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This article is from the 8-track Tapes FAQ, by Malcolm Riviera malco@interpath.com with numerous contributions by others.

2. Who invented the 8-track tape?

[8TM - David Morton] The 8-track tape has roots that extend into the

motion picture industry. Endless loop motion pictures were made from

the 1920s on for advertising or other special purposes. With the

appearance of inexpensive reel-to-reel tape recorders in the late

1940s, several inventors adapted the endless loop motion picture idea

for use with the new German-style plastic recording tapes. Of these

inventors, only one, William Powell Lear, gets much attention



Long before he set down to work on the famous Lear Jet, Lear had made a

name for himself developing instruments and communications equipment for

airplanes. In 1946 Lear Purchased a California company that had tried

to market a steel-tape loop recorder based on the old Western

Electric/AT&T Technology [from their 1933 "Hear Your Own Voice" endless

loop recorders]. Bits of this technology made its way into his own

design for several models of wire recorders announced in 1946, including

an endless loop wire recorder. But Lear's early experiments did not

result in a line of investigation that led directly to the 8-track.

Instead, Lear dropped the project and subsequently was out of the loop

for many years while he concentrated his efforts on aircraft.



In the mean time, the focus of endless loop technology shifted from wire

to tape and from Lear's Chicago headquarters to Toledo, Ohio. There,

Bernard Cousino, the owner of an Audio Visual equipment and service

company, became interested in endless sound recordings. He won a small

contract to build a "point of sale" device -- that is, a store display

that played a recorded message over and over endlessly.



Cousino, aware of the widespread use of short motion picture film loops

for similar purposes, began experimenting with an 8-millimeter endless

loop film cartridge marketed by Television Associates, Inc. of New

Hampshire. Cousino soon developed a cartridge specifically adapted for

audio tape that he marketed in 1952 through his company, Cousino

Electronics, as the "audio vendor." The little cart could be used with

an ordinary reel-to-reel player -- the cart fit over one reel spindle

and the exposed loop of tape was fed through the heads. Later, Cousino

would develop the Echomatic, a more advanced two-track cartridge which,

like the later 8-track, required a special player. In the meantime,

another inventor named George Eash designed and patented a similar

cartridge that came to be known as the Fidelipac. Following Cousino's

pattern, Eash designed and patented a cartridge with similar

specifications, later modifying it to include a more complex reel

braking mechanism.



Eash's cartridge was the basis of dozens of commercial applications of

the endless loop, two of which were particularly successful. Eash's

Fidelipac design became the basis of several new recorders adapted for

radio station use; by the early 1960s, many radio stations had put some

or all of their music, spot announcements, and station i.d.'s on carts

that could be quickly inserted and played and which could be

automatically stopped at the beginning of the recording.



The second main commercial application was in the field of auto sound.

Earl "Madman" Muntz was a former used car salesman who became something

of a local celebrity on the West Coast by opening a chain of television

retail outlets selling TV sets that were manufactured by his other firm, Muntz

Television, Inc. When he discovered the Fidelipac in the early 1960's,

he threw in his lot with the endless loop, never to return to the

television business.



Muntz had inexpensive Fidelipac players custom manufactured in Japan,

and licensed the music of several record companies for duplication on

carts. Even though the players were intended to be installed in cars,

Muntz sought to enhance the appeal of his product by adopting stereo

tape standards established by recorder manufacturers a few years

earlier, and his players used the new, mass produced stereo tape heads

being made for the home recorder industry by firms like Michigan

Magnetics and Nortronics. These heads but two stereo programs, a total

of four recorded tracks, on a standard 1/4 inch tape.



Muntz players caught on quickly, starting an autosound fad in

California which slowly spread east. By 1963 Muntz players were to be

found stylishly adorning the underdash regions of Frank Sinatra's

Riviera, Peter Lawford's Ghia, James Garner's Jaguar, Red Skelton's

Rolls Royce, and Lawrence Welk's Dodge convertible. During 1964 and

1965 a number of major labels began issuing new releases and old

favorites on 4-track, and the Fidelipac looked like it was going to be

the next big thing in consumer audio. A number of home players even

appeared.



Suddenly Bill Lear appeared on the scene, newly world famous for his

Lear Jet business plane, and announced in 1965 that he had developed a

cartridge with eight tracks that promised to lower the price of recorded

tapes without any sacrifice in music quality. Lear's enthusiasm for

loops had not faded after the failure of his endless wire cartridge of

the late 1940s. In 1963, he became a distributor for Muntz Stereo Pak,

mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Lear Jets.

Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted one of the leading

suppliers of original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company of

Michigan. He specified a head with much thinner "pole-pieces" and a new

spacing that would allow two tracks (or one stereo program) to be picked

off a quarter-inch tape that held a total of 8-tracks. Although a

departure from the Muntz player, the technology of the closely-stacked

multi-track head was by the early 1960s well established in fields like

data recording. Lear in 1963 developed a new version of the Fidelipac

cartridge with somewhat fewer parts and an integral pressure roller.

During 1964, Lear's aircraft company constructed 100 players for

distribution to executives at the auto companies and RCA.



Just how Bill Lear got his products from the drawing board to the

dashboards of Ford Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear.

Certainly Lear carried with him the cachet of his successful business

jet project, and had many personal contacts in industry. And in a

roundabout kind of way, he already had ties to Ford. In the 1930s Lear

and his partner Paul Galvin had together built Motorola into a leading

manufacturer of car radios, and Motorola was now affiliated with Ford.



Whatever the details of Lear's selling job, the keys to its spectacular

success seems to have been the backing of both Ford and the recording

industry. After getting RCA Victor to commit to the mass production of

its catalog on Lear Jet 8-tracks, Ford agreed to offer the players as

optional equipment on 1966 models. The response, in one Ford

spokesman's word, "was more than anyone expected." 65,000 of the

players were installed that year alone. The machines were initially

manufactured by Ford's electronics supplier: the firm that had

pioneered the mass produced auto radio or "motor victrola" -- Motorola.



Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting moments

of glory. Bernard Cousino, arguably the source of much cart technology,

has rendered a seemingly endless succession of endless loop

technologies. He had a measure of success with his Echomatic cartridge

in the 1960s as a "point of sale" or educational audio-visual

technology, largely by adopting Eash's strategy of licensing his designs to

other firms. In 1965 the success of the Echomatic spurred the Champion

Spark Plug company (a subsidiary of Ford) to purchase a controlling

interest in the firm. At Champion's insistence, Cousino Electronics

became a manufacturer of Lear-style players and was a major supplier for

Sears Roebuck. Looking for greener fields, Cousino had in the early

1960s also linked up with Alabama entrepreneur and firebrand John

Herbert Orr, whose Orradio Industries tape manufacturing firm (makers of

Irish Brand tape) had recently been acquired by Ampex. Orr and Cousino

cooked up Orrtronics, a company that made a background music system

based on the old Echomatic cartridge. While Ford debated the adoption of the

Lear Cartridge in 1965, Champion Spark Plug funded the development at

Orrtronics of a competing system. This was the ill-fated Orrtronics

8-track, a remarkably better sounding but commercially unsuccessful

response to Lear's cart. The Orrtronic cartridge had a somewhat

different tape path that reduced strain on the tape and allowed better

head-to-tape contact, and was somewhat more compact to boot.

Nonetheless, no record companies seemed interested, and the idea was

stillborn. Cousino continued to patent endless loop devices, such as a

miniature cartridge and, now in his 90s, he has recently submitted a

patent for an endless loop videocassette.



Endless variations on the endless loop cart appeared during the 1960s

and 1970s; a.c.8-t-t readers will undoubtedly continue to discover

obscure cart formats. The best known, of course was the Playtape, a

tiny cart introduced in the fall of 1966 which later re-emerged in

slightly modified form as the basis of a Dictaphone Corp. telephone

answering machine in the 1970s. Answering machines, in fact, were a

major source of new endless loop variations from the 1960s on. The

success of the Fidelipac in radio spawned a host of imitators, including

both the well known Audiopak (which by the way is still being

manufactured), the Aristocart made in Canada, the Marathon made by some

Massachusetts firm, and the Tapex.



While carts themselves continued to be manufactured in the U.S., makers

of 8-track players disappeared after only a few years. The manufacture

of 8-track players shifted almost entirely to Japan between 1965 and

1970. There were a few valiant efforts to revive the flagging American

industry, but to little avail as the foreign firms cranked players out

in huge numbers using cheap labor. Nonetheless, Quatron, Inc., a

Maryland firm, shone brightly for a few years making the now highly

desirable Model 48 automatic 8 track changer, but its star soon faded.

By the time the major record labels stopped offering new releases on

8-track, there were no domestic manufacturers of home or auto players.







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