tape

The Onion: Study: U.S. Wastes 2 Million Hours Annually Figuring Out Where Tape Roll Starts

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BLOOMINGTON, IN—A new study published Friday by researchers at Indiana University revealed that U.S. citizens waste approximately 2 million hours annually trying to figure out where a roll of tape starts. “According to our data, thousands of hours are squandered each day by Americans running their fingers along the outside of a roll of tape until they stumble upon the frayed edge where the tape begins,” said the study’s co-author Bethany Cohen, who noted that the amount of time Americans fritter away bringing the roll of tape up close to their face and slowly tracing their fingertips around its perimeter accounts for nearly $15 billion annually in lost productivity.

Study: U.S. Wastes 2 Million Hours Annually Figuring Out Where Tape Roll Starts – News in Brief, The Onion (29 June 2015)

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Weekend read – especially for old radio hands

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My heart punched forward a beat at the sight of simply the name. Nagra. I started in BBC Radio and wore a groove into my shoulder carrying a portable Nagra tape recorder around. And I remember being shown the continuity suite in BBC Radio 4 where Nagras were used to play in clips because they were so quiet and moreover they started instantly. No lurching up to speed, just on, bang, go.

I am choked with nostalgia for this stuff and yet I never knew any of its history. Until now:

Stefan Kudelski didn’t set out to make a sound recorder. He was interested in robotics, and in the 1950s, one of the ways to create robotic memory was to use magnetic tape. As a student, working with that tape, he built a machine that doubled as a recorder. Nobody was interested in the robotics aspect of the project, he said later: “But people were very excited about the recorder that I created. So, I became a manufacturer of recorders. That’s how it started.”

This first recorder, the Nagra, was, in Kudelski’s words, “just a gadget.” The second was “very serious equipment.” But the third one, built in 1961, when Kudelski was 27, was “a good machine.”

The Sound Recorder That Changed Film – Sarah Laskownov, The Atlantic (28 November 2014)

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