Okay, so... Bell Labs was spun off into Lucent Technologies which merged with Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent which was purchased by Nokia. And... this is not a physics applicaiton. This is 100%, genuine, bona-fide applied communications. Bitch please. I wonder why. By the way, it's not like wire recorders hadn't existed for 30 years. It also isn't like they weren't portable. Here's the one you see all the time in movies pretending to be vintage, because even though it was made post-war it sure don't look like it: And it describes '50s vintage rubber, too, which wasn't the sort of thing you'd want to keep around very long. Also, the tension would have to be spot-on perfect because if you stretch it you'd pitch-shift your recording. ...and they didn't have the patents on wire recorders, and they didn't have the patents on tape recorders, and clearly, they were looking for a way to make you buy media and wire? Wire's virtually impossible to fuck up. Tape? Also pretty tricky. Magnetized rubber? ...yeah, that would require some engineering to dupe. Part of it may be because it's a stupid idea by inspection. The fact that it shows up in Popular Mechanics says a lot. Bitch please. I've got a stockpile of vintage '50s and '60s Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines at my grampa's old house. That shit was never serious. Pick a year and I'll show you antigravity research, get-rich-quick schemes and plans to run your car on water if you just send a SASE and $1.95 to a PO box in El Paso. picardfacepalm.jpg Sound was NEVER recorded on film. It was PRINTED on film but the actual recording... Okay. You wanna know how fucking scary the internet is? When you shoot film without sound, you call it "MOS." There's a legend that this means "mitt out sound" because everyone thought there were all these german directors running around during the golden age of talkies and it's a fun story. But what it actually stands for is "missing optical sync" because the thing being recorded on film was 2nd system OPTICAL burn-in, which was SYNCED with the big dumb magnetic recording truck a short distance away. So the way it used to work was the AD would say "ready" and sound would say "sound speeds" which means "my recorder is at operating speed" and then camera would say "camera speeds" which means the camera is at operating speed and then the director would say "action." Now we say "camera speeds" and then "sound speeds" because audio has cost less than film for a long time (even when it was film) but the terms still exist. Yet if you type "missing optical sync" into the Internet... ...well, go ahead. I'll wait. Yesterday notwithstanding, I am starting to get the feeling that by the time I'm in my dotage, me watching the internet will be like y'all watching this:Bell Labs still exists—sort of. AT&T sold the labs to a French communications company that closed the labs’ physics research department in favor of more applied communications and networking research.
1954 was the year the American public was introduced to the transistor, the small (in the ‘50s, a few inches long; now, as small as 1nm)
Dave Morton, who wrote Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America, took a look at this ad and said, “It’s kind of funny, because Bell Telephone Labs had given this [answering machine technology] up 20 years before this,” when they decided not to pursue Clarence Hickman’s answering machine service that was in internal use at Bell Labs.
There are several things going on here: first, what is the “talking rubber” technology? After talking to several historians of science and technology, I’m pretty sure it’s not a term that ever caught on. But it turns out that’s because this actual technology never caught on; although on first glance, this ad seems to describe magnetic tape—the technology behind cassette and VHS tapes—“talking rubber” describes actual rubber, not tape!
According to that Bell System Journal article, this “talking rubber” could be around 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch think, whereas magnetic tape was (even in the '50s) already much thinner at 1/1000 of an inch thick.
Even though AT&T decided not to pursue Clarence Hickman’s version of magnetic tape from the '30s, by the '50s the company was looking for a way to record very short messages that could be played over and over again and then re-recorded at various intervals.
Except the technology never caught on; magnetic tape, not rubber, reigned. Part of this may have been due to the short nature of rubber recordings, because the rubber was so much thicker than tape.
To add to this idea, Wisnioski emphasized that, in 1954, running an ad in Scientific American or Popular Mechanics meant addressing an audience of scientists and engineers.
You have to remember, in 1954 the only way to record sound was to press a phonograph or record sound on film for a movie.
Thanks for the explanation. I thought rubber sounded like a bad idea, which is why I was intrigued by the attempted application. Too bad they didn't do their research well enough. 1 result, 0.36 seconds. Makes me wonder if I've ever used a phrase that only exists on the Internet because I said it...I'll wait.