Page "Magnetic tape" Paragraph 9

The practice of recording and editing audio using magnetic tape rapidly established itself as an obvious improvement over previous methods.

Many saw the potential of making the same improvements in recording television.

Television (" video ") signals are similar to audio signals.

A major difference is that video signals use more bandwidth than audio signals.

Existing audio tape recorders could not practically capture a video signal.

Many set to work on resolving this problem.

Jack Mullin ( working for Bing Crosby ) and the BBC both created crude working systems that involved moving the tape across a fixed tape head at very fast speeds.

Neither system saw much use.

It was the team at Ampex, led by Charles Ginsburg, that made the breakthrough of using a spinning recording head and normal tape speeds to achieve a very high head-to-tape speed that could record and reproduce the high bandwidth signals of video.

The Ampex system was called Quadruplex and used tape, mounted on reels like audio tape, which wrote the signal in what is now called transverse scan.