From Tinfoil To Stereo by Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch; Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., $9.95 softbound.
The valuable book, From Tinfoil To Stereo, by Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, has been reissued after having been out of print for many years.
To quote from the Forward: "Six teen years after its first appearance, the reprinting of From Tinfoil To Stereo, with but modest revisions and additions and by the original publisher besides, is something of a literary oddity, especially since, in that interval, the manuscript had been re turned to its authors, apparently with the thought that reprinting would probably never be warranted. How differently things turned out! For most of that intervening period, the book was entirely unavailable from the publisher in its original binding and dust sleeves, while the going price for used copies steadily escalated, year by year, to $60 and in one known case to $200. Libraries have found it impossible to keep copies in good condition because of intensive use, and many copies simply disappeared!" I purchased my copy from the estate of a close associate years ago. Far from a dry history of the phonograph, this remarkable book traces the seminal ideas that spawned talking motion pictures, radio, television, and in deed, the scientific foundations of the communications industry as a whole, back to the time and place where it was only a gleam in an intuitive inventor's eye.
The book is worth many times its low price of $19.95 for its discussions of Maxfield and Harrison's Theory of matched impedance, complete with Hanna's criticisms, and the influence of Webster, Lord Rayleigh, et al. As a clue-book to original source material, it is unexcelled.
The engineers responsible for making the motion picture talk were also key to the development of professional sound. There is detailed historical treatment of this period: "...The GE-RCA interest, Rockefeller backed, founded Radio-Keith-Orpheum, comprised of RCA, American Pathe, and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain, for the purposes of producing sound pictures. The Warner Brothers-E.R.P.I.-Western Electric-AT&T aggregation was a Morgan financed operation. The financial importance of those alignments may be appreciated by considering that from a state of virtual insolvency in 1925, Warner's assets had expanded to $16,000,000 by the close of 1928 and by the end of another year to $230,000,000." The industry went on to become essentially depression proof, especially for the sound system engineers. Western Electric-E.R.P.I. had income from theater installations in 1929 of $37,000,000. Out of E.R.P.I. came the Altec and JBL companies.
In this accurate, detailed book are the clues to the history of what amounted to a "space race" of its era, but between private industries rather than governments. When the 1920 and 1930 dollars are translated into to day's equivalent, the magnitude of the efforts can be fully appreciated.
The slaughter of sacred cows looks like a buffalo hunt in the unrestrained days of the 1870s. How the industry abandoned the vertical cut for the lateral and how today technology is back to the vertical is a fascinating and instructive tale that weaves as a thread through the tapestry the authors have woven.
Since those who don't know history are reputably doomed to repeat it, the lessons this exceptional book offers are painless compared to taking the Lumps of experience.
--Don Davis
(adapted from Audio magazine, Sept. 1976)
Also see: Bookshelf, The (Sept. 1979)
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