Early 1950s Variety show for WGN Radio
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ส.ค. 2024
- A really strange reel in the Marchant Archives. L.S. Toogood Recording Company “The Northerners” for WGN. On the surface this is a radio variety program with singing and talking and some ads (a banker talking down to a woman who just “doesn’t know a thing about finance” - very typical 1950s stuff). But, the reason this is in the archive is a pretty cool.
Reynolds Marchant worked at 3M in the magnetic audio tape division as a consulting engineer. In his work there he was co-inventor on a tape duplicating machine. Magnetic audio tape since its initial broad availability in 1947-8 was just used for recording. But the question was - could you sell pre-recorded reels just like a vinyl or shellac record? Reynolds and co-inventor Robert Herr created a machine that could take a single recording and duplicate it many times at the same quality, and I believe at high speeds so it wouldn’t take forever.
Here is Reynolds patent from 1948 on Google patents - it expired in the early 70s, shortly after his death:
patents.google...
Initially I don’t think the plan was to use this concept for selling commercial reel to reels. I believe the idea was that content creators could ship tapes to radio stations to play over the air. This was already being done as one offs, but now it could be done for multiple radio stations at once. And in fact this reel I believe is perhaps an early proof of concept of this. The L.S. Toogood Recording Company had a studio in Chicago, Illinois and used a 3M prototype machine to ship original content to radio stations like WGN, the station this reel was made for.
I found an article via Google Books in Billboard Magazine in 1950 that talks about this:
---------------
“NEW YORK, Feb. 25.-The first tape recordings produced commercially for home use are being marketed by Tape Recording Industries, of Lansing, Mich. The initial list consists of eight hour-long reels, featuring popular and semi-classical material, with 16 to 26 numbers per reel. The tapes are designed for home machines that operate at 7½ inches per second.
The tapes are duplicated on the machine owned by L. S. Toogood the only one of its kind in existence. This is the electronic unit sold last year by the research labs of the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company, which developed it. The latter outfit manufacturers Scotch tape, which is used for recording."
---------------
Another article talking about reel to reel duplication:
www.worldradio...
Pretty neat bit of hidden history here. Commercial reel to reels never really took off as records were easier and cheaper to make, and eventually cassettes came, then CDs… you know the rest of the story there. There are still commercial recorded reel to reels for sale out there - NEW recordings! But they are incredibly expensive. Many hundreds of dollars. The older stuff from the 50s and 60s is much cheaper unless it's something like a Beatles two track master.
Technical info:
Unknown Scotch
7” Cine Reel
7 1/2 IPS
Fantastic rendition of Deep Purple!! Thanks so much!
I enjoyed it as well. Thanks for listening!
As heard on Tuesdays at 9:30pm(ct).
Originally broadcast on October 18, 1949, when "South Pacific" was in its "sixth spectacular month on Broadway" {as noted at 9:49).
Awesome info! How did you find out about the original broadcast date? Surely not just from the South Pacific mention!
I consulted some Chicago radio newspaper listings- and sure enough, Louis Sudler *did* appear on "THE NORTHERNERS" the following week [October 25, 1949], as mentioned at the end of the program.
Should you find any other Northerners episodes might you please play them. So so enjoyable.
I wish! I couldn't find a single thing about this group called The Nothernerers on google. We'll see if I find any more reels.
"THE NORTHENERS" later moved to Monday nights [8:30pm], and concluded its 23 year run on WGN on May 25, 1953.
@@fromthesidelines regular Google searches failed me in finding more about The Nothereners. The name obviously had something to do with the Northern Trust company who was a key sponsor.
Yep! Incidentally, Northern Trust Corporation is still in business.
@@fromthesidelines I did find that in my research. I bet no one is alive at that company that remembers this :)