September 25, 2024 • 44 mins
Time named the Sony Walkman number 47 on a list of the 50 most influential gadgets of all time. How did the Walkman become a thing, and what influence has it had on how we experience music?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you So? Back in twenty sixteen, an actual
(00:25):
a group of writers writing for Time magazine, or at
least Time dot Com, assembled a list of what they
called the fifty most influential gadgets of all time. They
said that the list was quote ordered by influence end quote,
and maybe that's the case. I do find it a
(00:45):
little hard to swallow because number fifty on their list,
as in the bottom of the list, was the Apple iPhone. Now, y'all,
I am not the biggest fan of Apple. I don't
own an iPhone, but I think if I were to
make a list of most influential gadgets of all time,
the iPhone would be way higher up on that list
(01:08):
than the very bottom. You know, the iPhone really ushered
in the era of the consumer smartphone. It was not
the first smartphone. Apple rarely ever brings a product to
market as the first of its kind. They bring refined
products to the market, and it was the first smartphone
to see huge success with a mainstream audience, not just
(01:30):
you know, executives on the go or executives who wanted
to have a technological status symbol. Plus, I mean, the
entire nature of the web changed due to a shift
toward mobile computing, and I think we have to lay
that largely at the feet of the Apple iPhone. While
(01:50):
the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone in the world,
I think that it's really what got the trend moving
toward mobile computing, and that in turn changed really like
the entire web. So I put it higher on the list.
But then my guess is that making a list of
the fifty most influential gadgets is hard in anyway. Today's
(02:12):
episode is not about the iPhone at all. It's just
this was the article that kind of launched me into
where I wanted to go today. So instead of talking
about number fifty, because I've done episodes about the iPhone before,
I thought we would talk about number forty seven on
this list. So this is more influential than the iPhone
according to that group of writers, and it's the Sony
(02:33):
Walkman as in the portable cassette player. It's still not
very high up on the list, but you know what
can you do? So the Walkman created the chance for
folks to experience pre recorded audio in a pretty new way,
a way that was portable, and it let them create
a kind of bubble around themselves, even if they were
(02:54):
walking around in public. And it meant you weren't tethered
to like a wall outlet or lugging around a large
tape deck or tape recorder. So that you can listen
to your pre recorded cassettes. You could just PLoP in
some batteries, a pair of double A batteries into this thing.
You put in your favorite audio cassette, You plug in
(03:14):
your headphones, put them on your ears, you push play,
you head out into the world. I think it's easy
for us to take for granted how portable the music
experience is today. You know the fact that we had
MP three players and iPods and then smartphones and streaming
services and all that that's transformed the way we experience
music in large part, But once upon a time that
(03:38):
wasn't so much of an option. So let's turn back
the clock and learn about the development, the release, and
the impact of the Sony Walkman. And before we get
to that, we have to have some preamble, because you
know this is tech stuff. You know tech stuff. I
like to talk about the history of technologies, and not
just the technology, but the stuff that led to the
development of that tech. So let's talk about recorded media
(04:00):
and the development of the cassette tape medium. Now I've
done full episodes about the invention of recorded media. How
one of the earliest versions was recording sound to cylinders
that were coated in wax. Recording to a wax cylinder
essentially involved shouting into an acoustic horn, and that acoustic
(04:21):
horn at the narrow end had a little membrane that
was connected to a needle, and the membrane would vibrate
when sound waves would come into the horn. The needle
that vibrates would carve into the wax on the cylinder.
The cylinder would be turned and the needle would start
to carve a spiral into the cylinder. You could take
(04:45):
the carved cylinder and put that into a player, which
essentially did the same process, but in reverse. You would
put a stylust like another needle and fit it into
the groove in the cylinder. You would begin to rotate
the cylinder. The needle would travel through the groove and
it would vibrate as it did so, which would cause
(05:05):
a membrane to vibrate at the narrow end of an
acoustic horn, and then if you listened real carefully at
the wide end of the acoustic horn, you would be
able to hear the recorded sound, the playback of whatever
sound had been recorded originally. Now, it didn't take too
much longer after the invention of the cylinder for various
(05:26):
folks to come up with flat recorded discs as an alternative,
so instead of a cylinder, you would just have a
flat disc with audio recorded on one and then eventually
both sides of the disc. These would ultimately become easier
to store and to produce than wax cylinders were. They
were originally made all of stuff like shellac, which is
(05:49):
essentially something that you get from insects. But eventually companies
would make the shift to vinyl. While different music companies
battled it out over formats, we would mostly settle on
albums playing back at either forty five revolutions per minute
or thirty three in a third revolutions per minut on turntables.
(06:11):
Some older albums would actually play it like seventy eight
revolutions per minute. Now, the record album traces its history
back to the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen sixties,
you know, more than half a century later, vinyl albums
were the dominant form of recorded media for home use.
In fact, they were almost exclusively the media format for
(06:35):
home use unless you were really well off or maybe
you worked in the music industry or something, because then
you might have a real to real player. But otherwise
there just wasn't any call for that. So the music
industry had been relying upon real to reel players for
a while in order to make master recordings of performances,
as well as to edit and put together that master
(06:57):
in the first place. And this, of course is magnetic
tape we're talking about now. Magnetic tape also traces its
evolution back to the late nineteenth century, though at that
point we weren't yet talking about tape. So back in
the eighteen eighties, there was this feller named Oberlin Smith,
which what a name, What a great name, Oberlin Smith.
(07:19):
Oberlin reckoned that you could use magnetization to record sound
onto a magnetic medium, and it would have to obviously
be a medium that would respond to magnetic fields. So
his suggestion was using like silk thread that had been
coded in steel particles. And here's how he proposed such
(07:40):
a device would work. So first, for recording, you would
have a microphone, so sound goes into the microphone, like
speaking into the microphone would then generate an alternating current.
I've done episodes about how microphones work, but essentially what
you're talking about is similar to what we were talking
about with recording with wax cylinders, except instead of the
membrane moving a needle to carve into wax, the vibrating
(08:05):
membrane would interact with an electromagnet and create a current,
a variable current. That current you could then use to
represent the sound. You could actually just send that current
to an amplifier and then to a speaker, a loud speaker,
and that's how you get microphone to loudspeaker amplified sound. Well,
(08:26):
in this case, you wouldn't be sending it to a loudspeaker. Instead,
you'd be using that current to go to an electromagnet
create a fluctuating magnetic field. And meanwhile you would run
the steel dust coded string past this electromagnet, and that
fluctuating magnetic field would cause the particles on that string
(08:50):
to align a certain way according to whatever the magnetic
field was at the moment that the string was running
past it. And because that field is in fluck, the
direction of those particles would vary over time, So the
string would actually become a record of the magnetic fluctuations
over time. And you know, obviously the rate at which
(09:13):
you pulled the string past this electromagnet would determine the
speed of recording. So to play it back, you would
put the string near a conductor essentially connected to some
sort of playback device like a speaker, with an amplifier
in between, because the signal you're going to get is
going to be too weak to really drive a speaker.
(09:34):
So the magnetized particles on the string when you pull
it past a conductor, then you can induce current to
flow through that conductor, and that current, when amplified and
then sent to a speaker, would play back the recorded
sound used to create the record on the string in
the first place. Now, all Obey never build a working
(09:58):
model of his idea. However, a Danish inventor named Valdemar
Poulsen built upon this notion. He either had read about
the previous concept or had come to the same conclusion independently.
It's not clear which is the case, but you know,
(10:18):
Obey didn't build it. So Valdemar creates a patent for
a similar invention that he called the telegraphone, and he
got the patent. He was awarded the patent for this
invention in the late eighteen hundreds, and he landed essentially
a licensing deal here in America. He also landed other
(10:41):
deals elsewhere in the world, but in America he got
some folks to buy into it, and they created the
American Telegraphone Company of Washington, DC. So that device used
like steel wire to record upon, but same sort of
basic idea. You would run the steel wire past a
(11:02):
magnet that would magnetize the wire in various alignments, and
then running it back across a reader would play back
the recorded medium or media I should say. In that case, well,
the device didn't make that big of an impact here
in the United States. The utility was somewhat limited, and
the idea was that it really would be more like
(11:23):
a business equipment, right. It was meant for things like
taking notes for dictation, that kind of thing. The sound
quality wasn't fantastic. It was not really intended for pre
recorded music. It wouldn't do well for that purpose. The
invention actually did a little bit better in Europe than
(11:44):
it did here in the United States. Here in the US,
the business didn't stay around for very long, but other
businesses that also took Polson's patent and licensed it, they
were able to create a business that stood the test
of time a bit better than the American version. But
let's get to the development of magnetic tape. So this
(12:05):
approach showed that it was viable to use magnetism as
a recording medium or recording method, but the steel wire
just wasn't really the best approach. In the mid nineteen twenties,
there was an American named Joseph O'Neill who theorized that
you could quote quote a strip of paper or some
(12:26):
other cheap material end quote with magnetic material for the
purposes of recording audio to it, and this would remove
the need to use steel wire, or steel coated threads,
or steel tape. These all had limited utility. With the
case of thread, there was limited resilience, like it could
eventually break or fray. So he said, why not just
(12:49):
use a strip of material coat it with this magnetic
stuff and then use that for recording. However, while he
had suggests did the concept, he didn't appear to pursue
this in any serious way. As far as I am aware,
he did not produce an actual example of this. He
(13:10):
just kind of theorized that it could be done. Whereas
a German engineer named Fritz Fleoimer had developed a method
to put metal stripes on cigarette paper to want purpose.
I do not know. I'm sure there was a reason
to put metal stripes on cigarette paper, but I don't
know what it was, but I didn't look it up
(13:31):
because I've got enough bunny trails going on in this
episode anyway. But he reasoned that because he had figured
out how to do that how to put metal stripes
on cigarette paper, he could use a similar approach to
coat a strip of paper like paper tape, with magnetic material,
and then the paper tape could be used as a
recording medium for audio. The process of recording and playback
(13:54):
would be pretty similar as what it was with the telegraphones,
so not that different from steel wire or steel tape.
You would still have a right head that would use
a fluctuating magnetic field to record audio. Signals sent from
a microphone to this magnetically coded paper tape as it
passed by underneath the right head, and then later if
(14:17):
you wanted to play it back, a playback head a
red head would pick up the magnetic stripe with its
particles in various alignments, and this would create the electric
current that was created through induction, and then that current
would get amplified by an amplifier and could then be
sent as a signal to playback sound on a loudspeaker.
(14:38):
His work in the late nineteen twenties would ultimately lead
to the development of the Magnetophone K one, which he
unveiled in nineteen thirty five, which was the first practical
tape recorder. Okay, so that sets the first stage for
what would become the foundation for the Walkman. When we
come back, I'll talk a little bit more of about
(15:00):
Walkman prehistory, and we'll talk about Sony itself and how
it came about developing the Walkman device and why it
became one of the top fifty most influential gadgets in
history according to these folks in time. But first, let's
take a quick break. Okay. When we left off. Before
(15:28):
the break, I was talking about Fritz Fleoimer, a German engineer,
an Austrian German engineer who developed this magnetic tape that
ultimately he would unveil in nineteen thirty five, and that
was the Magnetophone K one that was the first practical
tape recorder. But this was also during a time where
(15:51):
the world was heading into World War Two. Obviously, World
War two ends up being this massive conflict, and you
US forces were very much interested in one learning what
technology the Germans had access to and two stealing it.
(16:11):
Now that's not just the Americans. Everybody was like this,
right in. Any country that perceived that another country had
a technological advantage wanted to remove that advantage from their opponents,
wanted to be able to exploit it themselves. So this
was going on across all enemy lines, like everybody was
spying on and stealing from everyone else, even allies in
(16:34):
some cases. But here US forces were able to get
possession of some German recording equipment as well as some
German tapes, and soon Americans began developing their own version
of Floimer's technology. They began to create their own magnetic
tape systems and magnetic tapes themselves. By the late nineteen forties,
(16:55):
the recording industry had begun to use magnetic tape in
order for you know, music production. Tape actually opened up
a ton of new opportunities. For one thing, you could
record several sessions to tape, and then you could physically
cut and edit the tape to put together a master recording.
(17:16):
You know, maybe you have some various takes that are
all pretty close to each other, but maybe take three
the band had a really great intro into the song.
It just sounded really good. But take five has the
best version of the bridge, and the group really nailed
(17:36):
the ending of the song just on the second take. Now,
before the days of magnetic tape, you pretty much had
to decide which of these takes was your favorite, and
it may not have all the best qualities of all
the best takes, but you're stuck with what you've got,
and so you got to pick whichever one is going
to be the master, and that's what you go with.
(17:58):
But with tape, with a really good editor, you could
actually put together a recording that doesn't really exist right,
or at least it doesn't exist in one performance. It's
actually a combination of performances. You could do that if
you were really good with editing, and if the band
was really consistent, you could actually put this together. And
you could also do other things, like you could do
(18:19):
multi track recording. You could do overdubbing. That really opened
up a lot of opportunities. Overdubbing means you would record someone,
Let's say it's a vocalist singing, but it could just
as easily be a musician playing some instrument like guitar
or piano or whatever, and then you've got your recording.
Then you could play the recording back, and meanwhile the
(18:42):
vocalist or musician or whatever could play their own harmonies
along with the original recording, so they're accompanying themselves. They're
accompanying the recorded version of themself live. Then you could
record that. That's overdubbing. This way, you could layer your
recordings again, a more lush, rich sound than would be
(19:03):
possible if you were just relying on a single artist
or band or whatever. You could really flesh sounds out
that way. The tape machines in those days were often
these big, real to real devices, and so it was
not common for your average person to get hold of
one of those. I mean they were sold sometimes to consumers,
(19:24):
but they were expensive and to get the actual media
was hard to There weren't a lot of places selling
real to real tape of performances, so vinyl records were
still the dominant form of recorded media in the consumer space,
but that would change thanks to a Dutch electronics company
called Phillips. Now, the Phillips Electronics Company dated back to
(19:47):
eighteen ninety one. Sensing a theme here, I'm sure like
all these technologies and companies date back to like the
late nineteenth century, Brothers Anton and Gerard Phillips created the
Phillips Company in the Netherlands. Their original focus was on
light bulbs, and generally the company's philosophy was that they
would aim to create high quality products, even though that
(20:10):
meant that their products would be priced for a fairly
limited market, which is a nice way of saying their
stuff was expensive. You know. Now, for a while, their
company was part of a global cartel that dominated the
light bulb market, and on the one hand, that did
lead to forming certain standards in the light bulb industry,
but on the other it arguably prevented competition in the
(20:31):
marketplace anyway. By the late nineteen forties, Phillips was starting
to get into other types of technologies, you know, like
electric shavers. But they found out the profit margins are
razor thin. Not really, but I couldn't resist the pun.
But in the nineteen fifties, Phillips got into the recording business.
They launched a music label. They later in the nineteen
sixties acquired smaller record labels like Mercury Records. And they
(20:56):
were also thinking, well, how can we also be in
the business of the the medium upon which recorded music
can go. So an engineer at Phillips named lew Atten's
worked out of an office in Belgium where he was
pioneering a new technology that would bring magnetic tape media
to home consumers. This was in nineteen sixty two and
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the invention that he pioneered was the cassette tape. This
tape would use a very thin strip of plastic film
coded in magnetic material. The film would wrap around a
pair of reels. Those reels would be encased inside a
plastic cartridge. On the outside of this cartridge you would
see like the two holes that'd be the center of
(21:38):
these two reels. They'd be pronged so that they could
fit onto a tape player's spokes, and a small length
of this tape is obviously uncovered. That section could be
then inserted into a tape recorder for recording or playback.
The cassette was such a small form factor that immediately
people saw advantages over larger reel to reel machine that
(22:00):
were far more bulky and expensive. Now, the initial plan
for the audio cassette was to sell them as business
tools like this was an idea like again, for dictation
and taking notes and that kind of stuff. It didn't
take long, however, before Phillips and other companies said, hey,
what if we put pre recorded music on these and
(22:20):
sold them like we do with vinyl albums. Now you
might wonder what artist was the first to offer an
album on cassette tape. The answer to that is unclear.
Christian Romer has a blog post on legacybox dot com
about this and lists a few potential contenders for the
(22:41):
first album on cassette tape. One is Nina Simone's Wild
Is the Wind. Another is Johnny Mathis's The Shadow of
Your Smile, But my favorite is Eartha Kit's Love for
Sale album. I Love Eartha Kit, What an amazing, But
as Romer points out, no one was really documenting the
(23:04):
history of albums on cassette when they first started to
become a thing, so it's unclear what the actual answer
is of who was first. I would also like to
point out that music labels likely produced more than just
one album on cassette at a time, because it seems
like an odd choice to just go with let's just
do one and see how it goes. Someone's album obviously
(23:24):
had to be the first off the manufacturing line, but
I think that's just splitting hairs. At that point, cassettes
were easier to store than vinyl albums, they took up
less space. They did have their own peculiarities. However, if
you brought a cassette tape near a strong magnet, well
you just screwed up the recording on your cassette tape
because the magnetic particles on the tape would realign to
(23:46):
this new powerful magnetic field, so effectively you would erase
your cassette. Anyone who had cassette tapes also knows the
pain of tape getting snagged on something and then unreeling
from inside the cassette. You would just have this massive
plastic film just unspooled from outside inside the cassette. Now
it's outside the cassette. So to fix that you would
(24:09):
have to do the old standby, which is what I
call inserting a pencil into the spokes on one reel
and gently coaxing the tape back into place by twisting
the pencil slowly, one twist at a time. What a
joy that was. But you know, while the cassette media
was far more portable than vinyl, the players weren't that
(24:32):
much more portable, at least not at first. I mean,
they were smaller than turntables, but they weren't pocket sized,
you know. Tape decks, like tape recorders, were still fairly large.
They were too large to carry around easily. Like you
could put a strap on one and wear it around
your neck like it was like a handbag or something,
(24:54):
but it was still pretty bulky. A lot of tape
decks did have headphone jacks, but not all of because
a lot of them had a built in speaker in
the tape deck itself, so you would just push play
and listen to the music coming straight out of the
tape deck. It's usually pretty tinny. It wasn't typically a
very good quality of sound. But it worked. But yeah,
(25:14):
it wasn't necessarily the case that a tape deck would
have a headphone jack. A lot of them did, but
it wasn't a sure thing, and that's kind of where
things sat for about a decade. But now let's flash
forward to the nineteen seventies in Japan. So the story
goes that one of Sony's co founders, a guy named
(25:36):
Masaru Ibuka, wanted to be able to listen to albums
on a portable playback device. Specifically, he wanted to be
able to listen to opera. He took lots of flights.
Being the head of a major electronics company in Japan,
he had to fly a lot, and he liked to
listen to opera, and he wanted a way to bring
opera albums with him on flights so that he wasn't
(25:58):
having to pay attention to everything else that's going on
on a plane. And he asked his engineers to look
into a way to achieve this goal, like how could
he listen to stuff on a device that was small
enough for him to easily bring it with him on
a flight. And a designer named Noria Oga got the
high pressure assignment of figuring out how to make something
(26:22):
that Ebuka would appreciate. So then Oga turns to a
product that Sony had already started producing at that point.
This was a product that they were producing for the
business market, and it was a small handheld tape recorder
called the TCM one hundred B. It was also known
as the Pressman because they were thinking that this would
(26:45):
be a device that reporters for newspapers would want to
use in order to make verbal notes. That kind of
thing did not digital, but recorded notes, and so it
was a handheld cassette recorder for voice memos and stuff.
It was small enough that you could hold it in
one hand and you would operate it by pressing the
various buttons, and they had buttons for stuff like rewind
(27:05):
and fast forward and record and play. You know, all
the basic functions of your tape deck all built in.
So the base elements for a Walkman were already present
in the Pressman. So Oga just used the Pressman as
kind of a launching pad, and he created a prototype
portable cassette player. He worked with engineers to take the
(27:27):
Pressman and tweak the design of that product. So one
thing they did was they removed the recording feature, so
it was purely a playback device, not a recording device.
They also changed it so that the Pressman was monaural
mono in other words, so you didn't have two different
channels of sound going to the different speakers in your headset.
(27:49):
It was all mono. They changed it to stereo so
it would be able to support stereo recording. He then
gave this prototype to Abuka before Abuka was to go
on another flight around world to do business e things
in order to test it out, and Abuka must have
really liked the result because Sony would then go on
to produce the Walkman portable cassette player the following year,
(28:11):
in nineteen seventy nine. Now, this was never a sure thing.
In fact, within the company, there was a lot of
resistance to this idea. There were a lot of executives
who said, I don't know about this. I don't think
there's actually a market big enough to support the production
and marketing of a portable cassette player. But then Sony's
(28:32):
other co founder, a guy named Marita Akio, saw the
potential for great success and he said, no, Abuka was right,
like this wasn't just a project for Abuka so he
could listen to music when he was on his flights.
This thing could be a real blockbuster hit for our company.
So with the support of the co founders, the company
(28:53):
did go into the development for a consumer portable cassette
player and they began to develop the Walkman. All right,
we're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
I'll talk more about the Walkman story and its place
in history. So, with the support of Sony's co founder's engineers,
(29:21):
that Sony got to work in creating a consumer version
of the prototype that Oga had created for Ibuka, and
they created a device that had the designation TPSL two,
but it would get the name Walkman. Akio came up
with that name and said it should be called the
(29:42):
Walkman because you can walk around with it and listen
to music. Pressman the voice recording device that was for
the press. Walkman is for walking around and listening to
your music, and they launched it in Japan in July
nineteen seventy nine for the equivalent of around one hundred
(30:03):
and fifty dollars, which is a big o' yikes. One
hundred fifty dollars in nineteen seventy nine. The United States
would not get the Walkman until nineteen eighty. Meanwhile, you
might wonder, okay, one hundred fifty bucks in nineteen seventy nine,
what would that be equivalent to today? Well, using a
handy dandy inflation calculator, that comes out to around six
(30:27):
hundred forty six dollars for a portable cassette player. Keep
in mind that the original Walkman didn't have recording capabilities.
Just playback Holy cats, y'all. That is as incredibly expensive.
Like again, I always think about things like video game
consoles that launch for around five hundred to seven hundred dollars,
and people talk about how expensive that is. Keep in
(30:49):
mind that original Walkman would have set you back six
hundred forty six dollars, more than what some video game
consoles launch at. That's expensive now. When it did launch
in the United States, the original name for the device
wasn't the Walkman, it was the Soundabout which sounds about
wrong to me anyway. But eventually Sony would migrate back
(31:11):
to the Walkman, which was a Buka's suggestion from the
get go and occhio suggestion. The two of them argued
that it should have been that from the beginning. Interestingly,
there was a dispute about the origins of the Walkman
concept because there was another inventor who came up with
(31:32):
a very similar idea and in fact patented that idea
in nineteen seventy seven, two years before the Walkman came out. Now,
this inventor was Andreas Pavel, who had an invention that
he called the stereo Belt. And as the name suggests,
(31:53):
the stereo belt was a belt that had audio equipment
attached to it, which included a battery pack as well
as audio players, and you would connect headphones to this
belt in order to listen to it. So not exactly
the same thing as the Walkman, but the idea that
being a portable music playing device is what made it
(32:17):
similar to Walkman. Eventually, Pavel would bring lawsuits against Sony
in various regions, arguing that there was a patent infringement
going on that Sony had essentially copied the design that
Pavel had created without paying for it, without licensing it.
In several places, these complaints were ultimately dismissed. In other places,
(32:42):
Sony would settle out of court with Pavel rather than
have to go through the whole process of a legal proceedings,
which can be really expensive even if you win. So
while Sony never admitted any fault in this, they did
eventually pay a pretty hefty settlement out of court. Anyway,
(33:04):
back to the Walkmen, so I mentioned earlier. The Walkmen
ran on a pair of double A batteries, which was great.
You know, their batteries weren't too expensive. You could take
them on the go, you didn't have to be tethered
to an outlet. They did require headphones because the Walkman
had no on board speaker. If you pushed play on
(33:25):
a Walkman and there were no headphones plugged into it,
all you would hear would be the gears turning as
the spokes were being rotated by the player itself. Sony
made around thirty thousand units initially in nineteen seventy nine
when they launched it in Japan, and sales were a
little slow in the beginning. However, Sony used some good
(33:46):
old fashioned elbow grease to get interest up in the product,
and by that I mean that Sony employees would literally
hit the streets in Japan with a Walkman and cassettes
and find people out there on the street and have
them listen to cassettes on the Walkmen and let them
have the experience of this portable music player. And it worked.
(34:08):
That marketing push really was effective. By August, just two
months after they launched, Sony had sold out of their
initial run of units. They were hoping for around like
five thousand units a month. Instead they sold thirty thousand
and two months. Pretty incredible. Now, not everyone was super
happy about the Walkmen and its success in the marketplace,
(34:31):
like it also saw great success here in the United
States once it came out in nineteen eighty, but not
everybody was really thrilled about this. There were people who
were warning that this technology was inspiring young folks to
shut themselves away from the world even while they were
walking around in the world, rather than being engaged in
(34:52):
the wholesome surroundings. Undoubtedly learning great moral lessons from their
wise elders. These wholigans would be listening to their Bob
Dylan's and their Judas priests at even their smothers brothers
on headphones and blocking out the outside world and allowing
themselves to be shaped by the evil, wicked whims of
(35:15):
professional musicians. Oh the humanity. I'm making fun of it,
but the moral panic was real, right, There was moral
panic around portable cassette players. It just shows that fuddy
duddies will find moral panic in the oddest of places.
Heaven help you if you have to also play dungeons
(35:38):
and dragons while listening to music on a Walkman, because
you were just destined for h double hockey sticks. Alan Bloom,
the author, said essentially as much in a book titled
The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that young
people listening to personal music devices would eventually lead to
moral decay. Pretty crazy stuff. Sony would release many follow
(36:03):
ups to the original Walkman, so there were lots of
improvements over the device over the following models. Some of
them were even smaller. Some of them would incorporate a
record function because people missed having that. The Walkman would
also become almost synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of
like how the iPod would become almost synonymous with MP
(36:25):
three players. Folks would use the term Walkman even if
they were talking about a product from a competing company.
You know, it wasn't a portable cassette player, It was
a Walkman. Even if it wasn't actually a Walkman, which
meant that Sony had to do a lot of work
to protect their trademark. Now, around the same time, you
had the fate of the cassette tape itself. So initially,
(36:48):
cassette sales were going very strong in the nineteen eighties,
but cassettes didn't totally replace vinyl records. For one thing,
you had music lovers who would call themselves audio files,
who would tend to prefer vinyl records over cassette tapes.
That cassettes could warp over time, you would get audio distortion,
(37:10):
you would get a hiss. There was a hiss associated
with audio cassettes, and therefore people who really valued the
experience of listening to music on high end equipment tended
to prefer vinyl to cassette tapes. However, the convenience of
cassette tapes plus the fact that you could purchase a
blank cassette and then record stuff to make your own tapes,
(37:32):
and thus giving birth to the cultural phenomenon of the mixtape. Now,
making a mixtape that's an art form unto itself. That
meant that the cassette had a really firm foothold and culture,
and the incorporation of tape decks into car entertainment systems
helped too. This gets complicated by the introduction of eight tracks,
but that's a different matter. Anyway, it appeared as though
(37:55):
the party would never end. In nineteen eighty four Billboard
report the cassette tape sales were outpacing vinyl LPs for
the first time, and at that point made up around
fifty three percent of all albums shipped. Now that shipped
not necessarily sold, but still cassettes were clearly making a
(38:15):
lot of headway. They were easy to manufacture, They again
took up less space, You could sell a whole lot
more of them, You could get a lot more in
stock at a record store than you could with vinyl,
and yeah, people were digging them. However, the introduction of
the compact disc, which also was introduced in the early
nineteen eighties, would ultimately set the stage for the cassette's decline. Now,
(38:39):
it would take quite a few years for compact discs
to really establish themselves in the market, particularly since early
CD players were ridiculously expensive, like just prohibitively expensive for
most people. However, over time CDs would start to catch on,
and cassette sales began to take a turn, just as
(39:01):
vinyl had done before it. In nineteen ninety one, CD
sales were higher, at least from a dollar value, than
cassette sales. It doesn't mean that there were more CDs sold,
but more money was made selling CDs than cassettes starting
in nineteen ninety one. So the nineties saw the decline
of cassette sales continue, with more and more people switching
(39:24):
to CDs. Vinyl became an almost obsolete format for the
general public. It never fully went away, and of course
it's enjoyed a resurgence in more recent years, but in
the nineties and early two thousands it almost disappeared. Cassettes
did enjoy a brief little bit of a comeback. I mean,
(39:44):
I guess arguably it's still going now because some artists
have released some of their albums on cassette formats, including
like Megan D. Stallion and Taylor Swift, but it's not
like a common thing. Cassette sales in general were pretty low,
and that also meant that cassette players weren't really flying
off store shelves either, so it didn't make much sense
(40:07):
to keep making them, which brings us to our sad
little tail coming to a close here, because Sony actually
did continue producing the Walkman all the way through the
nineteen nineties and all through the first decade of the
two thousands, despite the plunge in cassette sales over that
time period. But in twenty ten, Sony threw in the
(40:27):
towel and announced it would shut down the portable cassette
player line, so the Walkman cassette player would be no more.
They stopped production in twenty ten. It however, was not
the end of the Walkman as a brand, because Sony
gave the Walkman brand to other products that were also
in the music space. They just weren't cassette players. So
(40:50):
the main one would be digital music players, digital audio
players or DAPs, and this is what I would often
just call an MP three player back in the old days.
Like the Apple iPod, Sony started introducing digital audio players
way back in nineteen ninety nine, which is actually two
years before Apple would introduce the iPod, but Sony's version
(41:13):
initially only supported a proprietary digital audio format called a
track at r AC. Sony had control over that file
format and felt like this would protect Sony's interests in
the actual music production side. In other words, this was
a way to prevent piracy. Sony specifically did not want
(41:35):
to support file formats like MP three. Now, the Walkmen
would ultimately fall well behind the iPod in sales in
most countries. When it got to digital audio players. The
Walkman did okay in Japan, but outside Japan it just
it could not compete against the iPod. However, you can
(41:56):
still find digital audio players that are branded as walk today,
including high end players that cost a whole bunch of money,
like more than one thousand dollars for some of these devices.
I think that's a pretty tall order. When we live
in a world where smartphones have access to tons of
music through various music streaming platforms. Now, sure, the fidelity
(42:19):
isn't necessarily top notch, you know, that depends on the
streaming service, the format they use, how much compression is
used for the files, and what kind of headphones or
headset you're using to listen to it. However, I think
for the majority of people out there, the convenience and
accessibility that is presented through smartphones that ends up being
(42:40):
more important than musical fidelity. For most people, not everybody.
Some folks are more concerned with the quality of the experience.
I think that's legitimate. I think it's legit to really
want the absolute best quality of sound. However, that is
also a very subjective thing, right. You could have two
people and they can have the same taste in music,
(43:01):
but they might have very different perceptions of what set
up is best, and you can't, you know, necessarily agree
on a common standard. The world of high fidelity audio
is filled with a lot of marketing that strikes me
as being just a stone's throw away from pure pseudoscience.
But I've talked about that before, so I'll leave it
(43:22):
for now. So the cassette Walkman has been out of
production since twenty ten. The brand still exists for digital
audio players, and some artists do continue to put stuff
out on cassette because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Personally,
I do miss the days of putting together the perfect mixtape.
There's something really special about getting one just right, like
(43:44):
finding that right progress of songs so that you know
you've got like the really high energy number comes in
at song number three, and then you've got a cool
down number for song number four that kind of thing.
Making a curated playlist doesn't really scratch the same itch
for me. There's something really tactle about using cassette tapes
and creating a mixtape that way, and slapping a really
(44:07):
good mixtape into a portable music player and then just
going for a walk is a pleasure that I think
people should really seek out if they're able to. That
kind of thing is just one of the simple pleasures
of life if it's accessible to you. I hope that
this episode was interesting to all of y'all. I hope
you're doing well, and I will talk to you again
(44:29):
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you So? Back in twenty sixteen, an actual
(00:25):
a group of writers writing for Time magazine, or at
least Time dot Com, assembled a list of what they
called the fifty most influential gadgets of all time. They
said that the list was quote ordered by influence end quote,
and maybe that's the case. I do find it a
(00:45):
little hard to swallow because number fifty on their list,
as in the bottom of the list, was the Apple iPhone. Now, y'all,
I am not the biggest fan of Apple. I don't
own an iPhone, but I think if I were to
make a list of most influential gadgets of all time,
the iPhone would be way higher up on that list
(01:08):
than the very bottom. You know, the iPhone really ushered
in the era of the consumer smartphone. It was not
the first smartphone. Apple rarely ever brings a product to
market as the first of its kind. They bring refined
products to the market, and it was the first smartphone
to see huge success with a mainstream audience, not just
(01:30):
you know, executives on the go or executives who wanted
to have a technological status symbol. Plus, I mean, the
entire nature of the web changed due to a shift
toward mobile computing, and I think we have to lay
that largely at the feet of the Apple iPhone. While
(01:50):
the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone in the world,
I think that it's really what got the trend moving
toward mobile computing, and that in turn changed really like
the entire web. So I put it higher on the list.
But then my guess is that making a list of
the fifty most influential gadgets is hard in anyway. Today's
(02:12):
episode is not about the iPhone at all. It's just
this was the article that kind of launched me into
where I wanted to go today. So instead of talking
about number fifty, because I've done episodes about the iPhone before,
I thought we would talk about number forty seven on
this list. So this is more influential than the iPhone
according to that group of writers, and it's the Sony
(02:33):
Walkman as in the portable cassette player. It's still not
very high up on the list, but you know what
can you do? So the Walkman created the chance for
folks to experience pre recorded audio in a pretty new way,
a way that was portable, and it let them create
a kind of bubble around themselves, even if they were
(02:54):
walking around in public. And it meant you weren't tethered
to like a wall outlet or lugging around a large
tape deck or tape recorder. So that you can listen
to your pre recorded cassettes. You could just PLoP in
some batteries, a pair of double A batteries into this thing.
You put in your favorite audio cassette, You plug in
(03:14):
your headphones, put them on your ears, you push play,
you head out into the world. I think it's easy
for us to take for granted how portable the music
experience is today. You know the fact that we had
MP three players and iPods and then smartphones and streaming
services and all that that's transformed the way we experience
music in large part, But once upon a time that
(03:38):
wasn't so much of an option. So let's turn back
the clock and learn about the development, the release, and
the impact of the Sony Walkman. And before we get
to that, we have to have some preamble, because you
know this is tech stuff. You know tech stuff. I
like to talk about the history of technologies, and not
just the technology, but the stuff that led to the
development of that tech. So let's talk about recorded media
(04:00):
and the development of the cassette tape medium. Now I've
done full episodes about the invention of recorded media. How
one of the earliest versions was recording sound to cylinders
that were coated in wax. Recording to a wax cylinder
essentially involved shouting into an acoustic horn, and that acoustic
(04:21):
horn at the narrow end had a little membrane that
was connected to a needle, and the membrane would vibrate
when sound waves would come into the horn. The needle
that vibrates would carve into the wax on the cylinder.
The cylinder would be turned and the needle would start
to carve a spiral into the cylinder. You could take
(04:45):
the carved cylinder and put that into a player, which
essentially did the same process, but in reverse. You would
put a stylust like another needle and fit it into
the groove in the cylinder. You would begin to rotate
the cylinder. The needle would travel through the groove and
it would vibrate as it did so, which would cause
(05:05):
a membrane to vibrate at the narrow end of an
acoustic horn, and then if you listened real carefully at
the wide end of the acoustic horn, you would be
able to hear the recorded sound, the playback of whatever
sound had been recorded originally. Now, it didn't take too
much longer after the invention of the cylinder for various
(05:26):
folks to come up with flat recorded discs as an alternative,
so instead of a cylinder, you would just have a
flat disc with audio recorded on one and then eventually
both sides of the disc. These would ultimately become easier
to store and to produce than wax cylinders were. They
were originally made all of stuff like shellac, which is
(05:49):
essentially something that you get from insects. But eventually companies
would make the shift to vinyl. While different music companies
battled it out over formats, we would mostly settle on
albums playing back at either forty five revolutions per minute
or thirty three in a third revolutions per minut on turntables.
(06:11):
Some older albums would actually play it like seventy eight
revolutions per minute. Now, the record album traces its history
back to the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen sixties,
you know, more than half a century later, vinyl albums
were the dominant form of recorded media for home use.
In fact, they were almost exclusively the media format for
(06:35):
home use unless you were really well off or maybe
you worked in the music industry or something, because then
you might have a real to real player. But otherwise
there just wasn't any call for that. So the music
industry had been relying upon real to reel players for
a while in order to make master recordings of performances,
as well as to edit and put together that master
(06:57):
in the first place. And this, of course is magnetic
tape we're talking about now. Magnetic tape also traces its
evolution back to the late nineteenth century, though at that
point we weren't yet talking about tape. So back in
the eighteen eighties, there was this feller named Oberlin Smith,
which what a name, What a great name, Oberlin Smith.
(07:19):
Oberlin reckoned that you could use magnetization to record sound
onto a magnetic medium, and it would have to obviously
be a medium that would respond to magnetic fields. So
his suggestion was using like silk thread that had been
coded in steel particles. And here's how he proposed such
(07:40):
a device would work. So first, for recording, you would
have a microphone, so sound goes into the microphone, like
speaking into the microphone would then generate an alternating current.
I've done episodes about how microphones work, but essentially what
you're talking about is similar to what we were talking
about with recording with wax cylinders, except instead of the
membrane moving a needle to carve into wax, the vibrating
(08:05):
membrane would interact with an electromagnet and create a current,
a variable current. That current you could then use to
represent the sound. You could actually just send that current
to an amplifier and then to a speaker, a loud speaker,
and that's how you get microphone to loudspeaker amplified sound. Well,
(08:26):
in this case, you wouldn't be sending it to a loudspeaker. Instead,
you'd be using that current to go to an electromagnet
create a fluctuating magnetic field. And meanwhile you would run
the steel dust coded string past this electromagnet, and that
fluctuating magnetic field would cause the particles on that string
(08:50):
to align a certain way according to whatever the magnetic
field was at the moment that the string was running
past it. And because that field is in fluck, the
direction of those particles would vary over time, So the
string would actually become a record of the magnetic fluctuations
over time. And you know, obviously the rate at which
(09:13):
you pulled the string past this electromagnet would determine the
speed of recording. So to play it back, you would
put the string near a conductor essentially connected to some
sort of playback device like a speaker, with an amplifier
in between, because the signal you're going to get is
going to be too weak to really drive a speaker.
(09:34):
So the magnetized particles on the string when you pull
it past a conductor, then you can induce current to
flow through that conductor, and that current, when amplified and
then sent to a speaker, would play back the recorded
sound used to create the record on the string in
the first place. Now, all Obey never build a working
(09:58):
model of his idea. However, a Danish inventor named Valdemar
Poulsen built upon this notion. He either had read about
the previous concept or had come to the same conclusion independently.
It's not clear which is the case, but you know,
(10:18):
Obey didn't build it. So Valdemar creates a patent for
a similar invention that he called the telegraphone, and he
got the patent. He was awarded the patent for this
invention in the late eighteen hundreds, and he landed essentially
a licensing deal here in America. He also landed other
(10:41):
deals elsewhere in the world, but in America he got
some folks to buy into it, and they created the
American Telegraphone Company of Washington, DC. So that device used
like steel wire to record upon, but same sort of
basic idea. You would run the steel wire past a
(11:02):
magnet that would magnetize the wire in various alignments, and
then running it back across a reader would play back
the recorded medium or media I should say. In that case, well,
the device didn't make that big of an impact here
in the United States. The utility was somewhat limited, and
the idea was that it really would be more like
(11:23):
a business equipment, right. It was meant for things like
taking notes for dictation, that kind of thing. The sound
quality wasn't fantastic. It was not really intended for pre
recorded music. It wouldn't do well for that purpose. The
invention actually did a little bit better in Europe than
(11:44):
it did here in the United States. Here in the US,
the business didn't stay around for very long, but other
businesses that also took Polson's patent and licensed it, they
were able to create a business that stood the test
of time a bit better than the American version. But
let's get to the development of magnetic tape. So this
(12:05):
approach showed that it was viable to use magnetism as
a recording medium or recording method, but the steel wire
just wasn't really the best approach. In the mid nineteen twenties,
there was an American named Joseph O'Neill who theorized that
you could quote quote a strip of paper or some
(12:26):
other cheap material end quote with magnetic material for the
purposes of recording audio to it, and this would remove
the need to use steel wire, or steel coated threads,
or steel tape. These all had limited utility. With the
case of thread, there was limited resilience, like it could
eventually break or fray. So he said, why not just
(12:49):
use a strip of material coat it with this magnetic
stuff and then use that for recording. However, while he
had suggests did the concept, he didn't appear to pursue
this in any serious way. As far as I am aware,
he did not produce an actual example of this. He
(13:10):
just kind of theorized that it could be done. Whereas
a German engineer named Fritz Fleoimer had developed a method
to put metal stripes on cigarette paper to want purpose.
I do not know. I'm sure there was a reason
to put metal stripes on cigarette paper, but I don't
know what it was, but I didn't look it up
(13:31):
because I've got enough bunny trails going on in this
episode anyway. But he reasoned that because he had figured
out how to do that how to put metal stripes
on cigarette paper, he could use a similar approach to
coat a strip of paper like paper tape, with magnetic material,
and then the paper tape could be used as a
recording medium for audio. The process of recording and playback
(13:54):
would be pretty similar as what it was with the telegraphones,
so not that different from steel wire or steel tape.
You would still have a right head that would use
a fluctuating magnetic field to record audio. Signals sent from
a microphone to this magnetically coded paper tape as it
passed by underneath the right head, and then later if
(14:17):
you wanted to play it back, a playback head a
red head would pick up the magnetic stripe with its
particles in various alignments, and this would create the electric
current that was created through induction, and then that current
would get amplified by an amplifier and could then be
sent as a signal to playback sound on a loudspeaker.
(14:38):
His work in the late nineteen twenties would ultimately lead
to the development of the Magnetophone K one, which he
unveiled in nineteen thirty five, which was the first practical
tape recorder. Okay, so that sets the first stage for
what would become the foundation for the Walkman. When we
come back, I'll talk a little bit more of about
(15:00):
Walkman prehistory, and we'll talk about Sony itself and how
it came about developing the Walkman device and why it
became one of the top fifty most influential gadgets in
history according to these folks in time. But first, let's
take a quick break. Okay. When we left off. Before
(15:28):
the break, I was talking about Fritz Fleoimer, a German engineer,
an Austrian German engineer who developed this magnetic tape that
ultimately he would unveil in nineteen thirty five, and that
was the Magnetophone K one that was the first practical
tape recorder. But this was also during a time where
(15:51):
the world was heading into World War Two. Obviously, World
War two ends up being this massive conflict, and you
US forces were very much interested in one learning what
technology the Germans had access to and two stealing it.
(16:11):
Now that's not just the Americans. Everybody was like this,
right in. Any country that perceived that another country had
a technological advantage wanted to remove that advantage from their opponents,
wanted to be able to exploit it themselves. So this
was going on across all enemy lines, like everybody was
spying on and stealing from everyone else, even allies in
(16:34):
some cases. But here US forces were able to get
possession of some German recording equipment as well as some
German tapes, and soon Americans began developing their own version
of Floimer's technology. They began to create their own magnetic
tape systems and magnetic tapes themselves. By the late nineteen forties,
(16:55):
the recording industry had begun to use magnetic tape in
order for you know, music production. Tape actually opened up
a ton of new opportunities. For one thing, you could
record several sessions to tape, and then you could physically
cut and edit the tape to put together a master recording.
(17:16):
You know, maybe you have some various takes that are
all pretty close to each other, but maybe take three
the band had a really great intro into the song.
It just sounded really good. But take five has the
best version of the bridge, and the group really nailed
(17:36):
the ending of the song just on the second take. Now,
before the days of magnetic tape, you pretty much had
to decide which of these takes was your favorite, and
it may not have all the best qualities of all
the best takes, but you're stuck with what you've got,
and so you got to pick whichever one is going
to be the master, and that's what you go with.
(17:58):
But with tape, with a really good editor, you could
actually put together a recording that doesn't really exist right,
or at least it doesn't exist in one performance. It's
actually a combination of performances. You could do that if
you were really good with editing, and if the band
was really consistent, you could actually put this together. And
you could also do other things, like you could do
(18:19):
multi track recording. You could do overdubbing. That really opened
up a lot of opportunities. Overdubbing means you would record someone,
Let's say it's a vocalist singing, but it could just
as easily be a musician playing some instrument like guitar
or piano or whatever, and then you've got your recording.
Then you could play the recording back, and meanwhile the
(18:42):
vocalist or musician or whatever could play their own harmonies
along with the original recording, so they're accompanying themselves. They're
accompanying the recorded version of themself live. Then you could
record that. That's overdubbing. This way, you could layer your
recordings again, a more lush, rich sound than would be
(19:03):
possible if you were just relying on a single artist
or band or whatever. You could really flesh sounds out
that way. The tape machines in those days were often
these big, real to real devices, and so it was
not common for your average person to get hold of
one of those. I mean they were sold sometimes to consumers,
(19:24):
but they were expensive and to get the actual media
was hard to There weren't a lot of places selling
real to real tape of performances, so vinyl records were
still the dominant form of recorded media in the consumer space,
but that would change thanks to a Dutch electronics company
called Phillips. Now, the Phillips Electronics Company dated back to
(19:47):
eighteen ninety one. Sensing a theme here, I'm sure like
all these technologies and companies date back to like the
late nineteenth century, Brothers Anton and Gerard Phillips created the
Phillips Company in the Netherlands. Their original focus was on
light bulbs, and generally the company's philosophy was that they
would aim to create high quality products, even though that
(20:10):
meant that their products would be priced for a fairly
limited market, which is a nice way of saying their
stuff was expensive. You know. Now, for a while, their
company was part of a global cartel that dominated the
light bulb market, and on the one hand, that did
lead to forming certain standards in the light bulb industry,
but on the other it arguably prevented competition in the
(20:31):
marketplace anyway. By the late nineteen forties, Phillips was starting
to get into other types of technologies, you know, like
electric shavers. But they found out the profit margins are
razor thin. Not really, but I couldn't resist the pun.
But in the nineteen fifties, Phillips got into the recording business.
They launched a music label. They later in the nineteen
sixties acquired smaller record labels like Mercury Records. And they
(20:56):
were also thinking, well, how can we also be in
the business of the the medium upon which recorded music
can go. So an engineer at Phillips named lew Atten's
worked out of an office in Belgium where he was
pioneering a new technology that would bring magnetic tape media
to home consumers. This was in nineteen sixty two and
(21:17):
the invention that he pioneered was the cassette tape. This
tape would use a very thin strip of plastic film
coded in magnetic material. The film would wrap around a
pair of reels. Those reels would be encased inside a
plastic cartridge. On the outside of this cartridge you would
see like the two holes that'd be the center of
(21:38):
these two reels. They'd be pronged so that they could
fit onto a tape player's spokes, and a small length
of this tape is obviously uncovered. That section could be
then inserted into a tape recorder for recording or playback.
The cassette was such a small form factor that immediately
people saw advantages over larger reel to reel machine that
(22:00):
were far more bulky and expensive. Now, the initial plan
for the audio cassette was to sell them as business
tools like this was an idea like again, for dictation
and taking notes and that kind of stuff. It didn't
take long, however, before Phillips and other companies said, hey,
what if we put pre recorded music on these and
(22:20):
sold them like we do with vinyl albums. Now you
might wonder what artist was the first to offer an
album on cassette tape. The answer to that is unclear.
Christian Romer has a blog post on legacybox dot com
about this and lists a few potential contenders for the
(22:41):
first album on cassette tape. One is Nina Simone's Wild
Is the Wind. Another is Johnny Mathis's The Shadow of
Your Smile, But my favorite is Eartha Kit's Love for
Sale album. I Love Eartha Kit, What an amazing, But
as Romer points out, no one was really documenting the
(23:04):
history of albums on cassette when they first started to
become a thing, so it's unclear what the actual answer
is of who was first. I would also like to
point out that music labels likely produced more than just
one album on cassette at a time, because it seems
like an odd choice to just go with let's just
do one and see how it goes. Someone's album obviously
(23:24):
had to be the first off the manufacturing line, but
I think that's just splitting hairs. At that point, cassettes
were easier to store than vinyl albums, they took up
less space. They did have their own peculiarities. However, if
you brought a cassette tape near a strong magnet, well
you just screwed up the recording on your cassette tape
because the magnetic particles on the tape would realign to
(23:46):
this new powerful magnetic field, so effectively you would erase
your cassette. Anyone who had cassette tapes also knows the
pain of tape getting snagged on something and then unreeling
from inside the cassette. You would just have this massive
plastic film just unspooled from outside inside the cassette. Now
it's outside the cassette. So to fix that you would
(24:09):
have to do the old standby, which is what I
call inserting a pencil into the spokes on one reel
and gently coaxing the tape back into place by twisting
the pencil slowly, one twist at a time. What a
joy that was. But you know, while the cassette media
was far more portable than vinyl, the players weren't that
(24:32):
much more portable, at least not at first. I mean,
they were smaller than turntables, but they weren't pocket sized,
you know. Tape decks, like tape recorders, were still fairly large.
They were too large to carry around easily. Like you
could put a strap on one and wear it around
your neck like it was like a handbag or something,
(24:54):
but it was still pretty bulky. A lot of tape
decks did have headphone jacks, but not all of because
a lot of them had a built in speaker in
the tape deck itself, so you would just push play
and listen to the music coming straight out of the
tape deck. It's usually pretty tinny. It wasn't typically a
very good quality of sound. But it worked. But yeah,
(25:14):
it wasn't necessarily the case that a tape deck would
have a headphone jack. A lot of them did, but
it wasn't a sure thing, and that's kind of where
things sat for about a decade. But now let's flash
forward to the nineteen seventies in Japan. So the story
goes that one of Sony's co founders, a guy named
(25:36):
Masaru Ibuka, wanted to be able to listen to albums
on a portable playback device. Specifically, he wanted to be
able to listen to opera. He took lots of flights.
Being the head of a major electronics company in Japan,
he had to fly a lot, and he liked to
listen to opera, and he wanted a way to bring
opera albums with him on flights so that he wasn't
(25:58):
having to pay attention to everything else that's going on
on a plane. And he asked his engineers to look
into a way to achieve this goal, like how could
he listen to stuff on a device that was small
enough for him to easily bring it with him on
a flight. And a designer named Noria Oga got the
high pressure assignment of figuring out how to make something
(26:22):
that Ebuka would appreciate. So then Oga turns to a
product that Sony had already started producing at that point.
This was a product that they were producing for the
business market, and it was a small handheld tape recorder
called the TCM one hundred B. It was also known
as the Pressman because they were thinking that this would
(26:45):
be a device that reporters for newspapers would want to
use in order to make verbal notes. That kind of
thing did not digital, but recorded notes, and so it
was a handheld cassette recorder for voice memos and stuff.
It was small enough that you could hold it in
one hand and you would operate it by pressing the
various buttons, and they had buttons for stuff like rewind
(27:05):
and fast forward and record and play. You know, all
the basic functions of your tape deck all built in.
So the base elements for a Walkman were already present
in the Pressman. So Oga just used the Pressman as
kind of a launching pad, and he created a prototype
portable cassette player. He worked with engineers to take the
(27:27):
Pressman and tweak the design of that product. So one
thing they did was they removed the recording feature, so
it was purely a playback device, not a recording device.
They also changed it so that the Pressman was monaural
mono in other words, so you didn't have two different
channels of sound going to the different speakers in your headset.
(27:49):
It was all mono. They changed it to stereo so
it would be able to support stereo recording. He then
gave this prototype to Abuka before Abuka was to go
on another flight around world to do business e things
in order to test it out, and Abuka must have
really liked the result because Sony would then go on
to produce the Walkman portable cassette player the following year,
(28:11):
in nineteen seventy nine. Now, this was never a sure thing.
In fact, within the company, there was a lot of
resistance to this idea. There were a lot of executives
who said, I don't know about this. I don't think
there's actually a market big enough to support the production
and marketing of a portable cassette player. But then Sony's
(28:32):
other co founder, a guy named Marita Akio, saw the
potential for great success and he said, no, Abuka was right,
like this wasn't just a project for Abuka so he
could listen to music when he was on his flights.
This thing could be a real blockbuster hit for our company.
So with the support of the co founders, the company
(28:53):
did go into the development for a consumer portable cassette
player and they began to develop the Walkman. All right,
we're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
I'll talk more about the Walkman story and its place
in history. So, with the support of Sony's co founder's engineers,
(29:21):
that Sony got to work in creating a consumer version
of the prototype that Oga had created for Ibuka, and
they created a device that had the designation TPSL two,
but it would get the name Walkman. Akio came up
with that name and said it should be called the
(29:42):
Walkman because you can walk around with it and listen
to music. Pressman the voice recording device that was for
the press. Walkman is for walking around and listening to
your music, and they launched it in Japan in July
nineteen seventy nine for the equivalent of around one hundred
(30:03):
and fifty dollars, which is a big o' yikes. One
hundred fifty dollars in nineteen seventy nine. The United States
would not get the Walkman until nineteen eighty. Meanwhile, you
might wonder, okay, one hundred fifty bucks in nineteen seventy nine,
what would that be equivalent to today? Well, using a
handy dandy inflation calculator, that comes out to around six
(30:27):
hundred forty six dollars for a portable cassette player. Keep
in mind that the original Walkman didn't have recording capabilities.
Just playback Holy cats, y'all. That is as incredibly expensive.
Like again, I always think about things like video game
consoles that launch for around five hundred to seven hundred dollars,
and people talk about how expensive that is. Keep in
(30:49):
mind that original Walkman would have set you back six
hundred forty six dollars, more than what some video game
consoles launch at. That's expensive now. When it did launch
in the United States, the original name for the device
wasn't the Walkman, it was the Soundabout which sounds about
wrong to me anyway. But eventually Sony would migrate back
(31:11):
to the Walkman, which was a Buka's suggestion from the
get go and occhio suggestion. The two of them argued
that it should have been that from the beginning. Interestingly,
there was a dispute about the origins of the Walkman
concept because there was another inventor who came up with
(31:32):
a very similar idea and in fact patented that idea
in nineteen seventy seven, two years before the Walkman came out. Now,
this inventor was Andreas Pavel, who had an invention that
he called the stereo Belt. And as the name suggests,
(31:53):
the stereo belt was a belt that had audio equipment
attached to it, which included a battery pack as well
as audio players, and you would connect headphones to this
belt in order to listen to it. So not exactly
the same thing as the Walkman, but the idea that
being a portable music playing device is what made it
(32:17):
similar to Walkman. Eventually, Pavel would bring lawsuits against Sony
in various regions, arguing that there was a patent infringement
going on that Sony had essentially copied the design that
Pavel had created without paying for it, without licensing it.
In several places, these complaints were ultimately dismissed. In other places,
(32:42):
Sony would settle out of court with Pavel rather than
have to go through the whole process of a legal proceedings,
which can be really expensive even if you win. So
while Sony never admitted any fault in this, they did
eventually pay a pretty hefty settlement out of court. Anyway,
(33:04):
back to the Walkmen, so I mentioned earlier. The Walkmen
ran on a pair of double A batteries, which was great.
You know, their batteries weren't too expensive. You could take
them on the go, you didn't have to be tethered
to an outlet. They did require headphones because the Walkman
had no on board speaker. If you pushed play on
(33:25):
a Walkman and there were no headphones plugged into it,
all you would hear would be the gears turning as
the spokes were being rotated by the player itself. Sony
made around thirty thousand units initially in nineteen seventy nine
when they launched it in Japan, and sales were a
little slow in the beginning. However, Sony used some good
(33:46):
old fashioned elbow grease to get interest up in the product,
and by that I mean that Sony employees would literally
hit the streets in Japan with a Walkman and cassettes
and find people out there on the street and have
them listen to cassettes on the Walkmen and let them
have the experience of this portable music player. And it worked.
(34:08):
That marketing push really was effective. By August, just two
months after they launched, Sony had sold out of their
initial run of units. They were hoping for around like
five thousand units a month. Instead they sold thirty thousand
and two months. Pretty incredible. Now, not everyone was super
happy about the Walkmen and its success in the marketplace,
(34:31):
like it also saw great success here in the United
States once it came out in nineteen eighty, but not
everybody was really thrilled about this. There were people who
were warning that this technology was inspiring young folks to
shut themselves away from the world even while they were
walking around in the world, rather than being engaged in
(34:52):
the wholesome surroundings. Undoubtedly learning great moral lessons from their
wise elders. These wholigans would be listening to their Bob
Dylan's and their Judas priests at even their smothers brothers
on headphones and blocking out the outside world and allowing
themselves to be shaped by the evil, wicked whims of
(35:15):
professional musicians. Oh the humanity. I'm making fun of it,
but the moral panic was real, right, There was moral
panic around portable cassette players. It just shows that fuddy
duddies will find moral panic in the oddest of places.
Heaven help you if you have to also play dungeons
(35:38):
and dragons while listening to music on a Walkman, because
you were just destined for h double hockey sticks. Alan Bloom,
the author, said essentially as much in a book titled
The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that young
people listening to personal music devices would eventually lead to
moral decay. Pretty crazy stuff. Sony would release many follow
(36:03):
ups to the original Walkman, so there were lots of
improvements over the device over the following models. Some of
them were even smaller. Some of them would incorporate a
record function because people missed having that. The Walkman would
also become almost synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of
like how the iPod would become almost synonymous with MP
(36:25):
three players. Folks would use the term Walkman even if
they were talking about a product from a competing company.
You know, it wasn't a portable cassette player, It was
a Walkman. Even if it wasn't actually a Walkman, which
meant that Sony had to do a lot of work
to protect their trademark. Now, around the same time, you
had the fate of the cassette tape itself. So initially,
(36:48):
cassette sales were going very strong in the nineteen eighties,
but cassettes didn't totally replace vinyl records. For one thing,
you had music lovers who would call themselves audio files,
who would tend to prefer vinyl records over cassette tapes.
That cassettes could warp over time, you would get audio distortion,
(37:10):
you would get a hiss. There was a hiss associated
with audio cassettes, and therefore people who really valued the
experience of listening to music on high end equipment tended
to prefer vinyl to cassette tapes. However, the convenience of
cassette tapes plus the fact that you could purchase a
blank cassette and then record stuff to make your own tapes,
(37:32):
and thus giving birth to the cultural phenomenon of the mixtape. Now,
making a mixtape that's an art form unto itself. That
meant that the cassette had a really firm foothold and culture,
and the incorporation of tape decks into car entertainment systems
helped too. This gets complicated by the introduction of eight tracks,
but that's a different matter. Anyway, it appeared as though
(37:55):
the party would never end. In nineteen eighty four Billboard
report the cassette tape sales were outpacing vinyl LPs for
the first time, and at that point made up around
fifty three percent of all albums shipped. Now that shipped
not necessarily sold, but still cassettes were clearly making a
(38:15):
lot of headway. They were easy to manufacture, They again
took up less space, You could sell a whole lot
more of them, You could get a lot more in
stock at a record store than you could with vinyl,
and yeah, people were digging them. However, the introduction of
the compact disc, which also was introduced in the early
nineteen eighties, would ultimately set the stage for the cassette's decline. Now,
(38:39):
it would take quite a few years for compact discs
to really establish themselves in the market, particularly since early
CD players were ridiculously expensive, like just prohibitively expensive for
most people. However, over time CDs would start to catch on,
and cassette sales began to take a turn, just as
(39:01):
vinyl had done before it. In nineteen ninety one, CD
sales were higher, at least from a dollar value, than
cassette sales. It doesn't mean that there were more CDs sold,
but more money was made selling CDs than cassettes starting
in nineteen ninety one. So the nineties saw the decline
of cassette sales continue, with more and more people switching
(39:24):
to CDs. Vinyl became an almost obsolete format for the
general public. It never fully went away, and of course
it's enjoyed a resurgence in more recent years, but in
the nineties and early two thousands it almost disappeared. Cassettes
did enjoy a brief little bit of a comeback. I mean,
(39:44):
I guess arguably it's still going now because some artists
have released some of their albums on cassette formats, including
like Megan D. Stallion and Taylor Swift, but it's not
like a common thing. Cassette sales in general were pretty low,
and that also meant that cassette players weren't really flying
off store shelves either, so it didn't make much sense
(40:07):
to keep making them, which brings us to our sad
little tail coming to a close here, because Sony actually
did continue producing the Walkman all the way through the
nineteen nineties and all through the first decade of the
two thousands, despite the plunge in cassette sales over that
time period. But in twenty ten, Sony threw in the
(40:27):
towel and announced it would shut down the portable cassette
player line, so the Walkman cassette player would be no more.
They stopped production in twenty ten. It however, was not
the end of the Walkman as a brand, because Sony
gave the Walkman brand to other products that were also
in the music space. They just weren't cassette players. So
(40:50):
the main one would be digital music players, digital audio
players or DAPs, and this is what I would often
just call an MP three player back in the old days.
Like the Apple iPod, Sony started introducing digital audio players
way back in nineteen ninety nine, which is actually two
years before Apple would introduce the iPod, but Sony's version
(41:13):
initially only supported a proprietary digital audio format called a
track at r AC. Sony had control over that file
format and felt like this would protect Sony's interests in
the actual music production side. In other words, this was
a way to prevent piracy. Sony specifically did not want
(41:35):
to support file formats like MP three. Now, the Walkmen
would ultimately fall well behind the iPod in sales in
most countries. When it got to digital audio players. The
Walkman did okay in Japan, but outside Japan it just
it could not compete against the iPod. However, you can
(41:56):
still find digital audio players that are branded as walk today,
including high end players that cost a whole bunch of money,
like more than one thousand dollars for some of these devices.
I think that's a pretty tall order. When we live
in a world where smartphones have access to tons of
music through various music streaming platforms. Now, sure, the fidelity
(42:19):
isn't necessarily top notch, you know, that depends on the
streaming service, the format they use, how much compression is
used for the files, and what kind of headphones or
headset you're using to listen to it. However, I think
for the majority of people out there, the convenience and
accessibility that is presented through smartphones that ends up being
(42:40):
more important than musical fidelity. For most people, not everybody.
Some folks are more concerned with the quality of the experience.
I think that's legitimate. I think it's legit to really
want the absolute best quality of sound. However, that is
also a very subjective thing, right. You could have two
people and they can have the same taste in music,
(43:01):
but they might have very different perceptions of what set
up is best, and you can't, you know, necessarily agree
on a common standard. The world of high fidelity audio
is filled with a lot of marketing that strikes me
as being just a stone's throw away from pure pseudoscience.
But I've talked about that before, so I'll leave it
(43:22):
for now. So the cassette Walkman has been out of
production since twenty ten. The brand still exists for digital
audio players, and some artists do continue to put stuff
out on cassette because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Personally,
I do miss the days of putting together the perfect mixtape.
There's something really special about getting one just right, like
(43:44):
finding that right progress of songs so that you know
you've got like the really high energy number comes in
at song number three, and then you've got a cool
down number for song number four that kind of thing.
Making a curated playlist doesn't really scratch the same itch
for me. There's something really tactle about using cassette tapes
and creating a mixtape that way, and slapping a really
(44:07):
good mixtape into a portable music player and then just
going for a walk is a pleasure that I think
people should really seek out if they're able to. That
kind of thing is just one of the simple pleasures
of life if it's accessible to you. I hope that
this episode was interesting to all of y'all. I hope
you're doing well, and I will talk to you again
(44:29):
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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