Abstract

Semi Joseph Begun, who died in 1995, is credited with the development of the first commercial tape recorder to be successfully marketed for home use in the United States. His postwar version of the “Soundmirror,” a reel‐to‐reel tape recorder using paper tape coated with ferromagnetic powder, was introduced by the Brush Development Company in 1946. Begun's autobiography, edited by Mark Clark after Begun's death, documents the inventor's lifelong obsession with magnetic recording, ranging from his early efforts to develop a magnetic dictation machine to his flight from Adolph Hitler's Germany in 1935, his arrival in the United States, and his appointment as an engineer at Brush in 1938, where he eventually rose to the rank of vice president and chief engineer.Begun's dictation machine, the “Dailygraph” , was a wire recorder. The wire was housed in a cartridge that could easily be loaded and unloaded by the average office worker. In 1933 Begun engineered the “Steeltone Tape Machine” for the Lorenz Company. Though the steel tape was virtually impossible to edit and cumbersome , it found immediate use among English and German broadcasters for the transcription of radio programs.Begun's career in the United States illustrates the obstacles encountered by this new medium in a sound recording industry already dominated by highly capitalized corporate interests, including the record industry, moving pictures, and live radio broadcasting. Only the special demands of the armed forces for new sound recording technology during World War II enabled Begun to bring magnetic recording to a stage of development that would make it commercially viable in the postwar years.For the U.S. Air Force, Begun designed a recorder for cockpit conversations, including reconnaissance observations; years later, this technology was re‐engineered to create the black box flight recorder found on every commercial airliner. For the Navy, Begun developed a magnetic player designed to simulate the sounds of an invading fleet. This was used in the invasion of Sicily and at Anzio to divert enemy troops away from the actual invasion site. Variable‐speed magnetic recorders were also used to code military messages that were recorded at one speed and transmitted at another.Postwar applications of these devices can be found in recorders for conversations between air traffic controllers and pilots, recorders for the phone company to play back weather reports updated every half‐hour, and a “Mail‐a‐Voice Recorder” that recorded voice‐letters on a magnetically coated piece of paper that could be sent through the mails.A cheaper version of the 1946 “Soundmirror” was marketed in 1950, exchanging the earlier model's three drive motors for a single motor that drove a complex series of belts and clutches; a high failure rate for the single‐motor system effectively ended Brush's and Begun's attempts to dominate the magnetic recording market. Begun's book repeatedly details the troubled development of magnetic recording in terms of mechanical rather than electronic failings. Getting the tape or wire to move at the correct speed was a major obstacle to the successful innovation and diffusion of this particular invention.By 1950 another, more successful, magnetic sound recorder had emerged, based on AEG's Magnetophone, a polyvinyl chloride tape recorder developed in Germany after Begun's departure and “liberated” by Allied troops in 1945. A refurbished version of this machine was used by John T. Mullen to record Bing Crosby's radio show in the 1947–1948 season and, shortly thereafter, became the basis for Ampex's highly successful recorder