re: #66 Walter L. Newton

They are specifically talking about a phone answering machine. The article is badly written. You are correct, there were wire recording machines that early on, and tape was available during he war, but I think the article writer is trying to say that Bell Labs squelched the idea of a phone answering machine (that used tape), because of the effect it could have had on people recording phone calls and causing a decline in the use of phones by people afraid that their conversations would be recorded without their knowledge.

I think that’s what was the authors point, not well laid out.

You’re probably right, but the author strongly implies that this was the invention of magnetic recording itself and that Bell’s decision suppressed the invention for years. In fact, the first magnetic tape machines (using steel tape) were marketed in Germany in 1935, as reasonable a lead time as anyone could want. The likely reason the answering machine didn’t arrive sooner was that it was just too difficult and expensive with vacuum tube or early solid state technology. This would be analogous to facsimile machines, invented in the early 1900s, but not widely available to consumers until the 80s. Before that, newspapers and government organizations with a compelling need used fax machines, but the requirement for trained operators and constant maintenance put consumer use out of the question.