Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Sat, 25 May 91 0:35:28 CDT From: TELECOM Moderator Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Did Western Electric Also Produce Sound Recordings? Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 395, Message 1 of 14 Lines: 47 Most readers of telecom who know a little about the fascinating history of AT&T know that the Western Electric subsidiary was into a number of things besides strictly telephones, per se, as was the Bell Labs. It is still sort of a thrill to watch an old motion picture from the 1930-40 era and see a notation in the credits saying 'sound by Western Electric' ... when did they get out of the motion picture sound business? But of more interest to me now was Western Electric's involvement in phonograph records. It must have been very minimal and limited to the early days of sound recordings. Going through my *very old* (1948-49) phonograph records and tapes I came across "Bach on the Biggest", a recording made of the organ at the Atlantic City (NJ) Auditorium. It was a 'complimentary/radio station copy' provided to a station here for promotional purposes, and the advertising material with it said it was produced "using the latest and most modern 'sound-capture' techniques of the Western Electric Company ..." The first 33 rpm records began appearing late in 1948 as I recall. An accompanying tape was a 'modern reproduction' of a wire recording (anybody out there remember wire recorders? Of course! I knew some of you would!) made many years earlier by Western Electric apparently for promotional purposes. The wire-recording converted to 'modern magnetic tape media' (1949, har har!) was of Henry LeMare, municipal organist for the City of Atlantic City during the 1920's era. It was also recorded at the auditorium there. LeMare would have probably recorded it on some earlier type of media; then it went to wire, then tape. It is not clear to me if Western Electric did the original recording of LeMare or if they did the conversion to wire recording. The Western Electric employee who gave me these about 1958 when I was in high school had retired on pension from WECo several years earlier after almost forty years of working for them, and has been dead for thirty years, so I have no one to ask who would remember anything about it. Western Electric worked with all the major movie studios back in those days, but I didn't realize they also worked on phonograph records and wire recordings ... or did they? Are these antiques just special things they did for promotions, etc? Any ideas? PAT