 for video, therefore, was fairly narrow. Work on the videograph began almost immediately and a powerful cast of characters was assembled. There was one unlikely member of this cast who served as a catalyst: Bing Crosby. Keenly interested in broad- cast technologies, Crosby wanted to be able to record his weekly shows Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Premises Technologies Chapter 5 for later transmission. The Bing Crosby Laboratories played a key role in the development and testing of video technology. The Sarnoff Institute called upon the capabilities of several companies to reach its goal of creating what Sarnoff dubbed the "Hear-See machine." One of them was Ampex, developer of the first commercial audiotape recorder. The Sarnoffteam believed that audiotape technology could be applied to video recording. To a certain extent, they were correct. Marvin Camras, a Sarnoff team member and scientist who developed the ability to record audio signals on steel wire used during WWII, soon discovered that the video signal was dramatically broader than the relatively narrow spectrum of the audio signal. Early audiotape machines typically moved the tape along at a stately 15 inches per second (ips). To meet the bandwidth require- ments of the video signal, the tape had to be accelerated to somewhere between 300 and 400 ips-roughly 25 miles per hour. To put this into perspective, a tape that would accommodate an hour's worth of audio in those days would hold one minute of video-which did not take into account the length of the leader that had to be in place to allow the recorder to reach its ridiculously high tape transport speed. To hold 15 minutes of video, a reel of quarter-inch tape would have had to be three feet in diameter-not exactly portable. Put another way, a one-hour show would require 25 miles of tape! To get around this pro