London, England (Circa 1949s): When I was a boy I heard stories of some recordings that my grandfather made of his family, including the voices of my great grandparents, and even my mother as a young child...
A few years ago I found the recordings. They were made on steel wire in the late '40s and early '50s, before tape recording had been introduced to the domestic market. In fact my grandfather had designed and built his own wire recorder, and his own special wire spools for it.
The original recorder is long gone, which made the task of recovering the recordings all the more interesting! But I decided to have a go, and embarked on a fascinating project to learn about wire recording, and to adapt an old Webster-Chicago wirerecorder to play back the spools.
You can see a full write-up of the project, including photographs of the equipment and some of the recordings, at http://www.gentweb.co.uk/wirerecorder
Having now experienced playback of hair-thin steel wire, racing along at 2 feet per second, it makes me very grateful for CDs and MP3s! It is a pretty hazardous affair, especially when the finely tuned bailing mechanism glitches, and spills wire at high speed within inches of poorly isolated high voltages!
I doubt many people will remember the days before tape recorders, especially here in the UK where wirerecorders never quite seemed to catch on as they did in the US. But there are still a few working recorders in existence and a few people who can recover recordings from old wire spools. The recordings do very slowly degrade over the years, so if you have any spools gathering dust in the attic, now is the time to get them out and get them tunrned into MP3s - before it is too late!
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