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h\ famous nhotograph from the *30s_t Stokowski posed in Constitution Hall, Washington. with me late Har\ey Fletcher of Bel! Labs. which transmitted a Stokowski per-fornance there via Bell System land lines from the Academy of Musie in Philadelphia.

acńmomous litigation that eventually fixed the course of ihc infant recording industry. If less prominence has heen given Bell Labs* many seminal develop-ments, it’s not because lhev’re less im-portant.

The laboratory. which has never built or marketed a commercial product, was created in 1925 out of the Engineer-ing Department of Western Electric and the r&d department of AT&T to supply ideas and technology to the local tele-phone companies, which—together with the Long Lines Division—formed the op-erations arm of the Bell System, and to Western Electric, its manufacturing arm. Ali three address Communications, eon-ceived of as a utility: consumer goods simply were not within their purview.

The progression that led to the Or-thophonic phonograph is a good ex-ampleof modus operandi in thesystenTs Laboratories. Edison probably wasnT the firsi electrical engineer to use physical analogs as an aid in exploring Circuit be-havior. bul the reverse process—using electrical models to explain acoustical behavior-was of little use until the be-havior of Circuit, elements had bcen ex-plored and assimilated. By the early Twenties, Western Electric engineers had begun to realize that if capacitance represented “springiness” in an electri-ćal Circuit, for example. the compliance of an acoustic resonance might be analyzed in terms of the capacitance in an electrical one. By conceiving a Circuit analog of the acoustic phonograph and opnmizing its electrical values for best possible response, they were able to re-translate the circuit specifics into a through-engineered acoustic phonograph—the first of its kind in what had been a cut-and-try world. The design

That Bell Labsmight haveanythingtodo with Fantasia was aII butunthinkable.

eventually was licensed at the same limę as the electrical cutting system was, in 1925, to both Victor and Columbia. The Bell System derived no other profit from it. Victor’s incarnatior was called Or-thophonic. the name by which it is best known today, while Columbia used Vivi-Tonal as its trade style. In both in-stances, the proprietary name applied equally to the ncw acoustic players and to the electrically cut dises.

Western Electric’s sortie into phonography was neither a whim nor a raid lor quick profit. Like many projects there (and. later. at Bell Labs), it began as an inquiry into a facet of electro-acoustics on behalf of telephony. And the electrical recording process that was developed concurrently with it permit-ted documentalion of telephonic experi-ments-often with musie as the signal source, sińce it demands morę of the medium than speech does for equal listen-ing verisimilitude.

A famous fallout ca me from Western Electric’s habit of sending out exper-imental wax masters for plating and pressings by others (American Pathe. in this case). Test pressings of some electrical recordings fell into the hands of Louis (later Sir Louis) Sterling of British Columbia, who promptly forced the is-sue of licensing the technique—it had been stal led by indecision at Victor Talk-ing Machinę Company, w hich had a shot at an exclusive license during 1924—and came away one of the licensees. But by the very early Thirties. the lab (now. of course. Bell Telephone Laboratories) had progressed to wideband audio trans-mission (even by today’s telephone standards) and multiple-transmission-channel experiments, including genuine stereo.

One sound source used by the lab during this period was the Philadelphia Orchestra, which conductor Leopold Stokowski had been molding into a unique virtuoso instrument. The dises that were cut from microphone pickups in the Academy of Musie slill survive, as it turns out, and from behind the bas-tions in Murray Hill a two-LP selection of dubs has been going out to phono-graphic archives m libraries and univer-sities. They make fascinating listening.

The first disc is a rather mixed bag. mostly from rehearsals and perfor-mances in December 1931. There is Ber-lioz* Roman Carniud, W'eber’s lnvitation to the Dance. Mendelssohn^ Midsummer Nights Dream Scherzo, the Prelude and “LiebestoT* from Wagner’s Tristan, iwo short excerpts from Scriabin’s Pro-methens. and a collection of fragments from the Ravel orchestration (not Stokowski^!) of Mussorgsky’s Pictnresat an E.\hibition.

This last is both the glory and the tragedy of the record. It includes some of the best sound and some of the most suc-cessful stereo—though not. unhappily. si-multaneously. and only in little (its and starts, sińce the fragments musi be pieced together from dises of varying quality and madę for varving purposes. Contemplating the splendor of that performance is like viewing the ruined pałace at Knossos: The generał layout and many linę delails can bc perceived, but not even imagination can reconstruct the w hole as it musi have been.

The second record, issued morę recently. is all Wagner, all from the Ring. and all recorded on April 29 and 30. 1932. There are the “Ride of the Val-kvries.” ^łłWotan’s Earewell.” and the “Magie Fire Musie” (from Wd/kńre. and contaimng some stereo recording). the “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried, and filling Side 2. the “Funeral Musie” and “Immolation” from Gótterddmmerung. All in all, a priceless record of a kind of music-making peculiar to the I930s.

Having labored long to reproduce the brilliantly recorded bul sometimes abominably pressed or now-damaged Victor sets of Stokowski’s Ring “Syn-theses," I know how exciting this mateN rial can be. Had all the resources of Bell Labs been at fuli tilt throughout these sessions-either Victor’s or the lab’s own—the impact would surely have been staggering. By the time the LP’s dynamie (Continued on page 113)

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