Rummaging through the Laney Flea Market, as I do every Sunday in Oakland, I happened upon a strange piece of equipment. The dirty suitcase, as I suspected, was carrying antique circuits, and to my surprise it was an antique recording device. The woman running the booth wanted the thing gone. For $20 I assumed ownership of a Webster-Chicago 'Electronic Memory' Wire Recorder. I was very happy to find out the very same model is on show in the Smithsonian!
As always being car-less and forgetting rope and scissors, we bought both and tied it to the back of my bike and started back to East Oakland. Upon returning I plugged the thing in and to my surprise the damn thing actually turned on. It's lucky for anything electrical to turn on from the flea market let alone something that is over 60 years old. The antique has an eerie look to it that matched it's electronic hum and recording quality.
The Recorder in it's heyday was quite the possession. It promoted the idea of talking to relatives and meeting new friends by "mailing your voice instead of a letter." They had a ''Wirespondence Club' that "maintains lists of wire recorder owners all over the world" which I'm assuming acted as a primitive Casual Encounters.
Before the golden age of magnetic tape, these babies were the prize. They were actually made of stainless steel Piano wire and if kept in good conditions are said to last up to 250 to 300 years. Here's a little history from the Video Interchange.
The technology of magnetic recording dates back to 1878, when Oberlin Smith proposed the idea of recording telephone signals onto a length of steel piano wire. Over the next thirty years the technology evolved at a "snail's pace"; stalled by lack of adequate and cost effective electronic amplification. By 1930, advances in electronics allowed the first commercially successful wire recorders to be introduced as dictating machines and telephone recorders in Europe and North America. During WWII, the machines found their way into the BBC who employed banks of them for sending messages to the French underground. Meanwhile the US Army & Navy also employed them for similar purposes in their operations centers. Following the war from 1947 to 1952, wire recorders became popular in America and across Europe, and started showing up in many homes. The wire recorder was the very first reliable audio recorder to find it's way into the American home in significant numbers.
So The first spool I whipped out also had the most interesting material. As the motor hummed as I switched on the machine, the words "Brother Master Ceremony" spat out of the machine. As it continued I quickly realized it was the swearing in of a lodge master for the Freemason fraternity. Very interesting. Very eerie. The determined voice went through the proceedings for a certain 'Brother Frisbold' who didn't seem at all present. I'm assuming they were both part of the 'Wirespondence Club'.
Here's a pic of the wire spools.
Finally, The recording plus a remix of the ceremony.
1. Freemason Brother-Master Ceremony
2. Remix - Freemason Pancake Breakfast
I'm very interested in the production capabilities of rerecording things to the machine itself. The microphone that came included is said to have very bad frequency response. However, the actual wire itself, if fed a line level signal into its input, is said to sound very unique and warm.
I'll be collecting Wire Recording Spools and putting them unto Archive.org and also indexing them on this website. So if anyone has these laying around please contact me!
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