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