Wire recording
The first wire recorder was invented in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen, who gave his product the trade name Telegraphone.
[citation needed] Poulsen's original Telegraphone and other very early recorders placed the two poles of the record/replay head on opposite sides of the wire.
Because of its homogeneous nature and very high speed, wire is relatively free of the noticeable background hiss that characterized tape recordings before the advent of noise reduction systems.
When such a repair is made to an existing recording, a jump in the sound results during playback, but because of the high speed of the wire the loss of an inch due to tying and trimming is trivial and might pass unnoticed.
Sometimes the only practical solution is to carefully cut the tangled portion away from the spool—an operation which runs the risk of endlessly enlarging the problem—and discard it.
As the knot of each splice passes through the head during playback, a very brief loss of normal contact is inevitable and the resulting dropouts can make editing musical recordings problematic.
Although wire is not as suitable for editing as magnetic tape (a plastic-based material) would prove to be, in the field of radio broadcasting it offered tremendous advantages over trying to edit material recorded on transcription discs, which was usually accomplished by dubbing to a new transcription disc with the aid of multiple turntables and stopwatches.
The first regularly scheduled network radio program produced and edited on wire was CBS' Hear It Now with Edward R. Murrow.
The wire-recorded audio, which was played back through powerful amplifiers and speakers mounted on vehicles, was used to conceal real Allied deployments, locations and operations.
[11] In 1946, David Boder, a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors.
The CD, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, subsequently won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album.
[16] One of the world's first stored-program computers, SEAC, built in 1950 at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, used wire recorders to store digital data.
In 1952, the Harvard University physics department's musical variety show The Physical Revue, written by Tom Lehrer and performed by a cast including Lehrer, Lewis M. Branscomb and others, was recorded on wire by a later winner of the Nobel Prize, Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.
For example, in office scenes in the original 1951 version of The Thing, a typical Webster-Chicago unit is plainly visible on a small table by the window.
Ann Robinson's character in the 1954 Dragnet feature film carried and used a Protona Minifon wire recorder to gather evidence in a pivotal scene.
In the episode "The Relaxed Informer" (S1E24) of Danger Man the spy courier is smuggling a recording made on wire secreted inside the handle holding a puppet's strings.
The Department S episode "A Cellar Full of Silence" revolves around a blackmail recording on a wire disguised as part of another object.
Similarly, in the 1990 film Dick Tracy, set in the 1930s, Warren Beatty, in the title role, is shown manipulating a wire on which the voice of Mumbles (played by Dustin Hoffman) is recorded, in order to decipher the otherwise unintelligible speech of the fictitious criminal.
More recently in a UK Sky History TV series "U-boat Wargamers", in the last episode Captain Gilbert Roberts CBE debriefs the German U-boat Admiral Eberhard Godt using a Wirex Electronics Ltd of Edgware, London model B1 wire recorder to record the debrief (the machine is shown running).
