Ampex VRX-1000 (1956)
Fifty thousand dollars, a rotating head drum, and the machine that ended live television.
Overview
The price is the number that stops a modern reader: $50,000 in 1956, an enormous sum in the mid-1950s, and that bought a single machine. What it bought was the first commercial videotape recorder - a machine that could capture television pictures and sound and play them back. Before it existed, television was live. Film was the only way to delay a broadcast, and film was slow, expensive, and looked nothing like the electronic image going out over the air.
The idea did not come out of nowhere. According to manufacturer documents, it traces back to Bing Crosby's audio engineer Jack Mullin, who brought the first German tape recorders to America after World War II. In 1946 Crosby fronted Ampex the capital to begin building audio tape recorders. Four years later, with the advent of television, Mullin talked to Crosby about recording TV programs on tape. Ampex formally began its VTR project in 1952 under Charles Ginsburg. His team included Charles Anderson, Alex Maxey, Fred Pfost, Shelby Henderson, and a nineteen-year-old kid named Ray Dolby. Ginsburg rejected the fixed-head approach in favor of rotary tape heads - a concept proposed by engineer and inventor Marvin Camras. That choice is why tape could run slowly past a spinning head drum instead of screaming past a stationary one.
The rotating-head geometry is the whole trick. Mix (November 1985, p.48) describes the final configuration as multiple heads mounted on a rotating drum, spun at 14,400 rpm past wide, slow-moving tape. Heads and tape met at a velocity that would destroy ordinary tape in short order, which is why video tape had to be a different animal from audio tape.
The first production unit went to CBS for tape-delay broadcasts of news programs in November 1956. The first use of the VRX-1000, per Audio (September 1984, p.39), was for "Douglas Edwards and the News" that same month. The days of live broadcasts were numbered. A machine that cost a fortune and filled a room made the kinescope obsolete.
There is a small historical fight here. Manufacturer documents contain a letter from a reader, Robert Rosenow of Great Empire Productions, taking issue with the claim that the Ampex was the first practical videotape recorder. Rosenow recalled that Bing Crosby Enterprises had produced a fixed-head wide-band magnetic recorder that successfully recorded and played back television pictures and sound. It was limited mainly by how long a roll of tape would last when hauled at high velocity past fixed heads, something the Ampex machine avoided in part via its rotating quad head. He argued the Crosby machine predated the Ampex unveiling by several years and deserved the "first" prize. Either way, the VRX-1000 was the first *commercial* success, not necessarily the first working experiment.
The VRX-1000 videotape recorder on display at the Ampex museum is the first VTR made by Ampex, delivered to CBS in Hollywood. CBS returned the machine to Ampex in 1978 after twenty years of continuous service. Twenty years on a first-generation electromechanical video recorder is a startling figure, and the broadcasters who owned these machines treated them as capital equipment to be kept alive rather than replaced.
As for what the VRX-1000 means today, it is the rare piece of vintage gear whose significance dwarfs its usability. It is a museum piece in the most literal sense — one of the surviving units sits in a sponsored museum collection, and the machine's place in the story of magnetic recording is secure regardless of whether any individual example still spins. Collectors of Ampex video equipment will tell you the quadruplex machines are a different pursuit from the audio recorders: the tape is scarce, the electronics are lethal if you don't know what you're doing, and the reward is historical rather than musical. But for anyone who cares about how recorded sound and pictures got where they are, the VRX-1000 is one of the load-bearing artifacts of the twentieth century.
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