Bing Crosby, Jack Mullin, and Ampex
Last Friday at lunch, I was telling the well-known---and very San Francisco centric---story of Jack Mullin and the WWII origins of high-fidelity magnetic tape recording. One account of the events is here: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/16/11672678/tape-recording-70th-anniversary-jack-mullin My only quibbles with this account are it claims that we don't know the identity of the German engineers who developed the Magnetophon, frequently refers to the use of wax recordings for radio transcription, omits the fact that Crosby wrote a no-strings-attached check to Ampex for $50K (over $600K in 2022) that allowed them to purchase the parts and set up production of the first 24 Model 200 machines. Ampex, in return, appointed Bing Crosby Enterprises (BCE) to be the US distributor of their products west of the Mississippi. The first is simply wrong, the key innovator was Walter Weber at Reichs-Rundfunk Gesellschaft (RRG). RRG commissioned AEG to build the machines f...