the laugh track; at the insistence of Crosby's writer Bill Morrow, he inserted a segment of raucous laughter from an earlier show to follow a joke in a later show that had not worked well. Keen to make use of the new recorders as soon as possible, Crosby invested $50,000 in a local electronics firm, Ampex, and the tiny six-man concern soon became the world leader in the development of tape recording. Ampex revolutionized the radio and recording industry with its famous Model 200 tape deck, developed directly from Mullin's modified Magnetophones. Crosby gave one of the first production models to musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. Working with Mullin, Ampex rapidly developed two-track stereo and then three-track recorders. Spurred on by Crosby's move into TV in the early 1950s, Mullin and Ampex developed a working monochrome videotape recorder by 1956 and a version to record in color later on, both created to record Crosby's TV shows. Through the rest of his life, Mullin continued to follow new ideas. He also kept an impressive collection of early recording hardware, which was donated in 1990 to the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting. Mullin died of heart failure at his Camarillo, California home. See also John Herbert Orr Richard H. Ranger Charles Douglass Laugh track BCE Electronic Division References External links 20th-century American engineers 1913 births 1999 deaths Engineers from California People from San Francisco Military personnel from California