When I was very young, just after the war, we used to visit our "country cousins" who lived further south in a neighboring state. They had the family's old Victrola, a floor model console about a foot and a half square and about four feet tall, which had a hand-cranked spring motor, which would play about one and one half records before you had to crank it up again. Many of these rural areas had only just been, or were only just beginning to be electrified.
The phonograph records at that time were still virtually the same as they had been when the phono-disk industry began in the late nineteenth century. They were originally recorded acoustically, and later by the 1920's had begun to be electrically recorded.
They were still pressed in shellac, around a cardboard core. You had to be careful during the cold winter months when taking them to a party; sudden temperature changes would cause them to crack and become useless.
In the summertime, you did not leave them in the sun as they could easily warp from too much heat; the later black vinyl LP disks could do the same.
The standard "single" was 10 inches in diameter, about 1/8" thick, and spun at 78rpm. I can recall accompanying my older sister and her girlfriends to a "platter shop" as the teens called the record stores, to listen to and choose a new single.
They had enclosed booths with a door, not unlike the wooden full phone booths that were still common around the country (those phone booths were a favorite place to wait for the bus on a cold day, but you had to get out if someone needed to use the phone). The records came in a paper sleeve, you picked one out of the bin and took it into the booth placed it on the turntable, lowered the tone arm on the disk and listened over the loudspeaker in the booth.
At home, we had an old floor model console radio, a 3 to 4 foot tall Grunow Teledial, with broadcast, shortwave and aircraft am bands on a big colored backlit dial. The aircraft and/or shortwave bands had been disabled by cutting their tuning coils for wartime security. FM had been torpedoed just after the war by General Sarnoff over a personal rivalry with FM's inventor Edwin Armstrong and would be several years recovering yet.
On top of the Grunow sat a Grundig 78rpm record changer, which could hold four 10 or 12 inch platters at one time; as one record finished, the arm moved out of the way and the next platter dropped from the overhead stack onto the one just played. A fabric-insulated audio cord terminated in a 1/4inch "mono" phone-plug, same as used in many full size audiophile headphones today except for the single channel.
You had to reach into the open back of this radio, over the tops of the large "octal base" glass vacuum tubes, and insert the plug into the phono-jack, which was inconveniently located at the top of the far-side of the steel chassis, behind all the tubes.
The 12 inch platters were the "long play" disks; I can recall my first "real" phonograph album, a cardboard album with 4 paper sleeves containing the 12 inch double-sided shellac disks of Prokofief's "Peter and the Wolf".
The true "LP" had been invented by Thomas Edison's laboratories in the late 1920's, just before the great depression broke out; 12 inch, 33-1/3rpm, micro-grooved, pressed orginally in black Bakelite, the same material that was used for a lot of electric clock casings and table radio housings at the time. The formula used by Edison was smoother than modern vinyl, and his pickups were the first to use a diamond stylus. The LP didn't go into production until a decade after WWII due to the depression and war.
A lot of childrens 78rpm singles were being made in the early fifties, child-sized "Little Golden Records" pressed in yellow plastic. Many of the early childrens phonographs then had electric motors, but an acoustic tone arm just like the original Victrola.
Vinyl came into use by the mid 1950's, with the introduction of 45rpm 7 inch singles, and 12 inch LP vinyls that could play about 20minutes per side.
The 45's became the standard food of jukeboxes, just as the CD became later. They were the more popular media with teens, and teenagers had travel cases just as for CD's today, but each disk only played for four minutes.
By the late 50's or eary 60's, 8-track continuous-loop tape cartridges had come on the market; these became popular for automobile use, but had the disadvantage of more easily jamming, as the tape pulled out of the middle of the roll and returned on the circumference.
The 8-track began to become displaced by the still familiar Phillips cassette tape by the late 1960's.
In the 1980's Phillips released the compact disk standard, and the DVD video standard soon followed, but not before a number of larger video disks competed for position in the market place. They were 12" disks like the vinyl LP's before them; one system even used a stylus, which was remarkable, but had all the disadvantage of grooved media, dust and dirt entering the grooves.
The DVD revolutionized the jukebox idea, adapting the old Mills Soundie 16mm jukeboxes of the late 1930's and early 1940's to the modern media.
The rest, as they say, is history. All these major evolutions of the music media have taken place during this aspie's lifetime.
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He who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, hates none -- Isha Upanishad
Bom Shankar Bholenath! I do not "have a syndrome", nor do I "have a disorder," I am a "Natural Born Scholar!"
05 Jan 2008, 7:10 pm
