Happy 75th, vinyl

The Guardian digs back into its archive for this kind of delightful notice:

New York, 20 June
A symphony lasting 45 minutes was played on two sides of a 12-inch gramophone record at a demonstration here. The average 12-inch record plays for only eight minutes.
The record is known as the “Columbia LP (long playing) Microgroove.” It is also being made in the 10-inch size with a playing time of 27 minutes. The material from which the records are made is unbreakable.

I love this cos that’s the entirety of the original news about the birth of the vinyl record, just this casual acknowledgement that you could now fit a lot more music on a record and you couldn’t break them like you could with shellac discs. A revolution of sorts that clearly went underappreciated (at least by the Graun, apparently journalists at the demonstration were a lot more impressed). I also rather like the photo accompanying it…

…the engineer on the left looking faintly aghast at the way his boss is holding the record (“by the EDGES, you clown!”)

The rest of the article is a 1950 article on the somewhat belated introduction of the LP to Britain, which is quite amusing itself, mocking the way the American market agonised over the Columbia LP vs the RCA 45rpm single and what to do with 78s, and rather smugly proclaiming the 45rpm record “is probably doomed for serious music” and that certain forms of music, individual songs and other short items, don’t really gain anything from the LP format so the old 78s probably wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. The author was one Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who clearly did not foresee the record industry’s later propensity for repackaging and reissuing; just a couple of decades he would in fact be involved in a company devoted to just that…

Anyway, I bring this up cos it’s obviously timely and interesting—though as I’ve said elsewhere I’ve no particular love for vinyl per se—but also because I saw something on Tumblr the other day, which I now wish I’d saved cos I can’t remember where it was… anyway, it was a picture of a sign with the words “SAVE THE CULTURE” and something about vinyl… and I just thought, the culture? I just found something slightly ludicrous about that, cos the “culture” is officially only 75 years old. It has quite literally just passed that milestone. You can date the beginning of the “culture” quite precisely. Were there shellac enthusiasts in the 1950s lamenting the disappearance of 78s? Sorry, but I just find the fetishisation of vinyl irritating…