PINK TROLLEYS AND FROZEN AUDIO
------- Magnetophon
FLASH! Jack Mullin historical audio collection transferred to frozen North. Minnesota Broadcasters attach it to Pavek Museum of Wonderful Wireless near Minneapolis as an extension of that collection. The two original U.S. Muffin Magnetophons, basis for U.S. tape recorder industry, are included.
This remarkable news I first received via phone from one of Jack Mullin's close associates and the author of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society article (June, 1989) describing the Mullin equipment that was shown at the 1988 AES Convention in New York. Now it comes again, from the horse's mouth, as they used to say-no, not Mullin himself but the receptors of his choice in, er, the frozen North, 'way up there in Minneapolis. Jim Wychor, Executive Director of the Minnesota Broadcasters Association, has sent me the glossy brochure for the Pavek Museum and the news that he and his cohorts, whose address is the same as Pavek's, are aiming with this acquisition to build "The Pavek Radio, TV and Audio Museum," quoting Wychor's own words. How's that for progress, frozen or no? Not exactly national, but surely on the way, if a bit north of our central audio axis.
Joseph Pavek, a name new to me here in my own tiny state of Connecticut, is a man roughly of Mullin's generation (or maybe a bit older as I figure), who has had the same passion for collection and meticulous restoration as Mullin himself though his interest in radio, centered earlier than Mullin's in audio, came in a different way. Pavek received an amateur radio operator's license some 65 years ago, with the call letters W90EP, no doubt proudly displayed on whatever tin lizzie he drove at that time. Pavek still holds that license but it has been cryptically transformed (and thereby lies a story which I do not know) to, oddly, WOOEP, the first 0, but not the second, equipped with a slant like those in computer printouts-or, much further back, in thousands of old words in languages such as Dutch and Danish, pronounced like the French peu or beurre.
So now do we say "Double-you Eu, Oh, Eee P?," speaking on the ham air? Anyhow, that set of call letters is significant in that somehow this Pavek persuaded the State of Minnesota to make up a special car license plate with the O-slant on it. WOOEP. Now that, friends, takes persistence, patience and lots of personal heft! Obviously, the man had the umph to create and build a personal museum, be it radio, audio or whatever.
The Pavek radio brochure--that is as far as I have gotten so far--is fascinating. Its cover shows a double-page spread of a (restored) Grebe Synchro phase Seven of 1927, TRF, with seven batteries and seven tubes. My family owned a Kolster of. similar age, our first-ever radio, kept sanctimoniously in my father's inviolable literary study. We heard King George V on it. And the famed English Singers at Christmas.
Inside the Pavek is a sumptuous picture of a Murdock rotary-spark-gap transmitter of 1912,-phew, is it new and shiny! Yep, there's an electric mo tor with odd looking spikes on a wheel attached to its shaft-must be the rotary spark gap.
A gorgeous Atwater Kent radio adorns one full page, mounted with a background screen, 1920s modern-a galleon, big clouds, palm trees-which apparently was an advertising display.
This ultra-shiny number has three discrete elements, two rounded boxes each with a condenser dial (please there were no capacitors in those days) and a third round platform with three big tubes snuggled incredibly close together (heat buildup?). This was a "breadboard" model or as we would say, a kit, Model 3945 of 1923, regenerative, battery operated.
My own very first radio experience would have been close to this moment in time, and it was with an Atwater Kent, one of those plain black models with no fewer than three tuning condensers lined up in a row out front, which everybody had in those days.
We were visiting my grandfather in Wilmington, Delaware. He was a bit nouveau riche, out of shipbuilding, and had to have everything first, including the first two automobiles in that city, circa 1907. (He took his entire family around Europe in those cars, and surely hired a few more to carry spare parts and attending mechanics.) Hence the Atwater Kent, in his "gun room," a large study sheathed entirely in wood and containing mainly a Steinway grand, on which he improvised while his family crept around the house in awe, never daring to disturb the great genius. A kindly soul, even so, in a day when that sort of pretension could be gotten away with.
Alas, no audio! My brother and I spent an entire morning, our hard Bakelite (?) headphones on each of us, twirling those three separate dials in search of-anything, just something. A noise. Audio. The miracle of radio in our own ears! Not a chance. That business-like Atwater Kent did not produce a sound for us, not even static. We were terribly disappointed. Probably a dead battery. My first radio sound came later from the previously mentioned Kolster. It worked and worked well, until we traded it in for a Philco mantelpiece radio, the gothic arch type.
As far as I am concerned, all those advanced circuits, culminating in the superhet (for a while available only from RCA as finished sets, though one could buy and build superhet kits) was not the real dawn of the age of radio.
That dawn came with two more or less external factors, of immense importance for a potential mass public. The first, of course, was "plug-in" power, the use of a.c. Big, unwieldy batteries-not the little wonders of today were a perfect nuisance--you never trusted them and blamed all poor or missing reception on them as a matter of course. A.C. was unfailing and forever. People fell for it with gusto, and radio was really launched.
And second, actually earlier, was the consolidation of those multiple tuning condensers onto one knob. So simple, it seems now. But during the '20s most radios displayed two or three tuning knobs. This was impossible! To get two, or three, of them precisely tuned at two, or three, different micro-spots among the numbers was a pain, and indeed very difficult. Imagine, trying to re-find a weak station that you had lost.
As soon as ONE knob to tune every thing appeared, radio took off. 'Nuff said.
One of the big questions I raised--I use that term deliberately--in my writing on the possibilities for a national Audio Museum was the matter of restoration. As you discovered (see "Audio ETC," July and September), I was all for it, beginning in 1929 with the original Deutsches Museum in Munich in the days before the start of real restoration among collections of old musical instruments. In that musical area, even today, there is not much doubt: An inoperative ancient harpsichord is now non-working only because it is beyond repair-and many harpsichord builders would deny that any such instrument is beyond hope, if you don't mind replacing 99% of its structure. Why not 100%? Done every day, in brand-new instruments based meticulously on the old, with enormous and accumulating knowledge of harpsichord building techniques (and other instruments as well) amounting by now very nearly to the expertise of the original makers.
In audio, as in railroad restorations, trolley cars, and similar, the question is not so easily settled. I spoke too loudly, out of memory, when I mentioned the original Edison phonograph, in fact ex aggregating the unseemly dirt and dust though not my memory of the same.
We received a very friendly letter thanks be!-from Dr. Michael Biel of Morehead State University in Kentucky, concerning that unique ma chine, still resident at the East Orange Edison facility. No, it is not "musty and covered with dirt" as I remembered with a bit too much emotion. The brass merely has a patina "that it has earned in its 113 years," as Biel puts it. More over, "during the day the machine was (and is) encased under a glass cover.
At night, at closing time, it is tucked away in a vault." During the 1977 celebration, Biel says it was announced that the original machine was not use able for a re-creation ceremony hence the "spanking new exact replica." So there you have it in an Edisonian nutshell. To restore or not to re store-a special question with no final answers, to be resolved uniquely in every different case.
An Edison recording, actually, is not very practical on any machine due to the unique nature of the original pro cess, indentation of a spiral groove on tinfoil, wrapped carefully around a cylinder. In 1977, the centennial year, a number of kind souls sent me samples of this tinfoil, the real thing, as contrasted with our present ubiquitous aluminum foil. I have two samples tacked on my wall along with a piece of aluminum. A striking difference. The tin is yellower, more like polished silver, and remarkably soft, as limp as fine silk.
Aluminum is relatively tougher and much springier. Without a doubt Edi son chose this tinfoil as having the most desirable characteristics for his delicate indentation and playback.
Biel agrees with me that there is value in a hands-on "working" museum his six-year-old daughter enjoyed the present-day Deutsches Museum as recently as last summer. But he points out that there are, and must be, two aspects to the museum operation:
Those items specially prepared for the public to enjoy as directly and positively as possible, and the equally urgent and longer-range need for the archival approach, which may dictate preservation but not public participation nor fancy show.
I think immediately of the famed cave painting at Lascaux, now entirely closed to the public, the inside of the caves expensively maintained with air conditioning. That was an emergency measure, taken when the incredibly ancient wall paintings began to disintegrate merely by the presence of human beings and the variable outside atmosphere.
What was the museum at Lascaux? Astonishingly, an "exact replica," a whole new set of faked caves and re productions of the originals, only a few yards away. Also, a detailed color film regularly shown on the spot. And no doubt thousands of documentary photos were available.
There are all sorts of in-between problems in restoration, whether for public show or not. The railroad and trolley museums have endless debates as to which stage in a long lifetime a steam engine or interurban car should be reproduced. Almost all such equipment has gone through endless alterations and ownership over the practical working years. At the Maine trolley museum I was unnerved when an open trolley on which I surely rode as a child appeared not in the standard Connecticut Co. yellow but a shocking pink! Seems it might have been pink for a few early years under the Consolidated label. How about those conversion kits for the famed Dynaco audio line-to bring your stuff up to current state of the art? Would you enjoy the thought? Or are you shocked, as I was over the pink trolley? Once again, do not forget the Sistine Chapel. Furious battles still rage over the restoration of the great ceiling art there. Part of the problem is that not only were all sorts of later renovations and even changes made over the centuries but the artist himself seems to have begun with a kind of detailed sketch in place, over which he worked in much later and maybe better painting. (The work extended over a very long period.) Some of the new restoration brings forth the earlier sketches or "original versions"-rightly or wrongly? Reverting to Pavek's radio museum, now moving into audio via Jack Mullin, I think we can see Minnesota as a good advance towards the documenting of audio's history and perhaps we may it time see similar centers East, West, and South, in addition to the frozen North. And, hopefully, major inter changes between these centers and others. If a million $$$ of Van Gogh or Cezanne can be shipped around, why not a batch of ancient tape machines--priceless too?
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Dec. 1990)
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