Skip to main content

EVER HEARD OF AUDIO WIRE RECORDING?


SO WHAT IS WIRE RECORDING?

Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first early magnetic recording technology. An analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording was made on a thin steel wire.

The first crude recorder was invented in 1898 by Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen.  With the first magnetic audio recorder to be made commercially available anywhere was The Telegraphone, which was manufactured by the American Telegraphone Company in Springfield Massachusetts.


HOW DOES IT WORK?

The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head which magnetises each point along the wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal being supplied to the recording head at that instant.  

By later drawing the wire across the same or similar head whilst the head is not being supplied with an electrical signal, the varying magnetic field induces a varying electric current in the head recreating the original signal at a reduced level.

WHAT REPLACED THE WIRE RECORDER?

Magnetic wire recording was replaced by magnetic tape recording. The principles and the electronics are nearly identical. The magnetic tape was already in existence but the wire recording had an advantage, having that it was already fully developed whilst the tape recording was held back by the need to improve the materials and methods used to manufacture the tape.

Warm regards
Cheryl
Director
Oxford Duplication Centre
cheryl@oxfordduplicationcentre.com
01865 457000


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Repair Shop - How To Spot A Ferrotype Camera 1855-1940s

After watching The Repair Shop on BBC1 restore a beautiful and rather rare ferrotype camera I thought a blog on the process would be interesting. Not only did they repair but they managed to have the camera working, taking photographs. This was very inspirational given the age of the camera. ABOUT FERROTYPE PROCESS Ferrotypes first appeared in America in the 1850s, but didn’t become popular in Britain until the 1870s. They were still being made by while-you-wait street photographers as late as the 1950s. The ferrotype process was a variation of the collodion positive, and used a similar process to  wet plate photography . A very underexposed negative image was produced on a thin iron plate. It was blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling, and coated with a collodion photographic emulsion. The dark background gave the resulting image the appearance of a positive. Unlike collodion positives, ferrotypes did not need mounting in a case to produce a positi...

Preserving Family Memories - caring for your heritage

Memories  are an important part of all our lives. Old letters, photographs, scrapbooks, slides and negatives, glass plates, cine film, audio-visual tapes and many other things help us to recall our past and the history of our family and communities. All of these things, however, are subject to decay and eventual destruction if they are not cared for properly.  Oxford Duplication Centre in Kidlington can support all our clients with digitisation of all consumers, corporate and heritage scanning and digitisation.  Please do email cheryl@oxfordduplicationcentre.com or contact us 01865 457000 to discuss your project. Letters, Diaries, Books and Documents.   Many families preserve letters, diaries, or other written documents in which family members discuss their life and times. World War II remembrances have led many families to look for a relative's carefully stored letters. Other families have saved newspaper clippings of important family events, such as the announcemen...

Onion Skin Archive Book Scanning - What is this and how do we process the pages?

CURRENT BOOK SCANNNING PROJECT.  We are currently working on a very large archive of old books that require HQ scanning to Archival TIFF images.  Once processed, these images will be prepared to PDF with OCR (optical character recognition) for a complete searchable output.   The difficulty in this order, is the books are prepared using a medium called Onion Skin Paper. Whilst we are very confident in preparing this type of medium, it is very important to be aware that there are risks with scanning, given the sometimes-fragile nature of the paper.   Tears and rips can occur, so a very gentle white glove approach is required. Equally, with the nature of onion skin, the paper is very translucent which requires a sheet of white paper to be placed under each page before scanning. This then grants a very good HQ image that we can work with.   WHAT IS ONION SKIN PAPER? Onion skin paper is a type of very light weight, almost translucent paper that ...