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Many recall when audio tape recorders first appeared in the marketplace at the end of World War II. Fewer, perhaps, remember the fate of a short-lived but clever competitor known as the wire recorder. Its name reflected the ability of this machine to capture sound in the form of magnetic impulses on a very fine steel wire. Marketed by firms such as Wilcox-Gay, Pierce, Webcor, Air King, and others long forgotten, these recorders were based on the research and development effort of an equally obscure university laboratory in Chicago, the Armour Research Foundation. Wire recorders wowed Americans in the postwar years by capturing voice and music on something that seemed a very unlikely recording medium. The machines could do so without the scratch and hiss of the phonograph, and they could even erase the sound so that the recording wire could be used again and again. But the decline of the wire recorder was as sharp as its rise, and by the early 1950s, the device had been completely displaced by the tape recorder, a machine with similar operating principles but a different recording medium.
What, then, is the wire recorder's historical significance? Like many new technologies, Armour's wire recording project involved inventors and their inventions, the research and development process, the problems of entrepreneurial ventures, patent management, technology transfer between nations and firms, and the creation of a new industry. All these themes should be familiar to historians of technology, who are accustomed to thinking in terms of technological systems. The wire recording project, however, was unique because it involved a group of competing systems builders rather than a core of cooperative, key individuals. Armour's backers were a collection of corporate sponsors who lacked a shared vision for the new technology. This divisiveness fragmented the industry, and ultimately Armour's efforts to build its own system failed. A magnetic recording industry emerged anyway and carried on without waiting for the technologies of magnetic recording to stabilize through the dominance of particular firms or the setting of industry standards. The history of the Armour wire recorder, which examines the formative years of the industry, warns against an oversimplified interpretation of the systems-building process. This historical example may also be instructive because it does not end in...