Mondo Knows Facts
Bing Crosby paid for America's first tape recorders
The singer invested in Ampex so his radio show could be pre-recorded Crosby disliked performing live twice for East and West coast broadcasts, so he backed John Mullin's small Ampex company to build a professional tape machine. The Model 200 arrived in 1948 and his show was routinely recorded, cutting his working week. Radio networks soon dropped discs for tape. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Commercial broadcasting began in 1920Station KDKA went on air from Pittsburgh to report election resultsLes Paul helped Ampex build an eight-track recorderSel-Sync let him overdub a new part while hearing the ones already recordedThe first recording was played back on tinfoilEdison's phonograph cut sound into a sheet wrapped round a spinning cylinderFlat discs beat cylindersEmile Berliner's gramophone made records cheap to press and stackThe Beatles recorded their first album in one dayPlease Please Me was done at Abbey Road on 11 February 1963Edison's phonograph recorded sound onto tinfoilThe first machine that could play sound back was built in 1877
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Tags: recording, crosby, broadcasting
Bing Crosby paid for America's first tape recorders: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The singer invested in Ampex so his radio show could be pre-recorded. The figure is taken from Grammy Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.