Sears Silvertone Wire Recorder - Record Player - Radio

After World War II Sears started selling a combination wire recorder, record player and AM radio (and a microphone was also included).

In the 1947 Sears Christmas Wishbook it was advertised at $184.50 less wire, so really another $4.75 for wire for a total of $189.25.

  That inflates  to $2396 in 2022 dollars !  No wonder there were time payments.

The machine and a spool of wire inflated

The wire cost inflated

 

No wonder there aren't more old time radio home recordings from that period, even Bing Crosby must have been telling the fellows at Ampex: hurry up and invent magnetic tape, wire is too expensive !

The 7500 feet of stainless wire was good for 1 hour of recording.  Doing a little figuring that's a speed of 25 inches per second !  No wonder it took 12 minutes to rewind.

Sears also sold a table top version for less, see it in this video:  

price of the tabletop version (from the video)

It's interesting to watch the unit play.  The recording/playback head moves up and down (driven by some kind of cam mechanism?) to neatly put the wire on the spool - no scramble winding.  The head is engaged during rewind, I would have thought that would result in a lot of wear.  I'm not sure why the two reels differ in size, must be some good reason.

I remember seeing the movies: Chinatown and The Two Jakes (the sequel).  Chinatown was set before World War II and The Two Jakes around the time that Sears was selling their combination audio unit.  As the literalist, one thing I remember from each movie was the hardware.  In Chinatown it was the Leica that Jake used for his surveillance work.  In The Two Jakes it was the wire recorder.

the recorder on screen in The Two Jakes

  The technical details were authentic, let's hope the rest was complete fiction.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm