1958 · Portable Transistor Tape Recorder · Work 835 of 1,871
A portable tape recorder standing on the cobbles of a village street in France on a film shoot in summer, a flat rectangular case of brushed silver aluminium thirty-six by thirty-eight centimetres under a translucent amber plastic lid through which two pale reels show, a narrow front strip of plain brushed aluminium turned at a slant with a small round meter and three black knobs, a headphone cable leading to a sound man seen from behind in a light shirt with headphones raising a pole with a microphone, a light brown leather bag lying open beside the case, afternoon sun from the left, long shadows.
What it was used for
The Nagra III from Stefan Kudelski's workshop near Lausanne was a portable tape recorder for film sound and reporting: 7 kg, 360 × 380 × 135 mm, run from twelve ordinary D cells, with level read on a peak meter Kudelski called the "Modulometer". The amplifiers sat as sealed transistorised modules in metal cases. 240 machines were built in 1958; in 1959 RAI ordered 100 for the Rome Olympics; the ten-thousandth was celebrated in 1967. The Science Museum describes it as "usually used for film sound recording and sound gathering" and holds one in the BBC collection.
What was new
The drive was what marked it out: a servo-controlled DC motor replaced the clockwork spring of its predecessors, and the valve amplifiers gave way to transistorised modules. The machine therefore ran without mains and without winding. Synchronisation itself came later: the first Nagra IIIs with the "Neopilot" pilot-tone system were delivered only in 1962, 4 years after the recorder appeared. It then lasted: by the Science Museum's account Neopilot remained the standard for synchronising sound and picture until time code replaced it in the late 1980s.
What the sources leave open: Dimensions, weight, Modulometer and Neopilot from the Science Museum Group, which dates the machine 1958-1969 and reports over 10,000 sold. The figures of 240 machines in 1958, 100 for RAI in 1959 and the ten-thousandth in 1967 appear only in the Local 695 sound engineers' magazine. Neither source gives a transistor count.