Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording Main Menu Introduction Introduction to Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording Notes Notes for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Media Media for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Acknowledgments Acknowledgments for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Technical Information Technical Information for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P References References for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P This essay is part of the “New Media” special issue of American Literature (volume 85, number 4, December 2013). See http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230. Version 1 of the site is (c) 2013 by Duke University Press.

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Intended for audiences across the intersections of literary criticism and comparative media studies, this essay highlights how magnetic recording was affiliated with permanent, immaterial sound during its first six decades (1870–1930). Oberlin Smith (1878) initially framed it as a scratch-free alternative to Menlo Park recording methods and Edison’s tinfoil phonograph. That is, magnetic recording “impressed” sound; it did not “inscribe” it. Later, Valdemar Poulsen’s research on the telegraphone, including his demonstration of it at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, suggested that even then magnetic recordings could be erased and re-impressed, affording at once the immaterial and material, impermanence and permanence. However, the telegraphone was an economic failure in the United States and Europe. Intended as a mechanism for writing the voice from a distance, it was reduced solely to military use by 1917. 

Nevertheless, author and amateur criminologist, Arthur B. Reeve, did write about the telegraphone during the 1910s and 1920s. Spanning magazines, cartoons, film, and radio, Reeve’s incredibly popular science fiction detective tales didactically introduced audiences to the presumably magical features of the relatively unknown telegraphone, mixing technical specifications with paranoia about the infallibility of forensic science and disembodied voices forever recorded on wire. With Reeve’s work in mind, this essay demonstrates how, despite the telegraphone’s economic failure, the magnetic aura of permanent, immaterial sound still gained traction in consumer markets well before tape in the 1940s. Through the use of the Scalar platform, the essay unpacks the often ignored, pre-1940s history of magnetic recording, with particular attention to how—through an interweaving of print fiction, sound transduction, and visual culture—early magnetic recording materialized. In so doing, it offers scholars of both new and old media a sense of how we might better historicize the simultaneous permanence and immateriality of contemporary computing cultures.

This page has paths:

  1. Making the Perfect Record Jentery Sayers

Contents of this path:

  1. Introduction
  2. The Spirit of Sound
  3. The Telegraphone
  4. Prehistory for Today’s Magnetic Media
  5. Responding to Edison’s Noise
  6. Smith’s Projected Design
  7. Fidelity and Deceit
  8. Not a Worthwhile Investment
  9. Selling the Weird Instrument
  10. Leave a Message
  11. A Rewritable Medium
  12. Remediating the Telephone
  13. Exhibiting the Telegraphone
  14. Mystifying the Technical Particulars
  15. The Mechanical Arts
  16. Imagining Applications
  17. Faith in the Device
  18. Reeve’s Scientific Detective Fiction
  19. The Erudite, Loquacious Polymath
  20. Reeve’s Scientific Realism
  21. The Modern Detective
  22. From Print to Film and Radio
  23. “I Learned Their Methods”
  24. Merely a Validation Machine
  25. Learning about Magnetic Recording through Fiction
  26. Enculturating Listening and Memory
  27. Speculative Determinism
  28. Before the Hard Drive
  29. No Neat Distinctions between Genres
  30. The Perfect Record and Plausible Denial
  31. Acknowledgments
  32. Technical Information
  33. References

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