Many scholars have documented the ways that Soviet citizens used technologies like audio tape and videotape to copy and distribute western entertainment (see for example Gene Sosin, “Magnitizdat: Uncensored Songs of Dissent” in Rudolf L. Tokes, ed. Dissent in the USSR, chapter 8). A recent Reuters story documents Kazakhstan’s museum of Soviet-era tape recorders. They Read More …
Frederick Hart was an English engineer who immigrated to New York in 1884. He established a company in Poughkeepsie in the early 1900s to build steam-powered automobiles, but soon became a manufacturer of Hollerith punched-card equipment for a nearby company that, as it turns out, would be a predecessor to International Business Machines (IBM). Hart eventually became president of a new IBM munitions division in the 1940s, located in Poughkeepsie. His original company, which by 1944 was making military gun parts, was purchased by the American Type Founders Company, and later became part of Daystrom Corporation. Hart apparently formed a new firm, which manufactured something called the Recordgraph. How and why Hart got into that business is unclear. Read More …
