AUDIO HISTORY: THE ‘DISCOVERY’ OF THE TAPE RECORDER

When you think of transformative moments in media, certain tipping points come to mind: The beginning of satellite delivery in 1962, the advance of the Internet in the 1990s and the introduction of the Smart Phone by Apple in 2008.

Add to these game-changing inventions the “discovery” of the reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1945. 

We say “discovered” because very few Americans knew how far German audio engineers had progressed with audio recording and reproduction just prior, and during World War Two.

We call this discovery Jack Mullin’s Prize.
 

Jack Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the waning years of the war specializing in radar technology. Just after the war ended in Europe in May 1945, Mullin was assigned to investigate German war-related electronics.

In July of the year, the Army sent Mullin to inspect a site near Frankfurt, where the Germans had been experimenting with high-energy radio beams as a potential weapon.

Mullin made a stop at a German radio station in the town of Bad Nauheim. It was there he saw and heard the Magnetophone, a reel-to-real tape recorder. As can hear in the YouTube podcast below, the German device provided audio reproduction that far surpassed anything he had heard before.

Mullin decided to ship two of the machines to his home in San Francisco as a “prize of war.” He also took fifty rolls unused recording tape.

Mullin shipped the Magnetophones piece by piece the States. When he returned to California he reassembled the machines and they were in perfect working order.

The only problem Mullin had was deciding what to do with the machine because nobody new about them

Jack Mullin at Ampex in the 1950s

In 1947 radio star Bing Crosby read about Mullin’s Magnetophones in a newspaper story. 

Crosby was fascinated by the device’s ability to make edits in the recordings eliminate embarrassing flubs.

Crosby was so impressed he agreed to invest in Mullin's work. 

Mullin parlayed Crosby's cash into a stake in Ampex. 

Mullin worked at Ampex for many years. He was part of the team that introduced videotape.

Please listen to our story and learn how one person’s “discovery” changed the world of recorded audio audio forever.