Bing Crosby Helps Create Silicon Valley

For John, BLUF:  Progress, technology, comes from strange locations.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Back in May The New Yorker had an article that connected the dots to show that "Bing Crosby and "The Nazis"♠ Helped to Create Silicon Valley".

It is a pretty snarky article, but then it is The New Yorker.  Here is the opening sentence:

The nineteen-forties Bing Crosby hit “White Christmas” is a key part of the national emotional regression that occurs every Christmas.

"National emotional regression"?  Give me a break!  Those rituals are part of who we are.  And, they must not be such bad rituals.  The Japanese have adopted the rituals themselves.  But, on to the question of Bing Crosby, Germany in WWII and Silicon Valley.

As WWII came to an end Bing Crosby wanted to go from live radio to pre-recorded, which meant wax disks.  However, from Germany came wartime technology based on the use of magnetic tape.

His interest was more than piqued; he handed fifty thousand dollars to the men from the Ampex corporation, which at that time was just a half-dozen people.  The machines they delivered went into use in 1947, and a new Crosby show, edited by tape splicing, was broadcast—the first radio show to use the new technology. Suddenly audio—recorded media—was flexible.  It could be cut and pasted, rearranged, and edited.

Here are the last two paragraphs:

Crosby’s career was built on technology, and he used technology to become a master of artifice:  to sing as if he were sitting next to you, even if he were in California and you were in New York.  He was an investor with a clear motive—a desire to stop recording live—but the ancillary benefits of tape, which could be rearranged with a razor blade, were useful to him as well.  It was a pattern of his life: he also invested in fast-freezing technology, and hence became chairman of the board and chief promoter of Minute Maid.  When the company went public, he rang the bell at the Stock Exchange.  “White Christmas” and orange juice and bad parenting are the memories he left, along with countless songs.

His artifice was a means to an end.  Perhaps this is apocryphal, but once while editing his show on tape he asked for a joke to get a different reaction—for a past laugh to be spliced in.  Thus, in addition to setting in motion the technologies that brought about the information revolution, he also indirectly created the laugh track.

The beauty of the economic system we have is the ability of individuals to make choices, sometimes for reasons of narrow self-interest, and thus advance technology, which advances not only new jobs, but also advances our enjoyment of life here.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Does use of the term "Nazis" suggest that magnetic tape is either (1) evil or (2) directly connected to the Germans killing 12 million people, 6 million of them Jews, either in death camps or by mass executions where they lived.  I still use the term, but at one point does its use become obscuring, rather than informing?