This IS "THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR", as broadcast over NBC on February 20, 1950. The "intermission" commercial for the "Bell System" (at 11:22) notes the first instance of "direct dialing" from Cranford N.J. to New York City, which took place the previous Saturday, February 18th. By the way, the only other known {complete} copy of this program [recorded on 16 inch acetate discs] is on deposit at the New York Public Library.
Thanks for the response. Yeah, you're definitely right about the whole circumference of the wire being magnetized and it did transfer of the signal onto adjoining layers of wire which was really annoying if you wanted to get a clean recording. Unfortunately when I used to go to Radio Shack all the time and get reel to reel tapes from them, the later ones were back coated and those tapes are just about no good anymore unless I was going to bake them for one last go round through my machine before I ditch them and then transfer them to a more stable medium. My next recording that I'm going to upload here will be of a radio station in Chicago in 1969. So I hope you'll enjoy the recording. It was about a 1/2 an hour longer so but it was something that was preserved on a spool of wire. Until next time..........
The Bell Telephone Hour was what he appeared most often on in the late 40s. This is his only recording of Tu lo sai I've ever heard. He commonly opened his concerts with it, and perhaps for that reason did not sing it on the radio. Great example of his art.
The machine looks to be so pristine. Is this one of your restorations? It has really good sound quality, even with the unavoidable wow and flutter (rim drive). Were you using a microphone to capture the sound, or a patch cord? What a wonderful cultural radio program! The vocals are impressive! Pretty clear recording too, especially after all this time. I actually know most of the songs on this reel! Puccini, Gilbert & Sullivan, Tchaikovsky -- oh yea, old friends! I am thinking this was an early version of the Bell Telephone Hour. The commercial is one give away, and I think the time period would be late 1940's or early to mid '50's because of the direct dialing they were talking about. The other giveaway was the Tchaikovsky performance. Tchaikovsky was enormously popular in the 1940s and 1950's in the US. They announced Donald Vorhees. He was director and conductor of The Bell telephone Hour Orchestra for MANY years from 1942 through 1968. (My dad actually knew him.) He was very good at arranging classics to fit within the compressed time format of radio and TV programs, so he was perfect for the goals of the programs. Purists were less than thrilled, but the Bell Telephone Hour was designed not just to sell telephone usage, but it brought culture to a lot of people who would otherwise know nothing about classical music. Odd as it may seem, many people did not own a telephone in the 1940's and 50's. Pay phones were a big deal (remember Superman changing clothes in a telephone booth?) and many low rent apartment houses had a shared "common area phone". Oh, and this was back when AT&T ("Ma Bell") was a monopoly. None of this cell phone stuff. You LEASED a black Bakelite telephone -- which they installed for you-- and if you moved or gave up your account, you had to turn it in. Gadzooks, that sounds like CABLE! Color phones started showing up in the late 1950's and on into the 1960's. As I recall, early colors were beige, deep red, dark green. Also, the BTH started in radio, but soon moved to television. They even had some TV shows in color. When on TV, they mounted a special 1 hour production of Gilbert & Sullivan - "The Mikado" - starring comedian Groucho Marx as KoKo the Tailor! I have one of the original pressings of the record they made of it - which came out on Columbia records and was sold in record stores. I wonder if RUclips Content ID would catch me if I posted it? As I listen to this, I see in my mind the wonderful old B&W films from the late 30's and 40's. "Living history"! Thanks for posting this.
clydesight Hey Tim, thank you for the comment. It was very informative and you always leave the best comments. Yes it is one of the machines that I worked on and this one I actually took the motor apart which I didn't think I would ever do because of how the whole machine was put together, and I thought it would be difficult to reassemble, but I wanted to clean it so I went about doing that. I used only the microphone from my digital camera to record the sound from this machine. The one thing I love about these old recordings, especially if they're from the radio is that a lot of times a clue as to its date or era when it was recorded was given in the recording itself so you can date when the broadcast was aired. There was a little bit of wow and flutter to the recording as a lot of times you can't get these spools of wire to reproduce perfectly, but also I think this recording was made later in John Charles Thomas's career and I don't think his voice was as steady as it used to be. I know you knew what I was talking about when I was referring to the recording underneath not being erased all the way but sometimes I don't describe things clearly when I'm describing my videos. But this is only being mentioned to people that might read my response to your comment, that when old recordings are being erased and new recordings are being made on these wire recorders a lot of times the erase head won't erase the entire old recording while you're making a new one and that's why you can hear remnants of the old recording underneath the new one that was just made. This is naturally inherent in these wire recorders. At first I thought it was just the wire recorder that I had that wasn't doing a good job erasing all of the old signal, but as I described in my Description before I played the video that the wire is of course cylindrical and thus it's not possible to really erase the whole recording because the wire could turn over on itself while it's being rewound or played back and you don't get the luxury of having the entire old recording being erased. In fact as strange as it may sound if you make a recording on a brand new or freshly erased spool of wire and then when the rest of the wire is blank when you go to rewind the recording to replay it after your recording is over, you will hear echoes of the recording that you just made on the adjoining blank layers of wire as it fades out to nothing and sometimes it takes minutes for the your recording to fade out on the blank wire until you can't hear anything anymore. It's almost like the wire is so strongly magnetized that it will send your voice to the unrecorded layers of wire and leave a very faint echo of what you just recorded on those blank layers of wire. Sometimes it sounds cool and other times it can sound kind of eerie. Who knows, I might even make a short video of this happening so that people can hear the effect that the magnetized wire has on the blank layers that it touches when it's being rewound on to the spool. When you wrote about The TV version of the Gilbert and Sullivan special of the Mikado and Groucho Marx playing a character on that show, I read that he was a very big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan so I guess it was only fitting that they chose him for one of the roles of the Mikado on that program. It's really cool that you come from the era where you remember this music and you appreciate it. I'm sure I was born some years after you but I also grew up appreciating this music and after discovering it on my own really learned to love this music from the twenties thirties forties as well as the fifties. I guess you and I are part of a rare breed the has to keep this kind of music alive in one form or another. I'm always glad to receive your RUclips comments Tim, and I'm glad to have you as a friend.
I too appreciate your friendship and our many discussions of all things Tape and otherwise! I think part of what you are finding in "unerased" recordings is a type of "print through". I know very little about wire recording techniques or principles, but in TAPE, "print through" is a result of a dense "tape pack" and is notorious on C-90 and above cassettes because these machines tend to wind tight and the tape is so thin. Some commercial cassettes also suffer from it as well, often because of the tremendous speeds they use to record the cassettes. Those machines, as you know, used "pancakes" - tape so tightly wound that they were like solid disks. Basic home recorders were usually safer because they did not wind the tapes as tight as commercial reproducers did, but in the 70's when they started making high end TEAC, AKAI and Pioneer decks with multiple motors, the problem came back. They tried a bunch of solutions including "back coated" tapes (a disaster) and high ferrite formula dense tapes (Maxell and TDK). As I understand it, wire is much more susceptible to print through because the entire wire is magnetic, whereas on tape, only half the tape is magnetic, the oxide coated side. The carrier material (usually mylar) was like an insulator. You could always test the effectiveness of the backing by putting the tape in "reversed" on a machine and making a recording. If you got a clear recording, the backing was too thin. Of course, you know all this. I put it in here for other viewers to read (assuming they do read this) to help them understand what we both know only too well. The whole technology is amazing, and is still in use today (okay maybe not wire recording so much). A computer hard drive is a magnetic disc. A lot of radiop telescopes still use those big multi track telemetry recorders! I have always wondered why no one tried to make a hard drive work like a tape recorder? There have been attempts at magnetic disc recording before. I think you did a video on a GE toy that used a magnetic disc? Or did I dream that one? As I recall the machine was yellow and really noisy.
This IS "THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR", as broadcast over NBC on February 20, 1950.
The "intermission" commercial for the "Bell System" (at 11:22) notes the first instance of "direct dialing" from Cranford N.J. to New York City, which took place the previous Saturday, February 18th.
By the way, the only other known {complete} copy of this program [recorded on 16 inch acetate discs] is on deposit at the New York Public Library.
Amazing good quality for the time....very enjoyable to listen to still......to think, I'm listening to my blue tooth speaker! Thanks!
carlos l very cool. Thanks for listening Carlos. :)
BTH program. The first direct dial long distance call was made Nov 10, 1951 so this probably dates from perhaps early to mid 1952.
Thanks for the response. Yeah, you're definitely right about the whole circumference of the wire being magnetized and it did transfer of the signal onto adjoining layers of wire which was really annoying if you wanted to get a clean recording. Unfortunately when I used to go to Radio Shack all the time and get reel to reel tapes from them, the later ones were back coated and those tapes are just about no good anymore unless I was going to bake them for one last go round through my machine before I ditch them and then transfer them to a more stable medium. My next recording that I'm going to upload here will be of a radio station in Chicago in 1969. So I hope you'll enjoy the recording. It was about a 1/2 an hour longer so but it was something that was preserved on a spool of wire. Until next time..........
The Bell Telephone Hour was what he appeared most often on in the late 40s. This is his only recording of Tu lo sai I've ever heard. He commonly opened his concerts with it, and perhaps for that reason did not sing it on the radio. Great example of his art.
The machine looks to be so pristine. Is this one of your restorations? It has really good sound quality, even with the unavoidable wow and flutter (rim drive). Were you using a microphone to capture the sound, or a patch cord?
What a wonderful cultural radio program! The vocals are impressive! Pretty clear recording too, especially after all this time. I actually know most of the songs on this reel! Puccini, Gilbert & Sullivan, Tchaikovsky -- oh yea, old friends!
I am thinking this was an early version of the Bell Telephone Hour.
The commercial is one give away, and I think the time period would be late 1940's or early to mid '50's because of the direct dialing they were talking about. The other giveaway was the Tchaikovsky performance. Tchaikovsky was enormously popular in the 1940s and 1950's in the US.
They announced Donald Vorhees. He was director and conductor of The Bell telephone Hour Orchestra for MANY years from 1942 through 1968. (My dad actually knew him.) He was very good at arranging classics to fit within the compressed time format of radio and TV programs, so he was perfect for the goals of the programs. Purists were less than thrilled, but the Bell Telephone Hour was designed not just to sell telephone usage, but it brought culture to a lot of people who would otherwise know nothing about classical music.
Odd as it may seem, many people did not own a telephone in the 1940's and 50's. Pay phones were a big deal (remember Superman changing clothes in a telephone booth?) and many low rent apartment houses had a shared "common area phone".
Oh, and this was back when AT&T ("Ma Bell") was a monopoly. None of this cell phone stuff. You LEASED a black Bakelite telephone -- which they installed for you-- and if you moved or gave up your account, you had to turn it in. Gadzooks, that sounds like CABLE!
Color phones started showing up in the late 1950's and on into the 1960's. As I recall, early colors were beige, deep red, dark green.
Also, the BTH started in radio, but soon moved to television. They even had some TV shows in color.
When on TV, they mounted a special 1 hour production of Gilbert & Sullivan - "The Mikado" - starring comedian Groucho Marx as KoKo the Tailor! I have one of the original pressings of the record they made of it - which came out on Columbia records and was sold in record stores. I wonder if RUclips Content ID would catch me if I posted it?
As I listen to this, I see in my mind the wonderful old B&W films from the late 30's and 40's. "Living history"!
Thanks for posting this.
clydesight Hey Tim, thank you for the comment. It was very informative and you always leave the best comments. Yes it is one of the machines that I worked on and this one I actually took the motor apart which I didn't think I would ever do because of how the whole machine was put together, and I thought it would be difficult to reassemble, but I wanted to clean it so I went about doing that. I used only the microphone from my digital camera to record the sound from this machine. The one thing I love about these old recordings, especially if they're from the radio is that a lot of times a clue as to its date or era when it was recorded was given in the recording itself so you can date when the broadcast was aired. There was a little bit of wow and flutter to the recording as a lot of times you can't get these spools of wire to reproduce perfectly, but also I think this recording was made later in John Charles Thomas's career and I don't think his voice was as steady as it used to be. I know you knew what I was talking about when I was referring to the recording underneath not being erased all the way but sometimes I don't describe things clearly when I'm describing my videos. But this is only being mentioned to people that might read my response to your comment, that when old recordings are being erased and new recordings are being made on these wire recorders a lot of times the erase head won't erase the entire old recording while you're making a new one and that's why you can hear remnants of the old recording underneath the new one that was just made. This is naturally inherent in these wire recorders. At first I thought it was just the wire recorder that I had that wasn't doing a good job erasing all of the old signal, but as I described in my Description before I played the video that the wire is of course cylindrical and thus it's not possible to really erase the whole recording because the wire could turn over on itself while it's being rewound or played back and you don't get the luxury of having the entire old recording being erased. In fact as strange as it may sound if you make a recording on a brand new or freshly erased spool of wire and then when the rest of the wire is blank when you go to rewind the recording to replay it after your recording is over, you will hear echoes of the recording that you just made on the adjoining blank layers of wire as it fades out to nothing and sometimes it takes minutes for the your recording to fade out on the blank wire until you can't hear anything anymore. It's almost like the wire is so strongly magnetized that it will send your voice to the unrecorded layers of wire and leave a very faint echo of what you just recorded on those blank layers of wire. Sometimes it sounds cool and other times it can sound kind of eerie. Who knows, I might even make a short video of this happening so that people can hear the effect that the magnetized wire has on the blank layers that it touches when it's being rewound on to the spool. When you wrote about The TV version of the Gilbert and Sullivan special of the Mikado and Groucho Marx playing a character on that show, I read that he was a very big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan so I guess it was only fitting that they chose him for one of the roles of the Mikado on that program. It's really cool that you come from the era where you remember this music and you appreciate it. I'm sure I was born some years after you but I also grew up appreciating this music and after discovering it on my own really learned to love this music from the twenties thirties forties as well as the fifties. I guess you and I are part of a rare breed the has to keep this kind of music alive in one form or another. I'm always glad to receive your RUclips comments Tim, and I'm glad to have you as a friend.
I too appreciate your friendship and our many discussions of all things Tape and otherwise!
I think part of what you are finding in "unerased" recordings is a type of "print through". I know very little about wire recording techniques or principles, but in TAPE, "print through" is a result of a dense "tape pack" and is notorious on C-90 and above cassettes because these machines tend to wind tight and the tape is so thin. Some commercial cassettes also suffer from it as well, often because of the tremendous speeds they use to record the cassettes. Those machines, as you know, used "pancakes" - tape so tightly wound that they were like solid disks.
Basic home recorders were usually safer because they did not wind the tapes as tight as commercial reproducers did, but in the 70's when they started making high end TEAC, AKAI and Pioneer decks with multiple motors, the problem came back. They tried a bunch of solutions including "back coated" tapes (a disaster) and high ferrite formula dense tapes (Maxell and TDK).
As I understand it, wire is much more susceptible to print through because the entire wire is magnetic, whereas on tape, only half the tape is magnetic, the oxide coated side. The carrier material (usually mylar) was like an insulator. You could always test the effectiveness of the backing by putting the tape in "reversed" on a machine and making a recording. If you got a clear recording, the backing was too thin.
Of course, you know all this. I put it in here for other viewers to read (assuming they do read this) to help them understand what we both know only too well.
The whole technology is amazing, and is still in use today (okay maybe not wire recording so much). A computer hard drive is a magnetic disc. A lot of radiop telescopes still use those big multi track telemetry recorders!
I have always wondered why no one tried to make a hard drive work like a tape recorder? There have been attempts at magnetic disc recording before. I think you did a video on a GE toy that used a magnetic disc? Or did I dream that one? As I recall the machine was yellow and really noisy.
@@clydesight thx for the info
I wonder what song that choir is singing. It's from the Madam Butterfly opera, but that's all I know.