History of the recorder

What kind of ingenious devices people have not invented for thousands of years in order to lure and fish! Sachki, nets, fishing rods, spoon-baits. .. On the campsite of people who lived 3-4 thousand years BC, fish are found, made of soft rock - slate, limestone, marble. They served as a bait for ice fishing with a harpoon. In Cuba, you can see a colorful spectacle - fishing with a kite. One fisherman takes the string off the snake, the other winds the fishing line off the coil. The colorful serpent leaves ever higher into the sky and further into the sea, until the fish catch. Then it remains to pull the fish out of the line, and pull the snake back to the shore. The Papuans of New Guinea still use the method of catching fish, which Miklouho-Maclay admired. They fish with their toes, which they have very developed. There is such an angler on one leg in a shallow place, and the other foot catches fish and puts it in a basket. And the most modern is, probably, the way of catching fish with the help of. .. a tape recorder. It is used in Australia. The microphone is lowered into the water and the recording of sounds issued by the feeding hamsa is transmitted. Of course, tuna and other predators do not mind eating fish and rush to the bowl - this is the name of the device. It remains only to organize fishing for hungry predators.

Gramophone. The end of XIX century. Recorder.

Fishing is just one of the many "professions" of a tape recorder. With its help, recorded on the film alarming voices of birds drive away birds from airfields and fields, the lion's roar scares away predators from farms in Africa, hunters in Europe use tape recorders to entice rabbits from burrows, fox hunting. But all these "professions" are rather curious. The main thing is another: today the tape recorder is the most popular sound reproducing device. Mono, stereo, video tape recorders - stationary and portable, cheap and expensive - fell in love with everyone. They are constantly improving - cassettes sound longer, the tracks get bigger, the sound quality improves.

Reproducing device.

Very many home things, to which we quickly get used to and believe in novelties of our century, were actually invented quite a long time ago. Sometimes it's hard to believe. For example, do you know that a tape recorder is more than a hundred years old? In 1888, the American magazine "The World of Electricity" published an article by the engineer O. Smith, which set out the principle of magnetic recording of sound. But the author of the article never tried to do it in practice.

It has been exactly 10 years, and the Danish physicist W. Paulsen demonstrated to his colleagues the device, which he called the "telegraph".This was the "grandfather" of the modern tape recorder - for the first time the sound was recorded not on a wax roller, but on a thin magnetized steel wire wrapped in one layer on a rotating drum. In 1900 the World Exhibition took place in Paris. The telegraph was also shown on it. The inventor invited visitors to talk on the phone, and then listen to the whole conversation. A year later Paulsen built a new version of his telegraph, in which the record was conducted on a thin steel tape. The tape was unwound from one reel, passed by a recording and reproducing head and was wound on another reel.

But, alas, these devices had annoying drawbacks: the wire was often torn, tangled, and the rest of the tape, moving at a speed of several meters per second, with the break was untwisted so that it could even hurt. And most importantly - the telegraph produced a very quiet sound, and it could only be heard through the headphones. The big possibilities of the device were only guessed. In the textbook of electrical engineering, released in Berlin in the 1920s, it says: "This interesting device can not yet be considered practical, but its precise and surprisingly clear sound reproduction makes it possible to expect that the telegraph will not remain a mere curiosity."

Telegraph has ceased to be funny, when they invented the amplifier and learned how to adjust the volume of the sound. This device has already got today's name - a tape recorder.

In 1925 in our country was patented flexible tape made of plastic, covered with magnetic powder. But this invention went unnoticed, and the magnetic tape was first released in 1932 in Germany. The current cellulose acetate tape coated with a mixture of iron oxide powder and nitrolac powder has many advantages over its metal precursors. First, it allowed to reduce the speed of motion up to several centimeters per second. Secondly, you can glue together individual pieces of records and mount them like movies. Finally, one tape can record information from various sources.

In our country, work on magnetic recording of sound began in 1930, and after three years in the Central Dispatch Center of Mosenergo appeared an apparatus for automatic recording of telephone conversations of the dispatcher in the event of an accident. Recording was conducted on steel wire, and the first in our country tape tape recorders appeared in 1940.But household devices began to be produced only after the war.

Currently, magnetic sound recording is widely used on radio, television, in the cinema, and also in computers. For a long time the stereophonic tape recorders, and rather recently - and video tape recorders have ceased to be considered a novelty.

Along with the wide distribution of cassette tape recorders, a new hobby has arisen - the collection of sounds. Sometimes newspapers and magazines even publish tips for collectors of records. One magazine, for example, advises you to tape the cock crowing from the famous tower clock on the Old Town Square in Prague, the sound of a "singing" fountain in the garden of the Royal Palace in the Prague Kremlin, the chime of the blacksmiths' hammering in the town hall clock in Olomouc, or the sound of the largest in the countryorgan pipe, which is located in Prague. It sounds as solid as it looks: the length of the pipe is 8 meters, and it weighs 174 kilograms! In the museum in Ceske Budejovice, you can record the sound of a glass violin, and in Harrachov - the ringing of a glass bell.

And quite an unusual tape recording among other souvenirs will be offered to tourists in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. The cassette records the shots and the roar of an indignant crowd who learned of the attempt on the head of the Catholic Church.

Do you know? How was the idea of ​​a "tape recorder" born?

Psychologists have established that if a child is allowed to listen to a "strange" crying recorded on a tape recorder, he immediately begins to cry. However, if he hears his cry, he quickly stops talking. So the idea of ​​a "tape recorder" was born.