Pallophotophone-immediate predecessor to RCA Photophone

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Yikes; that's a blast from the past. De Forest was only really interested in optical audio for movies (ironic, given that he self-styled himself the "father of radio"), whereas Hoxie and several others were trying to develop it for other uses, too, as Matthew describes.



Anyways, from his diaries and papers, it seems that De Forest spent as much time developing admiration for Hitler and Mussolini as he did developing sound technology, and on his return to the USA, wrote and lectured anyone who would listen on how cool this fascism stuff is, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, this didn't go down very well with the Hollywood establishment, especially as De Forest made no attempt to hide his extreme anti-Semitism. That, combined with the fact that De Forest totally burned his assistant, Theodore Case, by trying to take the credit for important refinements to the sound camera that were Case's work, ensured that he eventually remained largely forgotten in mainstream accounts of the history of movie technology, despite having made some of the crucial discoveries (e.g. the use of a weighted idler wheel to eliminate wow and flutter) that made optical sound possible.

Someone really should make a biographical movie about Lee de Forest, though absolutely not the one he tried to have made in the last few years of his life!

\


Thanks foir that info Leo, I never knew of his fascination with Hitler.... I wonder if it was all a put on to let him do research in Germany though??

[Leo Enticknap]

At the time De Forest was in Germany (late 1921 to early 1923), Hitler was only just starting to become known, and to most people as a bit of a joke. It would be another decade before he achieved any real political power. De Forest went to Germany because the spending power of the dollar in such a wrecked economy was a helluva lot more than it would have been in the USA, his radio patents were expiring, and movie sound was essentially his final roll of the dice. The tragedy (for him) was that in terms of actually developing the technology, the gamble paid off: Phonofilm worked, proved that optical sound-on-film was a reliable and marketable system, and took relatively little development to be transformed into a mainstay of movie technology for decades afterwards. But his lack of interpersonal skills, and his political views, screwed the pooch as far as taking the credit for it was concerned.

Without wanting to get too psychological, I'd hazard a guess (based on having read as many of his papers as I could during the week I had at the History San Jose archive) that he had a giant chip on his shoulder about Edison being celebrated the way he was, and thought that establishment had shunned him and that he should have had that reputation. If I've got that right, it's not hard to understand how he came to admire Hitler and Mussolini - both people who rose to power with, at the risk of getting too (contemporaneously) political, a "drain the swamp" message.

The typescript of his autobiography, Father of Radio, is about half as long again as the published version. Most of the stuff that didn't make it into print is his political ranting. The gist of it goes as follows: the rot started when Hoover lost the 1932 election, FDR was a goddamn commie stooge, making an enemy out of Germany and Japan proved that he was a goddamn commie stooge, supporting Hitler rather than fighting him would have been in the USA's best interests, Hitler would have been our best line of defense against the goddamn commies, and now that he's gone, the goddamn commies are coming for us. Unsurprisingly, the publisher was not willing to include these bits in the book, and after a long correspondence, De Forest was accusing him of being a goddamn commie, too. And there was a lot of anti-Semitic sentiment threading through all of this prose and correspondence.

Interspersed between these pages of Alex Jones-style rants was lucid and fascinating detail about the technology he invented and developed. If only someone had been there to firewall the political stuff from the people he interacted with, he would have gone down in the technology history books very differently, IMHO.

[Mathew Bailey]

Come to think of it,I had an Otis Elevator Elevoice part that had a magnetic drum with multiple stationary heads around it,one head for each message recorded onto the drum.

[Leo Enticknap]

The British "speaking clock" used the same basic technology, but initially with optical audio (I'm guessing, an adaption of the Philips-Miller principle, but with discs):

A speaking clock service was first introduced in the United Kingdom on July 24, 1936. The mechanism used was an array of motors, glass discs, photocells and valves* which took up the floorspace of a small room. The voice was that of London telephonist Ethel Jane Cain, who had won a prize of 10 guineas in a competition to find the "Golden Voice". Cain's voice was recorded optically onto the glass disks in a similar way to a film soundtrack.^[35] The service was obtained by dialling the letters TIM (846) on a dial telephone, and hence the service was often colloquially referred to as "Tim". However this code was only used in the telephone systems of the cities of London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Other areas initially dialled 952 but with the introduction of subscriber trunk dialling it was changed to 808 and later 8081 as more 'recorded services' were introduced and was standardised to 123 by the early 1990s.^{[citation needed]}

The time announcements were made by playing short, recorded phrases or words in the correct sequence. In an interview with Manchester Radio in 1957 Miss Cain said:

The way I recorded it was in jerks as it were. I said: "At the Third Stroke" (that does for all the times), and then I counted from One, Two, Three, Four, for the hours, we even went as far as twenty-four, in case the twenty-four-hour clock should need to be used, and then I said "...and ten seconds, and twenty seconds, and thirty, forty, fifty seconds", and "o'clock" and "precisely". The famous "precisely". So what you hear is "At the Third Stroke it will be one, twenty-one and forty seconds".^[36]

In 1963, the original device was replaced by more modern recording technology using a magnetic drum, similar to the Audichron technology used in the United States. The company that manufactured the rotating magnetic drum part of the Speaking Clock was Roberts & Armstrong (Engineers) Ltd of North Wembley. They took on the licence from the British Post Office to manufacture complete clocks for the telecommunications authorities of Denmark, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland, and a third (spare) clock for the British Post Office. This latter was installed in Bow Street, London. The European clocks were modified for the 24-hour system by lengthening the drum and adding extra heads. Roberts & Armstrong subcontracted the electronic aspects to the Synchronome Company of Westbury. The clocks were designed to run non-stop for 20 years. This system gave way to the present digital system in 1984, which uses a built-in crystal oscillator and microprocessor logic control. The complete apparatus comprises solid-state microchips, occupies no more shelf space than a small suitcase and has no moving parts at all. The BT service is assured to be accurate to five-thousandths of a second.

* Valve = British English term for vacuum tube.

[Jim Cassedy]

Mathew Bailey said:

Come to think of it,I had an Otis Elevator Elevoice part that had a magnetic drum with multiple stationary heads around it,one head for each message recorded onto the drum.

At least a decade or more ago, a computer museum I visited had an exhibit in which they displayed many of the computer systems used by NASA during the early days of the US space program, and their "disk drive" was a huge magnetic cylinder, about the size of a US 44Gal oil drum, which rotated horizontally on an axle (like a BBQ rotisserie), and there was a row of multiple magnetic heads, which each could be raised or lowered individually to read or write onto one of the "tracks" on the drum. I don't recall how much data the beast could hold, or how fast the drum rotated, but with that design, the length of each 'track' would have been only as long the drum's circumference. (which some rough math tells me would be appx 72&1/4in or 1.8m)

I tried to find a picture online, but the closest thing I could
come up with is this huge IBM "hard drive" from 1955, which
looks very similar to the one I recall seeing, except the drum in
this one is vertically mounted. SIne they're forklifting it into
an aircraft, this was obviously considered a "portable" drive!
BigOldDiskDrive.jpg
The original caption sez this drive holds
a whopping 5MB, and weighs 2000lbs.
JC