Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and Welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech, and today I thought I would do
Speaker 1: something a little different from my normal episode. So rather
Speaker 1: than tackle a particular technology or tell you about the
Speaker 1: history of a tech company, or even go into an
Speaker 1: in depth profile of an innovator, I thought instead I
Speaker 1: would talk about a more broad topic that kind of
Speaker 1: delves not just into technology, but into business and into culture.
Speaker 1: So it's all about our relationship with media. Specifically, I'm
Speaker 1: going to be focusing on stuff like audio and video
Speaker 1: and how our relationship with that sort of media has
Speaker 1: changed as technology has changed over the years. Those changes
Speaker 1: have been pushed by innovation and also the entertainment industry's
Speaker 1: reaction to innovation and spoiler alert, sometimes the entertainment industry's
Speaker 1: reaction was resistance. So I think the story also tells
Speaker 1: us a lot about ourselves, not just the stuff we enjoy,
Speaker 1: but it tells us more about what we value and
Speaker 1: where we can find that balance between art and commerce,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty tricky topic. So today we're going
Speaker 1: to look at how tech has changed the way we
Speaker 1: access entertainment. And because this is a large topic, it's
Speaker 1: going to take a few episodes. So we're going to
Speaker 1: focus on the early days of modern media in this episode.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna actually first start because you know how
Speaker 1: I am a couple of centuries ago, before the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution and the age of electricity. So first, most people
Speaker 1: didn't have a whole lot of time to spare for entertainment.
Speaker 1: If you were working class, you spend most of your
Speaker 1: waking hours doing work, and even those more elevated in
Speaker 1: social class had limited options for their entertainment. Let's say
Speaker 1: that you were one of those fortunate individuals. You're born
Speaker 1: into wealth and social status, so you could go to
Speaker 1: where entertainment was happening, such as a theater or an
Speaker 1: opera house if you're talking about say seventeenth century or later. Um,
Speaker 1: but maybe you go to a tavern, to go into
Speaker 1: a sort of public houses courtyard that's where sometimes various
Speaker 1: entertainments would be performed. Perhaps you could attend a party
Speaker 1: thrown by some fancy person who has decided to host
Speaker 1: entertainers for an evening, or maybe you bring the entertainment
Speaker 1: to you, you host your own fancy party. Perhaps you
Speaker 1: have a string quartet in your palatial estate. Now obviously
Speaker 1: that option is limited to a pretty select group of people.
Speaker 1: Or you could take it upon yourself to learn some
Speaker 1: form of entertainment, such as learning to play one or
Speaker 1: more instruments. But entertainment was ephemeral. It was momentary. You
Speaker 1: enjoyed it as it was happening, and then it was over.
Speaker 1: You had no way to experience it again without reinitiating
Speaker 1: the performance itself. And then of course you're going to
Speaker 1: get a variation on what you've just experienced, since it's
Speaker 1: pretty rare that humans can perfectly replicate a performance. So
Speaker 1: being a professional entertainer was a challenging gig in those
Speaker 1: days too, because there was there was no way to
Speaker 1: live off of recordings. You could conceivably publish sheet music
Speaker 1: for your works, but that was challenging too. It was
Speaker 1: an industry that was rife with piracy. Because music and
Speaker 1: entertainment piracy is not a new thing that has been
Speaker 1: around since the printing press essentially, So take the famous
Speaker 1: playwright William Shakespeare. He wrote in the late fifteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and early sixteen hundreds. He never published any of his
Speaker 1: plays during his own lifetime. Other people sometimes published his plays,
Speaker 1: and there were many versions of his plays that were
Speaker 1: printed in what we're called quartos. No need to go
Speaker 1: into why, that's more of a history thing. But these
Speaker 1: quartos were sometimes based off of partial theatrical scripts. They
Speaker 1: might be based off old drafts that were pieced together
Speaker 1: from previous performances, or they might even have been cobbled
Speaker 1: together from memory, either by working with an actor or
Speaker 1: someone who had attended a performance and then is essentially
Speaker 1: trying to recreate it as best they can. So they're
Speaker 1: frequently referred to by scholars as being unreliable or bad quartos.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until several years after Shakespeare had died that
Speaker 1: an official version of his plays reached publication, so this
Speaker 1: was not a common thing. In fact, it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: until really Ben Johnson was demanding his plays get published
Speaker 1: a little bit later. So if you were a performer
Speaker 1: back in the old days, you either sought out a
Speaker 1: patron who would put the bill for your expenses, or
Speaker 1: you would travel around and get hired to play for
Speaker 1: an engagement, or maybe you'd be part of an ensemble
Speaker 1: with an established theater and depend upon a share of
Speaker 1: the box office if you were part time owner of
Speaker 1: that or a part owner of that theatrical company. But
Speaker 1: that was about it. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the
Speaker 1: rise of the publishing industry, so if you were a composer,
Speaker 1: you could land a publishing deal and make a little
Speaker 1: bit of money there, although the publishing houses were making
Speaker 1: most of the money. And that's pretty much how things
Speaker 1: went until the late nineteenth century, and that's when tons
Speaker 1: of changes happened. The Industrial Revolution was underway and had
Speaker 1: actually really mostly happened by the late nineteenth century, and
Speaker 1: suddenly people had a lot more spare time on their hands.
Speaker 1: They could actually dedicate time to recreation and relaxation and entertainment.
Speaker 1: It's also when Thomas Edison and others were changing the
Speaker 1: world by introducing devices uh that could do lots of
Speaker 1: different things. You were getting electric light, electricity in general.
Speaker 1: The birth of radio was right around the corner, and
Speaker 1: the birth of the ability to record and playback audio. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not like the record industry immediately popped up after
Speaker 1: Edison demonstrated this capability. It took many years to refine
Speaker 1: the technology to a point where recording was of a
Speaker 1: high enough quality to serve as a commercial product, and
Speaker 1: it also took time to develop a better playback device,
Speaker 1: something like the gramophones that you could actually hear the
Speaker 1: recording and a decent volume. The gramophone introduced another innovation
Speaker 1: that helped create the recording industry, which was the flat disc.
Speaker 1: So earlier recordings were made on wax cylinders. The cylinders
Speaker 1: had several disadvantages. One was that they weren't easy to
Speaker 1: mass produce, so you were had limited runs when you
Speaker 1: were making these things in the first place. And early on,
Speaker 1: you might make a recording by shouting into the wide
Speaker 1: end of a speaking trumpet, and that would send vibrations
Speaker 1: down the trumpet to a diaphragm in the narrow end
Speaker 1: that had a stylus attached to it, essentially, and the
Speaker 1: vibration would make the stylus carve out a groove in
Speaker 1: a rotating wax cylinder that was moving vertically against well
Speaker 1: rotating and moving vertically against the stylus, so from top
Speaker 1: to bottom you would have one long spiral, and the
Speaker 1: variations of indentation would be the representation of sound but
Speaker 1: this was not a terribly efficient way to make recordings.
Speaker 1: Edison vound ways to improve the system, but it was
Speaker 1: still hard to make a lot of cylinders at once.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't the right format. On top of that,
Speaker 1: wax cylinders were fairly bulky. You couldn't store a ton
Speaker 1: of them on a shelf, for example, and they weren't
Speaker 1: very durable. After a couple of dozen playbacks, the quality
Speaker 1: on the recording would degrade to the point where it
Speaker 1: could be unintelligible. And also they couldn't hold very much
Speaker 1: recorded audio in the first place. They were limited just
Speaker 1: a few minutes. So a guy named Emil Berliner came
Speaker 1: up with the flat disc. If you listen to my
Speaker 1: episode about the history of the turntable, I talked about Berliner.
Speaker 1: I also will be repeating some of the information from
Speaker 1: that episode, but it's important to establish it to understand
Speaker 1: our relationship with media. So to make a recording on
Speaker 1: a flat disc originally anyway, he would take a master
Speaker 1: disc made out of metal and he would code it
Speaker 1: with lamp black, which is sort of like dipping the
Speaker 1: disc in ink while recording. There'd be a stylus that
Speaker 1: would drag against this disk in a spiral from the
Speaker 1: outside edge to the inside edge of this disc. So
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a record album, vinyl record album,
Speaker 1: that's how the grooves go from the outside and they
Speaker 1: work their way in same sort of thing. Now, while
Speaker 1: it was recording, this stylus would make little lateral oscillations,
Speaker 1: meaning it would shake side to side a little bit
Speaker 1: as the sound was impacting the diaphragm attached to the stylus.
Speaker 1: This is an opposition to wax cylinders those relied on
Speaker 1: vertical oscillations. The essentially think of the stylus as going
Speaker 1: in or out of the wax, so it's digging deeper
Speaker 1: or it's not digging as deeply as the sound is
Speaker 1: hitting it. This version, the the disc version was going
Speaker 1: left right, not up and down, So the stylus would
Speaker 1: essentially wipe away a little bit of the lamp black.
Speaker 1: So at the end of the recording you would have
Speaker 1: this disc that's mostly black, but you would have a
Speaker 1: spiral of metal showing through the black surface where the
Speaker 1: stylus had had scraped off the lamp black. Essentially, then
Speaker 1: Berliner would take this disc and dip it into an
Speaker 1: acid bath, and that would eat away at the exposed metal,
Speaker 1: leaving the lamp blacked metal untouched. You're lifted out of
Speaker 1: that acid bath, you wipe it down, and you have
Speaker 1: essentially a master recording. Berliner then could use a process
Speaker 1: called electroplating to create a negative image of this master,
Speaker 1: the negative image meaning that the copy of it would
Speaker 1: have the groove turned into a raised ridge on the negative.
Speaker 1: So what was a a indented groove on the master
Speaker 1: is now a raised ridge that would actually be used
Speaker 1: as a stamp, and you could stamp blank discs with
Speaker 1: this master or this master stamp, and thus transfer the
Speaker 1: master recording two copies. And that meant that Berliner's approach
Speaker 1: was better suited for mass production. It gave it a
Speaker 1: big advantage over wax cylinders. A bit later, innovators combined
Speaker 1: Berliner's mass production method with the practice of recording on wax,
Speaker 1: because recording on wax was easier and created a better
Speaker 1: quality recording than Berliner's approach with the lampblack uh. This
Speaker 1: was a method that Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter
Speaker 1: had developed, and so that was on wax cylinders back
Speaker 1: in the day. Now they're transferring it over to wax discs,
Speaker 1: and the result was a mass producible recording method that
Speaker 1: was able to produce good enough sound quality to allow
Speaker 1: for amercial application of the technology. So at the turn
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, so right around nineteen the companies
Speaker 1: making the playback devices, namely the Gramophone and Typewriter Company,
Speaker 1: began to sell home grammophones with the help of recordings
Speaker 1: of famous musicians and singers. The allure was really strong
Speaker 1: because not everyone had the means or opportunity to hear
Speaker 1: someone like Enrico Caruso sing, but with a gramophone and
Speaker 1: a record, you could reproduce him singing in your own home.
Speaker 1: Some of those early recordings were so popular that they
Speaker 1: would have to be re recorded because the master recording
Speaker 1: would wear out. The master stamp would wear out after
Speaker 1: a certain number of pressings, so that also led to
Speaker 1: the industry developing a new method in order to create
Speaker 1: multiple stamps from a single master recording. That way, when
Speaker 1: one wore out, they would still have another backup master
Speaker 1: stamp to go with, and they wouldn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about having to rerecord or the whole thing, because it
Speaker 1: would just mean that you have two different recordings of
Speaker 1: the same piece, and one might actually be better than
Speaker 1: the other, and maybe that the first recording was better
Speaker 1: or maybe the second one, but either way they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be exactly the same. Now this time around, you started
Speaker 1: seeing recording companies emerge. Victor and Colombia were big ones,
Speaker 1: and from the turn of the century until about nineteen five,
Speaker 1: all recordings were made by playing or singing or speaking
Speaker 1: into that wide end of a trumpet, a physical trumpet.
Speaker 1: This was the mechanical approach to recording. This was before
Speaker 1: the electric microphone was used in recording sessions, and there
Speaker 1: were engineering challenges that made this pretty tough. If you
Speaker 1: were really close to the horn, creating what was known
Speaker 1: as a forward recording, then your performance would sound more
Speaker 1: vivid and dynamic. You're you're closer to that diaphragm that's
Speaker 1: actually transferring the vibration through the stylus to the recording media,
Speaker 1: usually a wax disc. But the nature of those vibrations
Speaker 1: recorded on the disc meant that the discs you'd produce
Speaker 1: later would tend to wear out faster. They were deeper cuts.
Speaker 1: They were using a material called shellac at the time,
Speaker 1: which was hard and brittle, and fairly thin um, and
Speaker 1: so those deeper recordings would mean that if you were
Speaker 1: to play this playing it back on a turntable, each
Speaker 1: time you've laid it back, it was adding more wear
Speaker 1: and tear to the disc, and so those discs wouldn't
Speaker 1: last as long. The sound quality would be better, but
Speaker 1: they wouldn't last very long compared to other discs. So
Speaker 1: if you recorded further away from the horn, you would
Speaker 1: have a more muted sound, but it would also mean
Speaker 1: that those grooves weren't quite so extreme, so the produced
Speaker 1: discs would actually last longer. So it's something you had
Speaker 1: to balance out. Uh. The technologies limitations also dictated the
Speaker 1: type of content that could go on them, and thus
Speaker 1: it shaped the development of music itself. Early recordings had
Speaker 1: to be short. Early wax cylinders and discs had a
Speaker 1: capacity to hold just a couple of minutes of a recording.
Speaker 1: Engineers worked on refining the recording technology and the capacity
Speaker 1: slowly increased, but it was still hovering it around five
Speaker 1: minutes per disc or cylinder in the nineteen twenties. Rarely,
Speaker 1: sound engineers would work with musicians to play a piece
Speaker 1: faster than the normal arrangement, just so it would fit
Speaker 1: on a side of a recording, so you might hear
Speaker 1: about that. It didn't happen as frequently as some people
Speaker 1: tend to talk about, but it was something that occasionally
Speaker 1: happened where maybe you had a piece that would last
Speaker 1: typically five minutes fifteen seconds, but you're limited to four
Speaker 1: minutes forty five seconds per side of a recording, so
Speaker 1: rather than try and split it up, you just speed
Speaker 1: up the tempo and play it faster than you normally would.
Speaker 1: That did happen occasionally, but other times they might work
Speaker 1: with a composer or a musician to tweak a recording,
Speaker 1: to to tweak the the arrangement of the music so
Speaker 1: that they could create a transition in such a way
Speaker 1: that there would be a natural pause that would allow
Speaker 1: you to turn a disc over or to put on
Speaker 1: a second or third, or fourth or whatever disc on
Speaker 1: the playback device. So here we have our first really
Speaker 1: interesting example of how technology truly changed music, and not
Speaker 1: just by increasing its accessibility. The recorded media format dictated
Speaker 1: the form. If you were to compose a piece specifically
Speaker 1: to record it, you know, you're not just putting something
Speaker 1: that already exists to a recording, but you're writing to
Speaker 1: the format, you would have to work within the limitations
Speaker 1: of the medium. You couldn't have a piece be too
Speaker 1: soft in volume because it wouldn't be loud enough to
Speaker 1: transfer the vibrations to the recording horns stylist, so you
Speaker 1: couldn't also be meat loaf. You couldn't write a fourteen
Speaker 1: minute epic ballad because the physical space on the red
Speaker 1: warding blanks wasn't enough to fit that many grooves onto
Speaker 1: a side. These limitations would carry on even as technology improved,
Speaker 1: and it's largely why most popular songs these days averaging
Speaker 1: at around three minutes in length. It's not because that's
Speaker 1: about as long as people want to listen to a song.
Speaker 1: It's because back in the old days, three minutes was
Speaker 1: about what you had to work with, give or take.
Speaker 1: Longer pieces required several discs to make a complete recording,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't unusual for a single long piece to
Speaker 1: spend nine or more disks on one piece of music,
Speaker 1: not multiple songs. But you think of some of those
Speaker 1: classical pieces, like a symphony that can go on for
Speaker 1: quite a while. You might have nine, ten eleven disks
Speaker 1: representing one symphony. The industry standard recording in playback speed
Speaker 1: was for the disk to spend at seventy eight revolutions
Speaker 1: per minute or seventy eight rpm, and that started at
Speaker 1: around five as the industry standard. This actually wasn't anything
Speaker 1: necessarily to do with sound quality or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It was literally a convenience because there was a plentiful
Speaker 1: number of thirty six hundred rpm motors that you could
Speaker 1: get your hands on if you wanted to build a
Speaker 1: U turntable, and then you would use a forty six
Speaker 1: tooth gear to scale down that revolutions per minute and
Speaker 1: you would end up giving getting so many eight revolutions
Speaker 1: per minute. So typically you would store all the discs
Speaker 1: from a single recording in a folder with pockets for
Speaker 1: every disk, and those folders were called albums. Look kind
Speaker 1: of like a photo album. You would have a disc
Speaker 1: album that represented one full recording of whatever piece it was,
Speaker 1: and that's why we call them albums. Now, after the
Speaker 1: First World War, radio began to emerge, and that offered
Speaker 1: up an alternative to owning a gramophone at home. Instead
Speaker 1: of buying a gramophone and records, you could purchase a
Speaker 1: radio and listen to stations. Some of the stations would
Speaker 1: also play recordings. You wouldn't be able to listen to
Speaker 1: what you wanted when you wanted, but you'd also have
Speaker 1: the potential to access a much larger library of recordings, or,
Speaker 1: depending upon the station, you could be listening to live performances.
Speaker 1: In fact, a lot of radio stations depended more on
Speaker 1: live performances than recordings because radio, unlike the recording industry
Speaker 1: at the time, was reliant on electric electric microphones, so
Speaker 1: those were much better at picking up a dynamic range
Speaker 1: of sounds. They could pick up quiet stuff, they could
Speaker 1: pick up a loud stuff. They were much more versatile
Speaker 1: for recording sessions. You didn't have to be right up
Speaker 1: on the horn. They're amazing photos of of uh, small
Speaker 1: orchestras or bands all just crowded around the horn of
Speaker 1: a recording device in order to play their music into it.
Speaker 1: And you always had to put the quieter instruments up
Speaker 1: towards the front or else they'd be overpowered by the
Speaker 1: louder instruments. There wasn't as big a concern with that
Speaker 1: with electric microphones. They were much better at picking up
Speaker 1: those dynamic ranges, so you didn't have to worry about
Speaker 1: having everybody right up ons that that horn. So radio
Speaker 1: performances tended to be superior to recorded music on disk,
Speaker 1: and you started to see more people kind of gravitate
Speaker 1: towards the radio than the recorded media. So this was
Speaker 1: another shift the way that technology was changing our behavior,
Speaker 1: and the recording industry started to experiment with using electric
Speaker 1: microphones as well. They saw the need to respond to
Speaker 1: this new threat of radio. All right, now, when we
Speaker 1: come back, i'll talk about how some improvements in recording
Speaker 1: technology got the industry back in the game and changed
Speaker 1: how we think about media. But first, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break. In the nineteen twenties, a pair of engineers
Speaker 1: from Bell Telephone Laboratories would revolutionize sound recording. They were JP.
Speaker 1: Max Field and HC. Harrison, and they had already applied
Speaker 1: their ingenuity to making telephones a viable technology. They subjected
Speaker 1: the process of sound recording and replication to scientific study
Speaker 1: for the first time. In August ninety six, they published
Speaker 1: the results of their work in a paper titled High
Speaker 1: Quality Recording and Reproducing of Music and Speech, which you
Speaker 1: can find online. If you are so inclined, you could
Speaker 1: read the whole thing. It's not a very long paper either.
Speaker 1: Max Field and Harrison demonstrated that using electronic means of
Speaker 1: recording would produce higher quality results than the mechanical acoustic
Speaker 1: method that had been in use. Microphones for orchestras could
Speaker 1: be placed a bit further away from the musicians, so
Speaker 1: again they didn't have to be crowded around the horn,
Speaker 1: and microphones can capture the sound quality of the room
Speaker 1: where the recording is made, and that generated what the
Speaker 1: two engineers would refer to as room tone, which is
Speaker 1: still a thing. In fact, we actually try to remove
Speaker 1: room tone from our recording so that you get a
Speaker 1: cleaner sound. But it was thought of as a valuable thing.
Speaker 1: It it gave another quality to music, and so it
Speaker 1: was something that was considered an interesting thing to capture
Speaker 1: at the time. Interestingly, in that paper, Maxfield and Harrison
Speaker 1: argue that for playback devices, particularly for home playback devices,
Speaker 1: a mechanical system might be preferable to one using electricity
Speaker 1: for sound reproduction. So recording sound you want to use
Speaker 1: an electric microphone, but playing it back they didn't think
Speaker 1: it was that important. So with the mechanical system, you
Speaker 1: have the stylist that vibrates as it travels through the
Speaker 1: grooves of a disk, and those vibrations transferred to a diaphragm,
Speaker 1: which in turn vibrates and changes the air pressure inside
Speaker 1: a horn, and then we hear those fluctuations of air
Speaker 1: pressure as sound. But that's a direct path. The alternative
Speaker 1: is to have the stylus transfer those vibrations to a
Speaker 1: device that can transform the physical vibrations into electrical impulses,
Speaker 1: send those impulses to an amplification system to boost the
Speaker 1: very weak signal that the stylus generates, and use that
Speaker 1: boosted signal to drive some other element to vibrate, essentially
Speaker 1: a speaker, and to create the sound we'd hear. Now,
Speaker 1: due to the limitations of technology at the time, that
Speaker 1: really wasn't a viable approach for home electronics. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be till later, when speakers and amplifiers were more available
Speaker 1: that that would become viable. The paper led to a
Speaker 1: new method of recording called the Western Electric Recording System
Speaker 1: or West TREKS, and the results were pretty fantastic for
Speaker 1: the time. Suddenly a recorded piece of music or spoken
Speaker 1: word could stand up to the quality herd over live
Speaker 1: radio performances. Recording companies like Victor and Columbia quickly adopted
Speaker 1: the new methodology. But these recording companies were not eager
Speaker 1: to stick with the Western Electric system for a couple
Speaker 1: of big reasons. One was that the recording companies weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to purchase a recording system outright. Western Electric would
Speaker 1: only lease the systems, so that was an ongoing cost. Secondly,
Speaker 1: Western Electric demanded a royalty fee for every record sold
Speaker 1: that had been made through the Western Electric process. And
Speaker 1: let me tell you something, folks, nothing drives innovation more
Speaker 1: than money does. Genius has its place, but money makes
Speaker 1: the world go round, and companies often find great incentive
Speaker 1: to innovate when it could mean keeping more of the
Speaker 1: cash for the company itself. So the recording companies were
Speaker 1: all at work trying to create alternatives to the Western
Speaker 1: Electric system to get the same results, but through a
Speaker 1: different approach. They had to be careful that their own
Speaker 1: methodologies were distinct from Western Electric in order to avoid
Speaker 1: infringing upon patents, and so alternate methods began to emerge,
Speaker 1: and these in turn created recordings with slightly different qualities
Speaker 1: to them, so you could, in theory, record the exact
Speaker 1: same performance using two different systems and produced two different
Speaker 1: master recordings of that same performance, But the way the
Speaker 1: recorded music would sound when played back would be slightly
Speaker 1: different from one to the other, not so different that
Speaker 1: you would think you were listening to two separate recording sessions,
Speaker 1: but the tone of the recordings could be different. And
Speaker 1: so technology again was having an effect on music. Now,
Speaker 1: this also touches on something that will pop up again
Speaker 1: in these episodes, which is the quest for fidelity, and
Speaker 1: by that I mean the effort to create a playback
Speaker 1: of a recorded moment that strives to replicate the original
Speaker 1: performance as closely as possible. In an ideal recording system,
Speaker 1: the recorded media would sound exactly the way it sounded
Speaker 1: in the recording studio. So if you were in that
Speaker 1: room listening to the musicians play a song live, and
Speaker 1: then you listen to the recorded version, you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to tell the difference. Ideally. Now, there are plenty
Speaker 1: of instances in which those making the recording they don't
Speaker 1: want a perfect reproduction. There are lots of effects you
Speaker 1: might want to put on audio before you commit it
Speaker 1: to a master recording, like overdubbing or auto tune or
Speaker 1: what ever. But that wasn't a big thing in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, so we're going to ignore
Speaker 1: that for now. So let's switch gears a bit. We're
Speaker 1: gonna come back to the music industry before the end
Speaker 1: of this episode. But while the music industry was building
Speaker 1: its foundation, the same thing was happening in the film industry.
Speaker 1: The birth of that industry was also in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: as innovators discovered that by presenting a sequence of similar
Speaker 1: images to the eye and rapid succession, you could simulate
Speaker 1: a moving image. Actually it dates back to before that,
Speaker 1: but they're serious study put to it in the eighteenth
Speaker 1: century or nineteenth century rather, so that's the basis of
Speaker 1: film and animation. You aren't really watching motion. You're watching
Speaker 1: a bunch of still images, like photographs or drawings that
Speaker 1: are put in rapid sequence in front of us. So
Speaker 1: our brains, just like technology, are limited. There is a
Speaker 1: threshold for the speed at which we can view separate
Speaker 1: images and see them as being distinct. In the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: scientists hypothesized that it was the retina that could only
Speaker 1: distinguish different ages if there was a long enough delay
Speaker 1: between them, and so the name for the phenomena was
Speaker 1: the persistence of vision. But in fact this limitation is
Speaker 1: really in our brains, not our eyes themselves. If you
Speaker 1: present images faster than the threshold can account for, you
Speaker 1: get the illusion of movement. Twenty four frames a second
Speaker 1: is a good example. At twenty four frames per second,
Speaker 1: our brains cannot distinguish the the individual images and we
Speaker 1: see that as motion. So, just like with the recording industry,
Speaker 1: the early years of film were ones of experimentation. In
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties, George Eastman created a process that would
Speaker 1: allow a camera to take a series of photographs in
Speaker 1: quick succession, thus recording movement. A very short clip it's
Speaker 1: less than two seconds long. Uh it comes from eight
Speaker 1: shows a record of what this process could produce, and
Speaker 1: it's called the round Hey Garden scene. It was created
Speaker 1: by Louis la Prince and all it shows is people
Speaker 1: walking around in a garden. It's a far cry from
Speaker 1: a feature film, but it was a building block for
Speaker 1: what would follow. In the early eighteen nineties, a French
Speaker 1: inventor named Leon Bouley created a device called the cinematic graph,
Speaker 1: but Bully was never able to produce a physical prototype
Speaker 1: and so he sold his idea to two brothers, Auguste
Speaker 1: and Louis Lumier. The Lumiers took his idea and they
Speaker 1: created a new device. They made a lot of changes.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was really more their invention than Boulets
Speaker 1: at the end, but it used the same name cinematograph. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was not just a camera that could capture images,
Speaker 1: it was also a projector that could display those captured
Speaker 1: images against a flat surface. In fact, you could process
Speaker 1: the film too. You could do all three in this
Speaker 1: one device. It's was really revolutionary. So earlier devices could
Speaker 1: capture images on film, but they weren't projectors. So instead
Speaker 1: you would use this device that was kind of like
Speaker 1: a had a visor I piece. You would actually look
Speaker 1: into the visor and typically you would turn a crank
Speaker 1: as well, though some of them had mors and it
Speaker 1: would play back the frames and you would watch it
Speaker 1: playback in real time, but limited the audience to just
Speaker 1: one person at a time. The Lumier brothers created a
Speaker 1: technology that allowed for group presentations, which in turn set
Speaker 1: the stage for the theatrical film experience, and their contribution
Speaker 1: was significant enough that cinema became a word we would
Speaker 1: use to describe the art and industry of filmmaking. Their
Speaker 1: version was a hand cranked device. It actually made it
Speaker 1: much more portable. You didn't have to have big wires
Speaker 1: or anything to provide electricity to it. But it also
Speaker 1: depended upon the camera and projector operator having a steady hand,
Speaker 1: otherwise motion would be herky jerky. As the recording or
Speaker 1: playback speed varied, so there were electronic versions or or
Speaker 1: electric motor versions out there. Edison had already created one,
Speaker 1: but again, it wasn't a projector. Also, I'm skipping over
Speaker 1: a ton of interesting historical facts about projectors in general,
Speaker 1: but just know they were a critical component of cinema now.
Speaker 1: The Lumiers held a special screening in eight They charged
Speaker 1: people one franc to view ten short films. The total
Speaker 1: running time for all ten films together was about twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes. So the Lumiers combined several things that would
Speaker 1: become important parts of cinema moving forward, the capturing of
Speaker 1: images in short succession, projecting them back on a large surface,
Speaker 1: and charging money to watch the result. They weren't the
Speaker 1: first to do any of those things individually, but combining
Speaker 1: them in this way meant that Their screening is frequently
Speaker 1: used as sort of the birthday for modern cinema, but
Speaker 1: the brothers didn't think this curiosity would stand the test
Speaker 1: of time, with Louis even proclaiming that the practice didn't
Speaker 1: have a future. George Millier, who made films in the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth and early twentieth century, used the futureless art
Speaker 1: to do more than capture scenes of real life that
Speaker 1: the Lumiers were just sort of capturing stuff that was
Speaker 1: happening in front of them. Millier had the idea of
Speaker 1: using this to create stories. He wanted to build narratives
Speaker 1: with plot. He would edit and cut films. That was
Speaker 1: a practice that was truly innovative and would become another
Speaker 1: integral component of filmmaking. Edwin s Porter, who had worked
Speaker 1: for Edison, created a twelve minute narrative film called The
Speaker 1: Great Train Robbery in nineteen o three, and films were
Speaker 1: starting to get longer and longer, with what is considered
Speaker 1: to be the first feature length film debuting in nineteen
Speaker 1: o six that would Charles Tate's film The Ned Kelly Gang,
Speaker 1: had a running time of seventy minutes. The following decades
Speaker 1: saw various filmmakers introduced new techniques to push the art form.
Speaker 1: At the same time, engineers were working to improve camera
Speaker 1: and projector technologies. Gradually, the hand cranked era gave way
Speaker 1: to electric motors and projectors that could record in playback
Speaker 1: film at a set speed, so you didn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about herkey jerky motion anymore. One of the big
Speaker 1: engineering challenges the industry faced was how to put sound
Speaker 1: to film, and there were a couple of different methods,
Speaker 1: but one of those methods was called vitaphone, and vitaphone
Speaker 1: would rely upon a projector sync nized with a phonograph player,
Speaker 1: upon which a disk with the film's soundtrack would play
Speaker 1: in synchronization with the playback of the film, which ties
Speaker 1: together cinema with the recording industry. The big difference here
Speaker 1: was that while you could have a phonograph in your
Speaker 1: home and listen to your own records, there was no
Speaker 1: way as of yet to enjoy a film in your
Speaker 1: own home. I've got a lot more to say about media,
Speaker 1: but let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Like the recording industry, the film industry gave birth to
Speaker 1: new production studios. Early movies were usually produced by engineers
Speaker 1: and innovators, so sort of independence who were just trying
Speaker 1: out this new technology. These geniuses created that technology, but
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily as a dept at building compelling stories. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the storytellers out there weren't necessarily in a position to
Speaker 1: get hold of cameras and actors and sets and crew
Speaker 1: to put a movie to get other and so enterprising
Speaker 1: individuals began to form studios for that very purpose. The
Speaker 1: oldest one in the United States is Universal, which was
Speaker 1: founded in nineteen twelve. Paramount would follow later that year,
Speaker 1: but it was originally called the Famous Players Film Company.
Speaker 1: Films had to have a place to play as well.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just enough to make them, you had to
Speaker 1: have a place to show them. And that's where theaters
Speaker 1: come in. Now. Some theaters were independent operations, and those
Speaker 1: independent operations would negotiate with different movie studios for the
Speaker 1: rights to show different films. Such an independent theater could
Speaker 1: at least in theory, show a Paramount film one week
Speaker 1: and a Universal Pictures film the following week. But many
Speaker 1: theaters were outright owned by the studios themselves, and they
Speaker 1: would typically only screen films made by the parents studio.
Speaker 1: In addition, studios were buying up film processing companies, which
Speaker 1: brought the entire process of moviemaking from shooting to processing
Speaker 1: to screening under one company. An so, if you want
Speaker 1: to see a movie back in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you were probably headed to a specific theater owned by
Speaker 1: the studio then made the film you wanted to see.
Speaker 1: And it was a great situation for the movie studios
Speaker 1: and not so great for just about everyone else. Filmmakers
Speaker 1: and actors would have to sign exclusive contracts to specific studios,
Speaker 1: which might guarantee a number of movies or pictures as
Speaker 1: they call them in the biz, but would prevent those
Speaker 1: actors and filmmakers from working for any other studio during
Speaker 1: the duration of that contract. It was possible for a
Speaker 1: studio to sign a popular actor, let's say, to a
Speaker 1: contract and then not do anything with that actor except
Speaker 1: prevent them from being in any other studio works. So
Speaker 1: it was a way of, you know, taking an actor
Speaker 1: off the shelf so that competitor couldn't make use of
Speaker 1: them if they need be. Studios could also they were
Speaker 1: constantly producing movies. It was just a movie generating bis
Speaker 1: this it was almost like mass production of film, so
Speaker 1: people were at work all the time that there was
Speaker 1: very little downtime in those movie studios. Moreover, the studios
Speaker 1: were very powerful even with independent theaters. The studios could
Speaker 1: throw their weight around. They would negotiate with theater owners
Speaker 1: using a tactic called block booking and sometimes blind bidding
Speaker 1: as well. So in block booking, studios would withhold sought
Speaker 1: after films unless the theater owners agreed to buy copies
Speaker 1: of other movies from that same studio, and usually they
Speaker 1: were lower quality, mediocre films that no one was really
Speaker 1: clamoring to see, and independent filmmakers who were not working
Speaker 1: in the studio system found this practice to be unfair
Speaker 1: for a few reasons. One was if all the theaters
Speaker 1: in a region are beholden to studios because they've agreed
Speaker 1: to these block booking tactics and it's filled up their theaters,
Speaker 1: there may not be any play time for them to
Speaker 1: run into in film. For another, sometimes independent filmmakers would
Speaker 1: partner with studios for distribution, but then the studio would
Speaker 1: use that independently produced film to again be part of
Speaker 1: block booking and say, if you want to screen this movie,
Speaker 1: you also have to take these other twelve crappy films,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the block would be such a large block
Speaker 1: of programming that a theater's entire year's worth of programming
Speaker 1: would be taken up in one deal. And it was
Speaker 1: seen as a very anti competitive practice. Even early on
Speaker 1: in the silent era, this was seen as a problem. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, it created kind of a monopoly. And
Speaker 1: so then the United States, the Department of Justice began
Speaker 1: to push back against the film industry. Way back in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one, the Federal Trade Commission or FTC declared
Speaker 1: that the block booking method that the studios were using
Speaker 1: was anti competitive, and they also began to investigate the
Speaker 1: industry further. That culminated in nineteen twenty eight with a
Speaker 1: lawsuit against Paramount Pictures. The case also named nine other studios.
Speaker 1: Paramount was of paramount importance, but they were all kind
Speaker 1: of lumped in together. The case actually took two years
Speaker 1: to complete. In the Department of Justice, one a decision
Speaker 1: that stated the film studios did in fact represent a
Speaker 1: monopoly and they want a judgment against block booking. But
Speaker 1: rather than enforce a ban on block booking, nothing was done,
Speaker 1: And it wasn't that the government changed its mind about
Speaker 1: the practice, but rather, this was also the time when
Speaker 1: the Great Depression was hitting and films were a type
Speaker 1: of escapism and they were seen as an important way
Speaker 1: to preserve morale. So President Roosevelt's administration decided not to
Speaker 1: break up the studio theater relationship or to enforce a
Speaker 1: ban on block booking, and things continued as before for
Speaker 1: a time in order for more films to come out.
Speaker 1: The Roosevelt administration was afraid that by going in and
Speaker 1: regulating the industry during a time of depression, uh it
Speaker 1: would mean that films would stop coming out, people wouldn't
Speaker 1: have that escapism, and things would get even worse. The
Speaker 1: time of the studio dominance would finally end in May nine.
Speaker 1: That's when the Supreme Court settled the issue once and
Speaker 1: for all, declaring block booking to be anti competitive and
Speaker 1: that the movie studios had to sell off their theater chains,
Speaker 1: and that broke up the studio system. Now there were
Speaker 1: still film studios, but they would only be in the
Speaker 1: business of making movies, not the entire chain or vertical
Speaker 1: of film from production to screening. This was good news
Speaker 1: for independent filmmakers and for independent theater owners, but they
Speaker 1: had another technology that was just beginning to emerge that
Speaker 1: was a big cause of anxiety, which would be television.
Speaker 1: TV had been around for a bit, but it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be until the nineteen forties and fifties that started to
Speaker 1: become a larger concern. Now, jumping back over to the
Speaker 1: music industry, just to close out this episode, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about the development of the forty five and
Speaker 1: the long playing album or LP. So for decades re
Speaker 1: or than music was limited by capacity problems on a
Speaker 1: single disc or cylinder, and by this time we're just
Speaker 1: talking discs. No one was making cylinders anymore. There's just
Speaker 1: only so much space you can use on a surface
Speaker 1: to carve out a groove. The technology and material that
Speaker 1: recording studios had to work with meant that the grooves
Speaker 1: had size limitations too. You couldn't make the grooves too small.
Speaker 1: But that changed thanks to Peter Carl Goldmark. Now, if
Speaker 1: you listen to my episodes about our CIA, you heard
Speaker 1: me mention gold Mark, who worked for our CIA's rival Columbia.
Speaker 1: Gold Mark had a team of staff and they began
Speaker 1: to investigate the possibility of developing a long playing record
Speaker 1: album that would work when play back at thirty three
Speaker 1: and one third revolutions per minute. So remember the industry
Speaker 1: standard at that time was seventy eight revolutions per minute,
Speaker 1: largely because recording and playing records on older materials at
Speaker 1: slower speeds resulted in lower quality audio. There had been
Speaker 1: a couple of times where people had tried to do
Speaker 1: thirty three a third playback albums. They weren't long playing
Speaker 1: albums because they still had a limited number of grooves
Speaker 1: on them, but it was never financially viable. It was
Speaker 1: never economically viable to launch with those technologies. So this
Speaker 1: was a new attempt. So Goldmark wanted to do two things.
Speaker 1: He wanted to reduce the revolution speed and increase the
Speaker 1: number of grooves you could fit on one side of
Speaker 1: a twelve or ten inch record disc. Doing both of
Speaker 1: those things would extend the playing time for a record.
Speaker 1: If you had a twelve inch record, you could get
Speaker 1: more than twenty minutes of audio per side, and that
Speaker 1: would remove a lot of the frustrating limitations the recording
Speaker 1: industry had been dealing with since it had started. So again,
Speaker 1: earlier efforts had been thwarted by those technical and economic challenges.
Speaker 1: It would take a few years for the economy to
Speaker 1: recover and for World War two to end. That also
Speaker 1: happened during this time, and then you would get the
Speaker 1: right environment to launch a new format for recorded media.
Speaker 1: Within that time, gold Mark worked on perfecting his vision.
Speaker 1: He formed teams focused on specific problems. So one team
Speaker 1: would work on a turntable design meant to play at
Speaker 1: that thirty three and a third rpm and with a
Speaker 1: stylist that's capable of fitting in a much smaller groove.
Speaker 1: Another team worked on fine tuning the material they would
Speaker 1: use to make albums. They had been depending on shellac,
Speaker 1: but that was not going to work, so then they
Speaker 1: started practicing with vinyl. They found that vinyl was more durable,
Speaker 1: it produced less noise, and it worked well at that
Speaker 1: thirty three and a third speed, so they went with that.
Speaker 1: Another team worked on creating the right recording instruments, including
Speaker 1: a cutting head that would make those small grooves in
Speaker 1: the first place. They were called micro grooves, and it
Speaker 1: would take nearly a decade of work before the technology
Speaker 1: and the economy were both ready. So the thirty three
Speaker 1: and a third LP record debuted in nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: That was the same year the Supreme Court busted up
Speaker 1: the studio systems, and because you could fit as much
Speaker 1: music on a single disc as would normally require a
Speaker 1: dozen or so discs, those single discs were also called albums.
Speaker 1: So if you ever wonder why it's called a record album,
Speaker 1: it's because in the old days you had a physical
Speaker 1: album full of multiple discs that represented a piece of music.
Speaker 1: Now you could fit all of that and more on
Speaker 1: one disc. The following year, nineteen forty nine, was when
Speaker 1: r c A would release the forty five record format.
Speaker 1: While the thirty three and a third album's measured twelve
Speaker 1: inches across, forty five were seven inches, and they were
Speaker 1: called forty five because they would play back at forty
Speaker 1: five revolutions per minute rather than thirty three and a third.
Speaker 1: R c A produced them in a variety of colors,
Speaker 1: originally using color to designate the genre of music that
Speaker 1: the albums belonged to. Actually, I shouldn't call them albums.
Speaker 1: The records belonged to the forty fives at the time
Speaker 1: could hold around five to seven minutes of music if
Speaker 1: you were to optimize them. Most popular songs at the
Speaker 1: time still clocked in and around three sometimes four minutes.
Speaker 1: Forty five's typically would have a single song per side,
Speaker 1: but by the late nineteen eighties the technology had improved
Speaker 1: to the point where you could fit more than ten
Speaker 1: min it's to a single side of a forty five,
Speaker 1: and so you have three standards all battling it out
Speaker 1: at the same time, you had seventy eight, forty five
Speaker 1: and LPs. The seventy eight would eventually bow out. In fact,
Speaker 1: they bowed up first, fading away in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and then the forty five and LPs would continue to
Speaker 1: shape music. Popular music groups would collect songs together to
Speaker 1: create an album. Albums were something that only a few
Speaker 1: artists had been able to produce before that a lot
Speaker 1: of them would produce a single song or two songs maybe,
Speaker 1: and just release one disc so to do the singles,
Speaker 1: but in seventy eight format rather than forty five. But
Speaker 1: now it was possible to group lots of songs together.
Speaker 1: They would also release singles on forty five, which in
Speaker 1: turn could help encourage fans to buy the longer albums
Speaker 1: and discover other songs that weren't in single format, and
Speaker 1: later artists would begin to explore other possibilities within the medium,
Speaker 1: including concept albums, and a const album is one where
Speaker 1: all the songs of the album are thematically or totally
Speaker 1: linked in some important way, so that the songs can
Speaker 1: be considered not just individually but collectively. Now, you could
Speaker 1: argue that the concept album debuted before the LP, but
Speaker 1: it was a novelty at the time because it was
Speaker 1: such an endeavor to produce an album consisting of numerous discs.
Speaker 1: But the Woody Gut three album dust Bowl Ballads, you
Speaker 1: could say that was the first concept album. They all
Speaker 1: had to deal with the same sort of subject material,
Speaker 1: and that particular album consisted of six discs, and it
Speaker 1: was sold in two collections of three discs each, so
Speaker 1: you had kind of a part one and a part two.
Speaker 1: So six discs, twelve sides, all dealing with the songs
Speaker 1: about the same subject matter. That would arguably be the
Speaker 1: first concept album. But the LP made those sort of
Speaker 1: projects much easier to produce, and that led to some
Speaker 1: really interesting experimentation in music and form. It would lead
Speaker 1: to very interesting, weird concept albums and then things like
Speaker 1: rock operas and other uh extensions of the art. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna leave off from this at this point. We're
Speaker 1: gonna wrap this episode up, uh, And just to remind everyone,
Speaker 1: this is the time where albums and singles are now
Speaker 1: available and you can purchase them and play them at home,
Speaker 1: assuming you had a turntable. At the time, there were
Speaker 1: films and theaters under a new system that emerged from
Speaker 1: beneath studio control. Television, which I'll talk about more in
Speaker 1: the next episode, had debuted in the nineteen twenties, but
Speaker 1: electronic TVs had really only become available in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, and we're just starting to emerge from a
Speaker 1: niche industry right around the late forties. In the next episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to look at TV and Hollywood's involvement with television,
Speaker 1: and we'll also touch on radio a little bit, and
Speaker 1: then we'll talk about the rise of the home theater
Speaker 1: industry and how that shook things up, as well as
Speaker 1: the emergence of new forms of media formats, and we'll
Speaker 1: continue to look at how that shaped the media itself
Speaker 1: and how it shaped the way we consume media and
Speaker 1: our our thoughts about media. So this is, like I said,
Speaker 1: a pretty broad topic, but one that I really wanted
Speaker 1: to tackle because I think it's fascinating personally. UM, and
Speaker 1: if you guys have any suggestions for other broad topics
Speaker 1: you would like to hear, maybe two or three episodes
Speaker 1: about why not send me a message the email addresses
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop
Speaker 1: on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: You'll find links there to our social media presence, as
Speaker 1: well as the archive of all our past episodes and
Speaker 1: a link to our store. Every purchase you make there
Speaker 1: goes to help the showing. Greatly appreciate it, and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.