All-Day Records

The U.S. postwar home will be thoroughly wired for sound. To the radio and phonograph, wartime inventors have promised to add wire recorders and tape recorders. Last week a new sound recorder turned up--a slow-motion phonograph that plays for hours & hours without changing records.

Its inventor is Hollywood's versatile Ulrich L. ("Doc") Di Ghilini, professional magician, exposer of spiritualistic fakes and amateur art collector (TIME, Oct. 14, 1940). After five years of experiments, in his garage and (after the neighbors complained) in a Beverly Hills furniture store, Di Ghilini developed a recording machine which embosses (presses) a sound groove in a disc instead of cutting it, which is the accepted current method. His embossing system makes it possible to run a record at much slower speed than on the usual phonograph.

Result: his Lincoln Recorder plays five and a half hours of a talking record or three hours of high-fidelity music on one side of a 16-in. disc. There are other important advantages: surface scratching is virtually eliminated, and a record can be embossed and played back on a simple home machine.

Di Ghilini has yet to prove that his records can compete in tone quality with the best recordings on wax. But he thinks that, as a home recorder or as a commercial dictograph, his machine will have no trouble competing with the wire recorder and tape recorder.

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