May, 2016 Continued from page 10
— which they were able to test one month later. The new head assembly, rotating at 14,400
rpm doubled the frequency range of the recorded signals. Dolby’s involvement with the TVR project became his prime focus, and he dropped out of col- lege. This had the unfortunate result of his getting drafted into the U.S. Army. There was still a war going on in Korea. Recognizing his talent, the army put him to work as an electronics instructor in St. Louis. With Dolby in the Army, and other projects
looming as more crucial (the company still had to earn some money), work on the VTR at Ampex was temporarily put on the back burner. This made re- sources available for developing a stereophonic, wide-screen, movie sound system which came to be called Todd A-O, for producer Mike Todd, who gained notoriety by becoming one of Elizabeth Tay- lor’s parade of husbands. In the meantime, RCA demon-
strated its latest video tape technol- ogy late in 1953. Still beating a dead horse, the company exhibited tape whizzing past stationary heads at high speed. The trade press was suitably impressed by a system that ran tape 360 ips. Yet Sarnoff knew that he was not going in the right direction. The principal reason for this dead-end run was that RCA was still trying to create something that would meet the NTSC require- ments for color, especially since the company had written the original color standards for the FCC. But national acceptance of color TV was still six years off. The Ampex team had been
busy with Todd A-O, and Ginsburg kept up a lively correspondence with Private Dolby. In response to the renewed publicity for RCA’s flawed system, the Ampex video team was finally reactivated in 1954. The TVR group acquired four new team members: Shelby Hender- son, Charles Anderson, Fred Pfost, and Alex Maxey, and the team was rejoined by Dolby in early 1955. When Dolby came home he found two new developments: a new scan- ning technique with the heads ro- tating perpendicularly to the tape’s travel, and a reworked audio track that used FM instead of AM. More refinements followed, and on March 2, 1955 the new machine was demonstrated to the company’s board of directors. It still needed a lot more work, but the company re- solved to make a public demo dur- ing the 1956 NARTB (National As- sociation of Radio and Television Broadcasters — later shortened to NAB) convention in Chicago. That gave Ampex just a year to get the fi- nal system working. Dolby was splitting his time
between Stanford University and Ampex, 15 hours a week at the Uni- versity, and three days a week in Redwood City. He already held sev- eral patents that were important to Ampex, but he still had no degree and was labeled a “consultant”. In early 1956, a number of Ampex em- ployees were given a private demon- stration, and gave the system a standing, shouting and cheering ovation; several employees burst in- to tears of joy. Several “outsiders” were invit-
ed to Redwood City to see the VTR demonstration: William Lodge, en- gineering VP at CBS, and Mullin, the Hollywood engineer who had been working with rotating heads at BCE. When Mullin saw the quality of the picture, he knew his R&D ef- forts could shut down. Stockholders
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were told that there was an important new devel- opment, and the company worked with Lodge to have a demo at the CBS affiliates’ meeting during the 1956 NARTB. But they weren’t out of the woods yet; the
VTR team still had a lot of refinement to do, lots of “minor” problems to solve during the ensuing two months. Up against the April 14 demo deadline, the company had built four different versions, and the Mark IV got a gleaming, finely finished cabinet for the Chicago demo. A sister machine (Mark III) in an unattractive wooden case, stayed in Califor- nia for a simultaneous showing to the press. Dur- ing setup in Chicago, the CBS engineer, tweaking the system, complained about the high noise level, and it was decided, the day before the scheduled demo, that the problem was the tape itself. It was Friday the 13th. A call to 3M’s chief physicist re- sulted in a rushed new tape formulation that was still drying at 6:00 a.m. on demo day. It was
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Page 31
rushed to Chicago from Minneapolis/St. Paul. Demo day. The Normandy Room of the Chica-
go Hilton was bursting with more than 200 engi- neers and managers from CBS affiliates. CBS VP Lodge was at the podium giving a speech, which appeared on TV monitors all around the room. Then he stopped and said there was a new devel- opment from Ampex. The monitors replayed his speech, but Lodge was just standing there at the podium, not saying a word. The crowd was puz- zled, looking at him and then at the monitors until the curtains parted to reveal a desk-sized machine being tended by three engineers. The room erupt- ed with cheers and applause, and the future be- longed to Ampex and its $50,000 video tape recorder. Ampex took $5 million in orders that his- toric day at the NARTB. And Ray Dolby? He went on to get his engineering degree from Stanford, and then on to Cambridge for his PhD. Later, he created Dolby Laboratories which is still a major player in the entertainment industry. He died in 2013. He was 80, and a billionaire. r
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