Lou Judson wrote:
> This discussion is very interesting -
I agree! I'm sure glad I got all of you riled up because I didn't know
there were others on the list who were interested and did some work in
the subject of early tape. Found a few new links to documents I hadn't
seen, including some by my friend Friedrich Engel. Which reminds me
that now that I finally got a good digital camera a few weeks ago, I own
him the detailed photos of my AEG Magnetophone K-2 Serial number 0025 I
promised him a couple of months ago. I had not heard the story about
AEG approaching RCA about licensing the machine that Bob Olhsson
tells, but Friedrich and I do know that GE in Schenectady was sent a
machine around 1937 and they did a detailed report on its apparent
unsatisfactory performance. (They pronounced it good for use as an
oversized dictation machine.) Since I had found my machine here in the
U.S., we can trace its whereabouts back to at least the 50s, it is
totally complete, and it would be the right age, we had suspected the
machine I own might have been the one inspected by GE. I did a
measurement of the capstan diameter and it is 13 mm which would make it
a 1 meter/second speed machine rather than a 30 IPS machine with a 10 mm
capstan that the GE machine was supposed to be. The one thing GE forgot
to put in its report is the serial number of the machine they inspected!

I have good photocopies of the photographs and articles (in German) that
were published during the war in Rundfunk magazine. And I also have the
photocopy of the GE report that (I think) Friedrich sent me. I'd be
glad to send scans out to someone who could host them on their site.
Richard??

Now if I could just get Deitrich Schuller to send back the three
Magnetophone tapes I loaned Friedrich to dub!

Mike Biel [log in to unmask]