Now You See It, Now You Don't!

TellZall's object for December is the Cassette Tape Recorder.

Have you ever wondered how people used to play music before the invention of the compact disc? How did music artists record their music? Was their even radio before compact discs?

Musicians definitely had a means to record and sell their music to the public before compact discs, and yes, there was radio well before cds. Initially, music was recorded on phonograph records, but the sound quality was not nearly as good as on a modern-day compact disc. Phonographs and record players were also very bulky. Because of their size and because they usually needed electricity or had to be cranked by hand, phonographs and record players were not portable and did not work in cars.

By the 1940s and 1950s, people began to look for better ways to record music. They also wanted to be able to take their music with them when they traveled in the car, went for a jog, or were just somewhere that did not have an electrical outlet. The end result was the cassette tape recorder.

Cassette tape recorders were machines that recorded sounds on a cassette tape. Originally cassette tapes were also very bulky, but by the 1960s, inventors had created a tape as small as a deck of cards. The cassette tapes were strips of plastic, usually made out of polyester by the 1970s, that were coated with iron, chromium, or cobalt oxide. These chemicals made the tapes magnetic. To record sounds, a microphone would transform the sounds into an electric current. The electric current would then travel to a transducer, which was located in the cassette tape recorder. The transducer would transform the current into magnetic flux variations and would magnetize the cassette tape with corresponding sounds. Now that the cassette tape was magnetized, a person could play the tape in a tape recorder and hear the sounds.

The cassette tape recorder became very popular by the 1960s, but its origins went back to 1888, when Oberlin Smith, an American engineer, proposed recording sound on some sort of magnetized material. By 1893, Valdemar Poulsen, an engineer in Denmark, used a magnetic wire to record sounds. By the 1920s, inventors began to experiment with other ways, besides wire, to record music magnetically, and in 1947, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company had invented and was selling a paper tape covered in black oxide. The paper tape proved flimsy, and before the end of the year, the company had replaced it with a plastic tape covered in red oxide.

Between 1947 and the early 1970s, most cassette tape recorders were reel-to-reel players. Like phonographs and record players, these recorders were very bulky, but in 1964, the Philips Company created a cassette tape that was about the size of a deck of playing cards. These cassette tapes could be used in a very small cassette player-one that was less than the size of a shoebox. These newer and smaller players allowed people to play, record, or erase cassette tapes in a single and very small machine. Over the years, these cassette players became even smaller and also battery powered, which allowed people to take them with them when they exercised, walked to school, or engaged in other activities. Because of cassette tape players' small size, by the 1970s, cars also began to have tape players installed in them.

While cassette tape players were dramatically better in some ways than phonographs or record players, they still had problems. Cassette tapes were easily damaged. If a magnet ever passed near a tape, it might erase the entire cassette. Also, the sound quality was not as clear as modern-day compact discs. As a result of these problems, inventors began to search for an improved way to record music and other sounds. The end result was the compact disc, a much clearer and stronger way to record sounds.