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Wire recorder spool, from early 1950's
James E. D. ClineBackground:In High School age, in 1953 my father gave me a used Webcor wire recorder, forerunner tothe tape recorder, cassette recorder, and CD. It enabled recording and re-recording of audio,by magnetizing a small diameter wire back and forth as the wire was pulled past the magneticrecording head that was energized by electric current that was a copy of the audio pressurewaves in the air as picked up by the microphone. Later, very similar recording was done onspools of tape which had iron ferrite particles embedded along it, and whose magnetic polaritywas controlled by the magnetic recording head, instead of along the wire as in a wirerecorder. Tape was a lot easier to handle than the wire of a wire recorder spool, particularlywhen it came to splicing a break and unsnarling a scrambled knotty mess of wire. The doctorwho had used the wire recorder before me, had used it to record patient's conversations withhim; he had upgraded to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, freshly available at the time. Only twoitems survived in my possession the half century since then, one is the spool of wire recorderwire shown in these photographs. (The other is the wooden case he built for it when I went tocollege, which I still use as a memento suitcase.) Perhaps it was very influential in my life,since much of my life and career in electronics involved use and/or development of taperecorders and other ferrite recording systems.Here is the top view of the spool of wire recorder wire. A scale showing inches andcentimeters is alongside for comparison. A strand of wire can be seen inside the center of thespool in this photo, so you can see how tiny the wire is. And the magnetic wire is rustproof.
 
Here is a sort of edge view showing the wire on the spool.
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