BING AND AMPEX

For those that know me, know I am a fan of tape recording. It is a lost art these days. Bing started it all in the 1940s, and here is a great advertisement for an early tape recorder...

BING AND MAGNETIC TAPING

Bing Crosby and Magnetic Recording
By John Vardalas, Ph.D., Outreach Historian, IEEE History Center

Just a few months away, 2013 will mark the 110th anniversary of Bing Crosby's birth. His career as a singer, entertainer, and actor spanned six decades. During those years, he had become a cultural institution for several generations of Americans. His velvet-like voice and relaxed manner transformed popular singing. He was one of the first performers to exploit the microphone in performance. During World War II, Bing Crosby threw himself into lifting the morale of U.S. soldiers and the troops loved him. His success as an entertainer is underscored by his numerous singing and acting accolades: he was the top box office draw for over a decade, he sang on many platinum and gold records, a number of his songs that appeared in films that won Academy awards, and he even won an Oscar for Best Actor. In 1962, Crosby won the first Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Crosby was also an astute businessman. Not only was he an investor in the business of radio and television; at one point, in 1948, he became a large investor in the Vacuum Foods Corp., which pioneered the first orange juice frozen concentrate. The company later changed its name to Minute Maid. Not content to be just an investor, Crosby obtained sole distribution rights for the West Coast.
He had part ownership in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and owned extensive real estate holdings, including oil drilling operations. Though he is well known as an entertainer, and to a lesser degree as a businessman, very few people think of Bing Crosby as a champion of innovation in radio and television broadcast technology.

His first foray with technical innovation stemmed from his growing dislike for doing live radio shows. In 1936, Crosby became the host of the Kraft Music Hall, a musical variety show. For over a decade the Kraft Music Hall, which aired on the NBC network, remained a very popular feature on American radio. These shows were always broadcast live. By 1945, Crosby felt that the time commitment of a weekly live radio show had become an unacceptable burden on his family life. Crosby's desire to pre-record the show put him on a collision course with NBC executives, who refused to consider any option other than a live broadcast. Crosby refused to do the show. NBC sued, forcing him to finish the 1945-46 season. Looking to increase its ratings, ABC approached Crosby with an offer. He could pre-record his own show, but with one proviso: the quality had to be as good as a live broadcast. Crosby accepted and immediately threw himself into using the recording technology of the day, electrical transcription, a phonographic disc format which had been developed for radio in the late 1920s.

Crosby's 30-minute show was called the Philco Radio Hour. Two discs were needed to record the show. Very quickly, Crosby discovered the weaknesses of electrical transcription technology: the sound quality was inferior to the live broadcast; and editing, which is one of the great potential benefits of pre-recording, was very cumbersome. The inferiority of the technology hurt the show's ratings. With his show struggling, Crosby was receptive to any new recording technology that would improve the show's audio quality. John T. (Jack) Mullin, an electrical engineer, working with wartime German technology, would provide the answer.

Born in San Francisco in 1913, Mullin attended Santa Clara University and majored in electrical engineering. During World War II, he worked on a variety of wartime electronic projects. While in England, Mullin was struck by the quality of pre-recorded music broadcast from German radio stations. Electrical transcription technology could never produce this exceptionally high quality. “How were the Germans doing it?” he wondered. In 1944, he got his answer. That year he was sent to Paris to examine captured German electronics equipment. At one point, he visited a German radio station where he discovered the AEG Magnetophon K-4 studio magnetic tape recording machine. Given permission by the U.S. government, Mullin brought two units back with him, along with 50 reels of blank magnetic tape made by I.G. Farben. The I. G. had been created from a merger of several German firms, most notably Bayer, Hoechst, AGFA, and BASF, and by the 1930s, the I.G. was the world’s largest chemical manufacturer.

As soon as he returned to the United States, Mullin set about improving the quality of the AEG Magnetophon machines. He changed the recorder's bias circuitry to further improve the signal-to-noise ratio, added pre-emphasis for higher frequencies, and replaced all the components with standard U.S. parts. Together with his partner W.A. Palmer, in 1946, he produced their improved version of the AEG machine. This magnetic tape recorder was first demonstrated at a 1946 meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in San Francisco. The engineers, who were at the demo, all marveled at the high quality of the recording. Though it was a technical "tour de force," no one in the entertainment industry was ready yet to embrace it, until Mullin demonstrated the machine to Crosby in 1947. Immediately, Crosby asked Mullin to do a test recording of the Philco Radio Hour's first show of the 1947-48 season. Not only did the quality of this recording rival the live broadcast, but it also offered superior editing capabilities. Crosby was ready to pre-record his shows for the entire season, but he and his team had two concerns: would there be an adequate supply of recording devices and, if so, would there be enough magnetic tape to feed them? The season was about to start and Mullin had only his two machines. Enter Ampex and 3M.

Ampex, founded in 1944 in the San Francisco Bay area, produced small electrical motors and generators for the war effort. After the war, Ampex had to rethink its product line. Company founder Alexander Poniatoff decided to gamble its entire future on magnetic recording technology. Working with Mullin, its engineers produced two prototype units that worked well. Now the challenge was to go into production, but Ampex was unable to raise the needed capital. When Crosby heard of the difficulty he sent Poniatoff a check for $50,000 — a considerable amount of money for 1947. Crosby was determined to use this technology. His commitment did not stop there. He also invested money in Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), the company that was to produce a reliable supply of good quality magnetic tape. "[3M] ... had started development of their new red oxide tape that would work with the Ampex recorder. Jack Mullin began to work with Robert Herr and William Wetzel of 3M conducting tests to help develop a high quality magnetic tape for audio recording. ... The result was the Scotch Magnetic Tape No.111 that later evolved into the No. 111A that became the standard of the recording industry." Crosby recognized the long-term potential of this technology beyond his own radio program. As he did with Minute Maid, Crosby obtained exclusive west coast distribution rights from Ampex and 3M. After Crosby's entry into magnetic pre-recording, other radio programming followed suit. The 3 May 1948 issue of Newsweek featured this breakthrough in recording technology.

No sooner had Crosby adopted magnetic pre-recording than the "laugh track" was introduced for the first time on radio. Removing small mistakes on a tape had created short gaps in time. To fill in these empty spaces, Crosby suggested to his technicians that they introduce pre-recorded laughter after those jokes that he liked. Magnetic recording prompted other innovative applications like the 1948 show Candid Microphone. The creator of the program, Allen Funt, would go out and put unsuspecting individuals in awkward, but humorous situations, secretly tape their responses, and then play back the responses on radio. Funt later adapted this strategy to television with the popular show Candid Camera.

Crosby was not merely content to finance the innovation of others; he also saw the need to develop an in-house capacity to innovate. For the Kraft Music Hour, NBC had provided the engineering know-how to produce the show. But with ABC, Crosby wanted to use his own in-house audio engineering expertise. So in 1948, he created the Electronics Division within Bing Crosby Enterprises and hired Mullin as its “Chief Engineer.” Frank Healy, who was a former Hollywood producer, headed up the Electronics Division. When Crosby moved into television, he immediately thought of pre-recording his shows. The only technology available at the time was through film, which Crosby used in his early shows. As early as 1951, Crosby had asked Mullin if television broadcasts could be taped like radio. Mullin replied there was no reason why such a system could not be developed. At this point, Crosby created an R&D component within the Electronics Division and poured money into this quest to invent the first video recorder for television broadcasting, which at this point was still in black and white.

In November of 1951, Mullin demonstrated a prototype of a video recorder to the Hollywood press. Though still a very crude device, Healy used his talents as producer to convince the press corps of the machine’s great potential. The demo made the news in Variety. In a sense, this demo was the shot fired that started the race to invent a commercial video recorder. Ampex jumped in. RCA’s giant R&D machine also jumped in. But its goal was more ambitious — to invent a recorder for color television. Mullin soon discovered that moving from a crude prototype to a commercial machine proved much harder than he could have ever imagined. Crosby's first TV show had to be pre-recorded through syncing magnetic audio recording with 35mm film recording. Crosby's Electronics Division was not the only group trying to invent the video recorder. Crosby, pragmatically backing two horses, also encouraged the Ampex group.

In 1956, Ampex won the video recorder race, at least for black and white broadcasting. A day before the official start of the annual convention of National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) in Chicago, Ampex staged a successful demo of their video recorder. The 300 invited guests from the networks were caught completely off guard. They did not know that they were coming to see the first video recorder. As the guests sat listening to the VP of ABC give a speech, little did they know that it was being recorded. Then the curtains opened as the speech was replayed on several televisions around the room. After a few moments of stunned silence, the crowd broke into applause and stomped their feet in approval. Word of the video recorder spread like wildfire throughout the convention. The crowds wanting to see it were enormous.

For Crosby, the 1956 demo was not news. Because of his close ties to Ampex, he had known for a while that it had beaten his group to the video recorder. In 1955, Crosby sent Mullin over to examine the video recorder that Ampex was working on. Mullin returned with the bad news. The Ampex system was superior to theirs. Even though the Ampex machine wasn't quite ready for sale, Crosby wrote another $50,000 check to Ampex; but this time for the first machine when it was ready. This purchase effectively put an end to video recorder development at BCE. The design know-how built up at BCE was not wasted, however. Working closely with Ampex, the Crosby group developed technology to record rocket telemetry data for the U.S. military. In 1956, the video recorder work at BCE was shut down and the Electronics Division shifted its focus to an airborne wideband recorder for the U.S. Air Force. Using the knowledge gained in its approach to video recording, the Electronics Division saw an opportunity. With Ampex focused on the rotary head technology that chopped some types of signals, there was an opening for wideband longitudinal recording that had no head switching. With the move to military design, the activities of the Electronics Division started to diverge from BCE's business focus. Crosby's close association with 3M created an opportunity for him to sell off the Electronics Division. 3M found itself getting into magnetic recording hardware as a natural complement to its tape business. In August 1956, 3M decided to buy the Electronics Division. In 1957, with the Air Force contract completed, 3M formally acquired the Electronics Division.

In September 1977, Bing Crosby pre-recorded his last television show in London, U.K, with the rock star David Bowie. Just a month later, on 14 October 1977, the remarkable life of this entertainer, businessman, and champion of recording technology came to an end. The show aired on 30 November 1977. This year, 2012, on the 35th anniversary of his death, Crosby’s talents live on through a technology that he helped champion...

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BING AND TECHNOLOGY

No revolution has shaped the modern mass media more profoundly than the recording revolution. To record is the ability to create an exact duplicate of an act of communication, to preserve and replicate this act quickly and cheaply, and distribute countless copies of this act to consumers everywhere, so they can replay it over and over whenever they so desire. Johannes Gutenburg birthed the revolution in 1454 with his movable-type printing press. Louis Daguerre used chemistry to permanently fix a photographic image in 1839 and William Fox Talbot replicated positive prints from a single negative.Thomas Edison added the recordability of sounds in 1877 with his phonograph and of motion in 1893 with his kinetoscope. The man who would have the greatest impact on the mass media in the 20th century was not an inventor or scientist, but a crooner.

A crooner, you say?

Yes, it was Bing Crosby who was the leader of the revolution. The 1600 records he made during his 51-year career as a pop singer have never been equaled in number or influence. Bing sold 500 million copies during his career and only Elvis would sell more. His White Christmas was the No. 1 recorded song in total sales (35+ million) for over 50 years. He sang on 4000 radio shows from 1931 to 1962 and was the top-rated radio star for 18 of those years. He appeared in 100 movies and was the first popular singer to win a Academy Award for Best Actor (Going My Way, in 1944). He appeared in 300 television programs from 1948 through 1977, ending with his 42nd consecutive Christmas special taped before his collapse and death Oct. 14 after 18 holes on the La Moraleja Club golf course in Spain. The show was broadcast on CBS Nov. 30, 1977.

He was not the first singer-crooner. "Whispering" Jack Smith and Rudy Vallee had early in the 1920's discovered that a softer, natural style sounded better through the microphone than the live-stage Tin Pan Alley style. Crosby became the most famous crooner when he adapted the jazz-scat rhythmic style of Louis Armstrong to his own superb baritone voice. The new electrically-amplified condenser microphones of the mid-1920's favored a voice like Crosby's and he learned how to manipulate his voice to project a distinctive audio image onto a shellac disc. Radio also favored his voice (called "phonogenic" by Charles Henderson). CBS gave Bing his first big network contract in 1931 when William S. Paley heard his voice on a portable phonograph playing on the deck of an ocean liner. It was a voice that reproduced well.

By 1935, the year Elvis was born, Bing Crosby had become a star in several media. He was earning $5000 per week for the Kraft Music Hall on radio and $100,000 per film from Paramount. He was the first artist signed by new Decca Records and his soaring record sales made it possible for Jack Kapp to create the 35-cent cheap 78 rpm record. Over the next 5 years he would invest his growing wealth in racetracks such as the Del Mar Turf Club, stables, real estate, music publishing, fish packing (he would become the most famous spokesman in the 1960's to Save the Salmon), philanthropy, the annual Clambake pro-am golf tournament, and his trademark loose sweaters. In 1940, his annual income of $750,000 put him at the top of his profession. He was a rare independent powerhouse in the midst of the corporate radio, film, and music powers that dominated the mass media.

He used his power to innovate new methods of reproducing himself. In 1946 he wanted to shift from live performance to recorded transcriptions for his weekly radio show on NBC sponsored by Kraft. But NBC refused to allow recorded radio programs (except for advertisements). The live production of radio shows was a deeply-established tradition reinforced by the ASCAP union. The new ABC network, formed out of the sale of the old NBC Blue network in 1943 to Edward Noble, the "Lifesaver King," was willing to break the tradition. It would pay Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday sponsored by Philco. He would also get $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 60-minute show that was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch aluminum discs that played 10 minutes per side at 33-1/3 rpm. Crosby wanted to change to recorded production for several reasons.

The legend that has been most often told is that it would give him more time for his golf game. And he did record his first Philco program in August 1947 so he could enter the Jasper National Park Invitational Gold Torunament in September when the new radio season was to start. But golf was not the most important reason. Crosby was always an early riser and hard worker. He sought better quality through recording, not more spare time. He could eliminate mistakes and control the timing of performances. Because his own Bing Crosby Enterprises produced the show, he could purchase the latest and best sound equipment and arrange the microphones his way (mic placement had long been a hotly-debated issue in every recording studio since the beginning of the electrical era). No longer would he have to wear the hated toupee on his head previously required by CBS and NBC for his live audience shows (Bing preferred a hat). He could also record short promotions for his latest investment, the world's first frozen orange juice to be sold under the brand name Minute Maid.

The transcription method however had problems. The 16-inch aluminum program discs were made from master discs running at 78 rpm and holding only 4 minutes per side. This presented editing and timing problems that often caused gaps or glitches in the flow of the 60-minute program. Also, the acetate surface coating of the aluminum discs was little better than the wax that Edison had used at the turn of the century, with the same limited dynamic range and frequency response. In June of 1947, Murdo MacKenzie of Crosby Enterprises saw a demonstration of the German Magnetophone that Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt with 50 reels of tape at the end of the war. This machine was one of the magnetic tape recorders that BASF and AEG had built in Germany starting in 1935. The 1/2 inch ferric-coated tape could record 20 minutes per reel of high-quality sound. Alexander M. Poniatoff ordered his Ampex company (founded in 1944 from his initials A.M.P. plus the starting letters of "excellence") to manufacture an improved version of the Magnetophone.

Bing Crosby hired Mullin and his German machine to start recording his Philco show in August 1947 with the same 50 reels of German magnetic tape that Mullin had found in Frankfort. The crucial advantage was editing. As Bing wrote in his autobiography, "By using tape, I could do a thirty-five or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing."

Mullin's 1976 memoir of these early days of experimental recording agrees with Bing's account: "In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it - thought it was very funny - but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehersal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad-lib way of working is commonplace in the recording studios today, but it was all new to us."

Crosby also invested in Ampex to produce more machines. In 1948, the second season of Philco shows was taped with the new Ampex Model 200 tape recorder (introduced in April) using the new Scotch 111 tape from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company. Mullin explained that new techniques were invented on the Crosby show with these machines: "One time Bob Burns, the hillbilly cominc, was on the show, and he threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which of course were not in Bill Morrow's script. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on. We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born."

Crosby had launched the tape recorder revolution in America. In his 1950 film Mr. Music, Bing Crosby can be seen singing into one of the new Ampex tape recorders that reproduced his voice better than anything else. Also quick to adopt tape recording was his friend Bob Hope, who would make the famous "Road to..." films with Bing and Dorothy Lamour.

Mullin continued to work for Crosby to develop a videotape recorder. Television production was mostly live in its early years but Crosby wanted the same ability to record that he had achieved in radio. The Fireside Theater sponsored by Proctor and Gamble was his first television production for the 1950 season. Mullin had not yet succeeded with videotape, so Crosby filmed the series of 26-minute shows at the Hal Roach Studios. The "telefilms" were sent to television stations and projected into a camera using a film chain. This would be the same method used by Desi Arnaz in 1951 for the production of the I Love Lucy sitcom and Desilu became the industry model for the independent syndication of filmed episodic series. Crosby did not remain a television producer but continued to finance the development of videotape. Mullin would demonstrate a blurry picture on December 30, 1952, but he was not able to solve the problem of high tape speed. It was the Ampex team led by Charles Ginsburg that made the first videotape recorder. Rather than speeding tape across fixed heads at 30 mph, Ginsburg used rotating heads to record at a slant on tape moving at only 15 ips. The helical scan model VR-1000 was demonstrated at the NAB show in Chicago on April 14, 1956, and was an immediate success. Ampex made $4 million in sales during the NAB convention and by 1957 most TV production was done on videotape. Ampex developed a color videotape system in 1958 and recorded the spirited debate between Khrushchev and Nixon on a demonstration model at the Moscow trade Fair September 25, 1959.

By this time, Crosby had sold his videotape interests to the 3M company and no longer played the role of tape recorder pioneer. Yet his contribution had been crucial. He had opened the door to Mullin's machine in 1948 and financed the early years of the Ampex company. The rapid spread of the tape recorder revolution was in no small measure caused by Crosby's efforts.

The decade following the end of World War II witnessed what has been called the "revolution in sound." The Decca Company introduced FFRR 78 rpm records (Full Frequency Range Recording) that had the finest frequency response (80-15,000 cps) of any recording process before magnetic tape recording. Decca's method of reducing the size of the groove and designing a delicate elliptical stylus to track on the sides of the groove would be the same innovation of the new microgroove process introduced by Columbia in 1948 on the new 33-1/3 rpm LP vinyl record. Crosby's sponsor Philco would join Columbia in selling a new $29.95 record player with jeweled stylus (not steel) tracking at only 10 grams (not 200) for these LPs.

No longer would records wear out after 75 plays. Crosby's Ampex Company would be joined by Magnecord, Webcor, Revere, and Fairchild in selling one million tape recorders to a rapidly growing consumer audio component market by 1953. The 1949 Magnecord tape recorder had stereo capability eight years before any vinyl record had it. These components soon began to feature the transistor invented by Bell Labs in 1948. Crosby's 1942 film Holiday Inn (where he first sang his most famous song) would be remade in 1954 as White Christmas, the first film to use Paramount's new VistaVision wide-screen film process with multi-channel magnetic sound.

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