How were old time radio shows recorded?
Today, recordings exist for literally tens of thousands of old time radio broadcasts. However, tape recording was not perfected until the late 1940s–towards the end of radio’s golden age. How then, were so many of these historic broadcasts preserved? Recordings for the first decade of commercial radio braodcassting are virtually non-existant because a technique for recording live broadcasts was not developed until the late 1920s. In the late ’20s, the radio transcription was developed. Sometimes called the electrical transcription this was nothing more than a specialized phonograph record. Early transcriptions were composed of an aluminum disc, usually ten or twelve inches in diameter. During recording, a specially designed needle embossed grooves into the soft surface. I say embossed because the needle did not actually cut the surface, rather the grooves were pressed into it. The quality, although not perfect, was quite good for such a crude technique and continued to be used until t
