From the department of: Stuff We Find Online
OTTAWA: Considering that people now carry around hundreds of audio recordings on a device the size of a credit card, early recording gear seems a bit otherworldly. Take the unlikely Blattnerphone, for example. The Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa has one, according to its Flickr.comphotostream. Here’s the Museum’s chatter:
“By 1930, advances in electronics allowed the first commercially successful magnetic recorders to be introduced as dictating machines and telephone recorders in Europe and North America. Recording on solid-steel media, whether wire or tape, remained the dominant form of magnetic recording outside Germany until about 1950.
“The Museum has 17 such recorders dating from the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps most interesting, however, is our Blattnerphone, or Marconi-Stille recorder. This large device, which recorded on steel tape 3 mm wide, was developed in Germany and sold to several radio broadcasters, including the forerunner of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 1933.”
(Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corp.)
