Anyone familiar with the IT industry is surely aware of the hundreds of “industry standards” that have come and gone over the years: USB, FireWire, PictBridge, 802.11g, Bluetooth, Ethernet, PCI, ISA, RS-232… the list goes on and on. Most of these standards are (were) well thought-out systems created by engineers working with designers and marketing departments. But that’s not always the case. Industry standards are sometimes determined by available components or corporate warfare… or even one man’s random decision! And you can find all three of those reasons in the chequered history of the phonograph record.
As you probably know, the first commercially viable recording and playback system was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. The system used a needle to cut grooves into a spinning wax cylinder. The only problem with the system was the the cylinder was turned by a hand crank. This meant that you could record something at 30 cranks per second (cps), while your neighbor might record something at 50cps, while the guy down the street might use 60cps. It wasn’t long before Edison’s engineers were asking him to create a “cranks per second” standard so that any recording would play back correctly on any machine. Edison found a machine and played with it for a while before setting on 80cps… “because it sounded right”. No scientific testing, no focus groups, no careful study of the results… just Edison playing around with the machine for 15 minutes.
But the future of phonographs lay in discs, not in cylinders. A man named Emile Berliner invented the disc record the following year, and he too faced the problem of what standard to use. To be as compatible with Edison’s system as possible, he decided to aim for the same “5 minutes of sound at 80cps” standard that Edison had settled on. But an ugly problem surfaced when it came time to manufacture an electrically-powered version of the turntables in 1925: the company had the option of using either 3600 RPM motors and 46:1 gears (which were cheap and available in quantity, but produced 78.26rpm instead of the standard 80rpm), or they could use custom-made motors and gears (which were expensive as all get-out but produced a true 80rpm). As you might have guessed, the company took the easy way out: the new standard was 78rpm, where it would stay for nearly 30 years.
Within a couple of years though, an even newer standard would be created. This standard combined improved recording capabilities with thinner grooves on slightly larger discs that were played back at 33.3rpm instead of 78rpm. Aside from improved fidelity, the system offered much lengthier playback times: around 30 minutes per side compared to 5 minutes per side with 78rpm records. But instead of rolling out the new system to the world, engineers kept it under wraps for a couple of decades. This is because of another invention that was really cutting in to record sales: radio. After all, why buy music when you can hear it for free? The powers that be in the record industry decided that keeping an outdated standard made more business sense than alienating customers by making them convert their collections to 33.3rpm. This became especially true after 1931, when RCA tried to release a hacked-together 33.3rpm system that was cheaply made and didn’t work well. It was a complete disaster that not only made RCA look bad, but made 33.3rpm look bad too.
Columbia Records released a new version of the 33.3rpm system in 1948. This system was technologically much more reliable than RCA’s 1933 system, and this time Columbia had two tricks up their sleeve: first of all, they offered to license their technology free of charge to any company that wanted to use it. Secondly, the advertising campaign for the new system was aimed at classical music fans, who could now listen to an entire movement of a symphony without having to flip the disc over every five minutes. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony could now come on just 2 LP discs instead of the 15 discs the 78rpm versions shipped on. This system, at last, was a success. 33.3rpm records started appearing in record stores all over the country and reviews gushed over how great the new records sounded.
RCA wasn’t having any of this, though. Their feelings were still hurt over their 1931 disaster, so they decided to adopt another standard – this time it was 45rpm records. 45rpm records weren’t nearly as revolutionary as 33.3rpm records, in fact, they were simply an “upgrade” to the existing 78rpm standard. The new 45s contained the same amount of music as 78s (around 5 minutes), yet offered somewhat improved fidelity and the marginal benefit of being slightly more portable (7″ across instead of 10″ across). RCA’s marketing department unleashed a slew of ads that claimed that 45rpm was the “optimum speed” for sound reproduction. In reality, RCA simply told their engineers to create a system that rotated the discs at any speed they liked, so long as it wasn’t compatible with Columbia’s 33.3rpm system. And to really drive the incompatibility point home, the engineers designed the spindle hole in the 45rpm records to be the size of a half dollar – as opposed to a hole the approximate diameter of a pencil, like the hole on 78rpm and 33.3rpm discs.
Let’s pause and reflect, shall we? The year is 1948. You own a fair amount of records, all of which play at 78rpm. There’s one new system out there that plays half-hour long discs at 33.3rpm, and another new system that plays five-minute long discs at 45rpm. Oh, and there are still tons of records being made at 78rpm. What do you do? You probably just stop buying records altogether – and that’s what America did. From 1948 to 1950, record sales dropped a whopping 25 percent as the record-buying public waited for RCA and Columbia to duke it out for supremacy.
Unfortunately, neither side won. RCA was the first to blink; in 1950 they began offering 33.3rpm discs in Columbia’s format. But rather than dump the 45, they started a huge advertising campaign touting the 7″ (45rpm) record as the “preferred speed” for popular music. For some reason America bought that argument, and 33rpm records became the standard for classical and jazz music and 45rpm records became the standard for popular music. 45s became so popular, in fact, that Columbia began offering them in 1951.
So that’s how the record industry came to be. Even today, 45rpm and 33.3rpm records are still being produced, albeit in tiny quantities. And the story of how these things came to be is an interesting look at how invention and industry works.
BONUS TRIVIA: The compact disc was developed jointly by Philips and Sony. According to legend, the capacity of compact discs was decided on by Sony vice-president Norio Ohgathe, who thought that Beethoven’s 74 minute Ninth Symphony should be able to fit on a single disc. The truth to this long-standing geek legend is slightly more involved: although Sony and Philips were working as a team, groups from each company came up with two different circumferences for the discs. Philips was pushing for 11.5cm discs (which held around an hour’s worth of music) and had even built a huge test factory in Hanover, Germany for making such discs. Sony realized that allowing Philips to go ahead with the 11.5cm standard would give them a huge competitive advantage (Philips owned Polygram, at that time one of the world’s largest record companies). Ohgathe then came up with the idea of the “Beethoven’s Ninth fitting onto a single disc” story in order to push Philips into accepting Sony’s 12cm discs… thus rendering their factory – and the advantage it provided – useless. The ploy worked.