The Recordophone, a magnetic wire recorder

The sound machine of the month The Recordophone, a magnetic wire recorder This month the Swiss National Sound Archives present the Recordophone, a device capable of reproducing sounds recorded on magnetized steel wire. As early as 1888, just a few years after Edison’s invention of the phonograph, the American Oberlin Smith devised a process for recording sounds by magnetizing a metal wire, but no device of this technology has come to us. In 1896, the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen built the Telegraphone, a sound recorder on magnetized steel wire: in essence, the forerunner of the magnetic tape recorder. The machine offered modest recording quality and was therefore preferably used for spoken word recordings (such as theatre, lectures). It was perfected from the 1920s onwards in Germany and then in the USA, in particular by the Webster-Chicago factory, enabling better listening quality. The recordophone was to be found in the bourgeois living rooms of the time, usually embedded in an