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Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

Footnote 9

9. For prior intersections of thread with standardization and alienated labor, see Babbage 334 {Au: Is this from 1961 or 1963?} and Plant (1997, 15–16) on computation and Jacquard’s loom. Of course, Marx also wrote about spinning and weaving machines, with an occasional response to Babbage. See Chapter 15, “Machinery and Modern Industry,” Capital and “Division of Labour and Mechanical Workshop. Tool and Machinery” in Collected Works, Vol. 33. {Au: Please provide the page ranges for these two chapters.}

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Responding to Edison’s Noise In the history of technologies before and after 1888, a drive toward the abstraction and standardization of both information and perception is certainly nothing novel. However, what makes the case of early magnetic recording unique is that Oberlin Smith bundled that abstraction and standardization with a critique of mechanical noise, which abraded cultured ears as it revealed technical flaws. One such flaw was the friction between a needle and groove caused during the playback of mechanically recorded sound inscribed on tinfoil. As magnetic audio historian Mark H. Clark notes in “The Magnetic Recording of Sound,” Oberlin Smith visited Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in early 1878, ten years prior to his publication in Electrical World and just after Edison patented the cylinder phonograph (1999c, 7).

While examining Edison’s new device, Smith was struck by a scratchy noise generated during playback. It was a noise that mechanical recordings simply could not avoid, and it offended Smith’s ears. As a response, he proposed magnetic recording, where no audible, physical contact would be made between the storage medium (for example, thread) and the playback mechanism (for example, an electromagnet).