![]() Nearly four years later, the flexi disc made its first (and last) appearance in Spectrum, accompanying an article entitled “ Voice signals: bit-by-bit,” written by Jon W. This flexi disc is, in effect, an audio time capsule preserving the state of speech-digitization research in the early 1970s. For example, the December 1969 issue of National Geographic was dedicated to the Apollo 11 lunar landing and contained a sonic retrospective of the space race (“ Sounds of the Space Age”) narrated by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. Recordings were not limited to musical performances. In the United States, the Eva-Tone Company of Deerfield, Ill., became the leading manufacturer of vinyl “sound sheets” (their preferred trademark) by the mid-1960s and promoted their use in “mailing pieces, financial reports, product instruction, sales training, and packaging inserts.”ĭue to their low cost, thin form factor, and pliability, flexi discs became the medium of choice for magazine publishers who wished to supplement articles with audio content. The technology had many precursors, including German “ gramophone postcards” and Soviet “ bone music”-jazz or rock recordings pressed onto discarded X-ray film to avoid government censorship. And there they would have stayed without a chance conversation and assistance from some very capable librarians and archivists.Ī slim square of vinyl, measuring 18 centimeters on a side, the record is what’s known as a flexi disc, a lightweight alternative to traditional records that became popular after World War II. Instead, they were encoded in the grooves of a phonograph record bound inside the magazine. The reason for their ongoing absence is that they never actually appeared in print. It is impossible for any other reader to locate them, even using the IEEE Xplore digital library. ![]() But unless you happen to have a perfectly preserved physical copy, you would never know they existed. These cryptic sentences-and more than a dozen like them-were contained in the October 1973 issue of IEEE Spectrum. “Few thieves are never sent to the judge.” Power and prestige-focused human spaceflight, Moon and Mars missions, and human settlement of the solar system, became NASA's enduring 'human spaceflight culture'.“The beach is dry and shallow at low tide.” Despite this, NASA leaders consistently underestimated, ignored or spun-off Earth 'applications' in the formative period of America's civilian space programme. NASA was advised from 1959 onwards that earthly concerns - and practical worldly benefits - were necessary to create broad and enduring support for space explorations. NASA consistently misread the importance of the most popular science-based political movement of the late twentieth century. This is clear when examining NASA's relations with earthly applications in the late 1950s and 1960s and with fast-emergent environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s. But the early leaders of a self-consciously elite science and technology agency rarely saw Earth as a part of 'space' or solar system exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958 to develop America's non-military space effort.
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