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