27):
and the tape would be pulled past the rewrite head.
So same thing as the wire recorder, just using tape
instead of wire, but reels meant that the tape was
a little bit vulnerable to the environment. Plus it was
possible for the tape to unspool off the reel, like
if you held it the wrong way, you might start
like dropping tape everywhere, and that was a heck of
(38:48):
a mess to fix um. And the idea behind the
cassette was that the tape would be protected by the
cassette's body. It would be unable to come unspooled under
normal circumstances anyway, and it was protected from dust and
other stuff, and it could be stored really easily and
organized really easily, much easier than real to real tape.
(39:10):
When it took up less space, it was easy to find,
so it had a lot of pros going for it. Now,
the umatic was mostly used in broadcast stations. It was
originally intended to be a consumer product. It just didn't
quite make it, but it did make it within the
TV industry. The cassettes came in two different sizes, but
(39:31):
the full size measured eight and five eight inches by
five and three eighth inches by one and a half inches,
and that made them larger than VHS and beta cassettes
that would come out later on. So these were big cassettes.
They are kind of bulky. The machines that you needed
to play them on were also big and heavy and bulky.
(39:53):
And the Umatic was called the umatic because if you
could look through a machine while it cassette was being played,
you would see that the tape inside the cassette was
being pulled out and moved through a U shape as
it passed over the video head device. Also, oddly enough,
(40:14):
unlike every other cassette that I'm aware of, the reels
would turn an opposite directions, Like if you look at
an old audio cassette, if real on the left is
turning counter clockwise, the reel on the right is also
turning counter clockwise. Not so much with the U matics.
If the reel on the left is turning counterclockwise, the
reel on the right is turning clockwise. This is because
(40:35):
of how the tape was fed through the cassette and
looped around the video head. But yeah, the first time
I saw that in action, I thought, how the heck
is this working? Because you would think it would reach
a point where it's like a tug of war, But no,
it's because the way the tape is fed through Anyway.
Sony reportedly wanted the you Matic to be a consumer product,
like I said, but the costom manufacturing was so high
(40:58):
that the sales price of the machines was just prohibitively
expensive for the average consumer. But the broadcast industry adopted
Umatic as a relatively inexpensive upgrade from real to real tapes,
and it would let them store these cassettes much more easily,
and that was great for broadcast TV, where you might
need to go back into the archives and pull something
(41:20):
so that you can reference it in, say a new broadcast.
So it really saw a lot of use in television stations,
even though it didn't really ever emerge in the consumer market. Ultimately,
even TV stations moved away from you matic over time,
though there's still a lot of stations I'm told that
have a Umatic player and still have Umatic tapes just
(41:44):
in the off chance that they ever need to play
archived footage and they just haven't transferred that over to
a newer medium. So that's interesting. And finally, the other
video cassette kind of precursor I want to talk about
is a format again. They came out three years I
think before VHS and Beta are really beta because VHS
(42:05):
came later. And I'm talking about the Cartra vision system.
A guy called Frank Stanton created the Cartridge Television Incorporated
company that produced the cart Re Vision Cartridge Television Incorporated
was a subsidiary to a subsidiary. It gets down a
crazy rabbit hole. I tried to track it down, and
ultimately I said, you know what, this doesn't matter as
(42:27):
far as the actual format concerned, So I abandoned it.
But apparently it was part of like a aerospace company
at some point, which in itself was part of a
former textile company. This has got crazy anyway. The idea
behind cart revision was to create a system that included
both a television and a cartridge based playing system, with
(42:49):
cartridges containing content like movies and shows, but also record
ability like you could get a blank cartridge and record
TV programs to your blank cartridge so you can watch
them back later, all the basic function of later VCRs.
So you might wonder why did the cart revision disappear
(43:12):
when later formats like Beta and VHS managed to succeed. Well,
there are a few reasons. A big one was that
because this was a combination television and player. Uh was
that this was a big, bulky and expensive piece of technology.
(43:32):
Depending upon what source you look at, the cost was
anywhere between thirteen hundred and sixteen hundred bucks. Way back
in nineteen two, So that puts it somewhere between nine thousand,
five hundred dollars and eleven thousand, three hundred fifty bucks today.
That's wicked price for a little bit of consumer home technology.
But the concept for cartrovision for saw some interesting stuff
(43:57):
like movie rentals. Cartridge tele Vision was renting out movies
to customers. They came in special red cartridges. Most cartridges
were black with like a label on them that reflected
whatever the content was. The rental ones were red, red
plastic cartridges, and they would send these cartridges via ups
(44:17):
to customers and then the customers would be able to
watch the movie and they were supposed to send it
back via ups. And interestingly, these rental cartridges were rigged
to only play once for a customer, So there'll be
no reason for you to keep your rental, right because
you can only watch it once, you could not get
any more use of it, so you might as well
(44:38):
send it back. That was the thinking, and the way
it works was these cartridges had essentially what amounted to
a breaking system, like like pumping the brakes on a car,
that would prevent customers from being able to rewind the cartridge.
It would not rewind in a consumer card division system,
so you'd be able to watch through the rental one time,
(45:01):
but you couldn't rewind it to watch it again, so
you would have to send the cartridge back. And then
the Cartridge Television Incorporated had devices that could actually rewind
the rented cartridges and then send them back out to
the next rental customer, but the rental system wasn't convenient.
Folks were not crazy about the idea of not being
able to watch something more than once, or even be
(45:24):
able to rewind a cartridge briefly in case they missed
something while they were watching a film, so that was
another strike against the format. But a truly huge problem
was that the initial batch of cartridges went bad. They
had been stored in warehouses that had poor environmental controls,
(45:45):
and apparently as a result of humidity, there was massive
problems with the tape degrading inside the cartridges, which effectively
rotted out the cartridges. They were useless. They could even
you know, jam up a working system, so there was
a recall on all those cartridges, and that meant that
(46:07):
now you had this playback device that had no content,
you could play back on it and by the time
the company was trying to get things back in the
right direction, it was already too late. The marketplace was unforgiving.
Wall Street downgraded the company severely. The whole project folded.
(46:27):
Only a couple of thousand units were reportedly sold in
the first place. Collectors still seek out systems and cartridges
to this day, but it is definitely an obsolete format.
It did not stand the test of time like VHS,
which of course is also obsolete at this point, but
you know, it at least had a longer moment in
the spotlight than cartridge Television managed with their car division
(46:51):
or cart revision. All right, that's enough for this episode.
There's obviously lots of other examples. My beloved Seat E
D is a great one. I have one sitting right
next to me, and that's an obsolete format, if ever
there was one, But I've talked about it before. I'll
probably talk about it again. If you have suggestions for
(47:13):
topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff,
whether it's obsolete media or something entirely different, let me know.
One way to do that is to download the I
Heart Radio app. It's free to download, and news you
can navigate over to tech Stuff. Click on that little
icon that has the microphone on it. You can leave
a voice message up to thirty seconds and links for me,
or you can drop me a message on Twitter. The
(47:35):
handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(47:55):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Zero
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