late 1930s in America and both of them told me that even by the late ‘30s this system was basically mythical and they had never seen any components of it or even pictures. So even in ten years it had basically disappeared off the face of the earth.” Restoring the recording system At the outset of the pre-production of the American Epic documentary series there were no known photos or film footage of the full Western Electric system. Locating visual documentation became of paramount importance to the producers. Midway through the research on the film, MacMahon and McGourty were introduced to sound engineer Nicholas Bergh as a possible collaborator. After a year of getting to know each other, Bergh revealed he had spent almost a decade attempting to restore the Western Electric system. Bergh had scavenged spare parts from around the world, in places as far away as Japan and Europe, in his quest to complete the system. “All the individual items had to come from different places, often thousands of miles apart” he explained “I was able to confirm my progress by studying the few crude music studio pictures that started to show up.” However, Bergh was missing a vital part of the set up – the pulley driven Scully lathe. On an exploratory trip to the Scully family, looking for photographs, MacMahon and McGourty discovered perhaps the only surviving 1924 Scully lathe in the family's basement and persuaded them to loan it to the production. MacMahon then set about persuading Bergh to engineer a session with contemporary artists recording on the system. Bergh was nervous about doing this as “moving that [the recording system] into a production environment, that was a major change.” MacMahon persuaded Bergh to participate in a test session with two new artists so as to limit the pressure. Frank Fairfield and The Americans were the first musicians to record on the system in over 80 years. “The results were satisfactory” MacMahon explained “but Nick wanted to operate the machine more effectively”. Producer and co-writer Allison McGourty gained access to the AT&T archive which kept the research documents for Western Electric. Within the archive they located engineers’ casebooks and accounting forms that gave some more clues as to how to operate the machine. They also managed to locate 1920s photographs of the recording system being used in the Western Electric laboratory. Armed with this new