Recorded History
YOUR ARTICLE “THE RACE TO VIDEO” (by Stewart Wolpin, Fall 1994) mentions that magnetic tape was developed in Germany during the Nazi era. The story is worth telling.
In the 1920s cigarettes were tipped with bronze to give them a golden look. The bronze powder stuck to a smoker’s lips. A consulting chemist, Dr. Fritz Pfleumer, worked on a way to prevent this by gluing the bronze particles to plastic that could be wrapped around the tips. As part of this work he hit on the idea of embedding iron filings in the tape, so the cigarettes could be scanned electronically to make sure they were all in the pack tips up.
As an opera fan, Pfleumer was unhappy with current recording technology, and it occurred to him that he could use the iron in his plastic tape as a recording medium. He sent his assistant, Heinz Thiele, to Berlin to help the AEG electrical company make it practical. Technical problems almost killed the project until Thiele, who happened to be a hunter, met Dr. Wilhelm Gaus, a leading chemist, on a hunting trip. Dr. Gaus suggested that the iron filings were too large to handle the small waves of high-frequency sound and that chemically grown iron oxide crystals could be made small enough. This worked.
Shortly thereafter one of the wax disks containing a speech by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering was broken just before it was to be broadcast. When the head of the network was hauled before Goering the next day, he saved himself by saying that the newly developed tape machines would prevent such mishaps in the future. Goering was so impressed that he soon had all German radio stations equipped with tape recorders.
Nicholas W. Beeson
Boston, Mass.
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