didacted from: [URL=”https://physics.byu.edu/department/news/26″]https://physics.byu.edu/department/news/26[/URL]

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Harvey Fletcher was, indeed, a real pioneer in sound technology. I remember seeing a little mini-doc on him (probably from Disney, who also worked somewhat closely with Bell Labs at times)… it was the artificial larynx that stuck in my mind, in part because I ran into a couple folks back then who were able to use the things to speak again. (Not mellifluously, but comprehendibly.)

I first heard stereo circa 1959* (that was from an Ampex-branded tape copy of Arthur Lyman’s exotica classic, Taboo.) My mom’s friend’s husband, a ‘hi fi nut’ as they were called at the time, had put together a jury-rigged stereo by combining his den and garage component hi fis, feeding it from an Ampex stereo deck. He had a new amp on order. [size=1]*Fantasia wasn’t presented in stereo where I saw it the first time as a little kid. But it made a big impression on me anyhow. Dinosaurs![/size]

Around then, or maybe the next year (I was 8-9), I also got to see an AT&T produced live demonstration of stereo recording and repro in the AT&T pavilion at Disneyland. (This was the [i]real[/i] AT&T, not the company so-branded today, which is, in actuality, the old Southwestern Bell (SBC), who bought up a bunch of baby Bells, as well as rights to use the AT&T badge (after the original company was broken up in a 1980s antitrust case.)

[There were also a number of ‘live simulcast’ TV-radio broadcast presentations that demonstrated stereo. The first one I remember required an FM radio, an AM radio and a TV. As I recall, they kept the TV sound mono and then split the stereo mix to the radio channels. Obviously, not ideal, since the conventional AM broadcasts didn’t have much frequency content above 6-8 kHz, as I recall. After FM stereo became more common, and 70s TV picked up on rock/pop live concert shows, a more sensible TV-mono with full-stereo-mix on FM stereo had its heyday.]

It wasn’t long after that that one of my relatives (who had a thing for those 60s bachelor gift catalogs, though he was a middle-aged family- and businessman — bought an FM Stereo table set, the first commercial stereo product I ever saw. The ‘base’ had the knobs and one channel speaker; the satellite unit had the other speaker in a smaller box. It got around one of the biggest complaints about stereo in those days — the need to have wires connecting it all — by using the house’s internal power wiring as a signal carrier. They were sending analog signal, filtered up above the 60 Hz frequency in use in American AC power. As I recall, it was only good if both units were on the same panel circuit. I browbeat my folks to use our cache of Bluechip Trading Stamps (if you have to ask, you’re too young to possibly care) to get an RCA portable stereo — which I was pretty much immediately disappointed in, in part because the speakers were built into the case on either side of the flip down TT, about 14″ apart. My train and jet fly by records were super unimpressive over it. My disappointment, though, drove me to assemble my own ‘component’ stereo within a year or two, 1963. (I remember playing my friend’s family’s new imitation-Beatles 99 cent knockoff record over bare speakers sitting on my bedroom floor.) The twig was bent.