COWBOY CHRONICLES
Preserving Voices from the Past
Professor’s SoundScriber recordings offer audio treasures
A
udio recordings of Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College events and personalities collected before the 1940s are extremely rare. A faculty member’s purchase in 1947 would provide one of the first opportunities to preserve sounds and voices from the college. Thomas Edison developed the phonograph 70 years earlier, but adaptations for the general public had been slow to develop and recording capabilities at OAMC were extremely limited. Prior to this time, prices for most recording devices were very high, especially during the rationing of key materials during World War II, but in the years immediately following the war, new sound recording equipment would become more readily available and ensure that audio could be preserved locally. Dr. Berlin B. Chapman was the OAMC history faculty member who bought the audio recording device known as the SoundScriber to capture and record presentations, lectures, ceremonies, meetings, interviews and special events on and off campus. SoundScribers, first introduced in 1945, collected sounds from a microphone, converted them electronically and recorded the audio vibrations with a stylus pressing them into grooves on rotating soft green vinyl discs. A second stylus would be placed in these grooves to play the sounds preserved on the rotating discs. Each disc would store about 15 minutes of sound on each side. Initially intended for office dictation with limited playback potential, the grooves in the soft vinyl would develop increased distortion with use and quickly begin to lose their audio qualities.
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STORY DAVID C. PETERS | PHOTOS OSU ARCHIVES AND GARY LAWSON
