[emeritus]

As was noted in a recent thread, in the 1930's Radio Normandy used to record its English programmes on 35mm optical recorders in the UK for playback in France. I recall one of my (rather old) school physics books that must have been written in the 1940's before the LP record was invented, speculating on the possibility of film-based optical playback .

I heard on a radio programme a few years ago that in the 1940's, President Roosevelt ( I think), being tired of frequent mis-quotes in the press of what happened at briefing meetings, asked RCA if they could make him a sound recorder, which they did using an optical recorder which recorded on 16mm film. The recorder was apparently switched on at the start of a meeting, and then ran continuously until the film ran out. It thereby captured some rather frank comments made by the President after the meetings had ended, forgetting that the recorder was still running. It seems that the existence of the recordings only came to light following a chance remark by a researcher who had gone to the Library of Congress for a copy of Nixon's Watergate tapes [remember "expletive deleted" ?]. In jest he had asked the librarian for the Roosevelt tapes while he was about it, and was astonished to find that such things did in fact exist.