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Sound from the Depths of Philosophy
Winston Nelson, Alum, Faculty
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1959
School of Engineering and Applied Science 1959


I had come to Columbia in 1950 on a research fellowship in the Electrical Engineering Dept. My sponsor was Prof. Harvey Fletcher, who had recently retired as director of research at Bell Labs. He was organizing a study program in acoustics and electronic sound production in the EE Dept. and had brought from Bell Labs the stereophonic sound system used in 1933 for the first high- quality stereophonic music recording to be broadcast over telephone lines from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. The equipment from this demonstration consisted of a four-track optical film-reader machine, three banks of Western Electric pre-amps and power amplifiers and three banks of speakers with huge 5x5x5 foot folded-horn bass speakers and three 3x4 arrays of mid & high range speakers.

This impressive system was installed in the acoustics laboratory deep in the basement of the Philosophy Building. The lab bordered Amsterdam Avenue and had four deep airwells with grills on the sidewalk above.

One of my jobs was to get this 17-year old system working, while also managing the acoustics laboratory classes and assisting on several other of Professor Fletcher's projects. So, I tested all the vacuum tubes (remember vacuum tubes?) and got replacements from Western Electric, struggled to get the cranky film reader going, and replaced two if the 14" speaker diaphagms in the huge bass speakers. But, every time I tried to get it going, something else would go wrong.

Finally, late one afternoon in December, 1950, alone in the lab, I loaded a large 35mm reel of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite recorded by Leopold Stokowsky and the Philadelphia Orchestra (from that historic 1933 broadcast), crossed my fingers and turned on the system. The sound that burst forth was unbelievable! The bass sound from those three huge speakers literally caused my necktie to flutter (yes, we wore neckties then). In the pauses in the music I could hear voices up on Amsterdam Avenue, and when I looked up the airwell I could see a crowd of people all looking around trying to find the source of this amazing, beautiful sound.

I was only able to give a few demos of the system before some irreplaceable parts failed...But I never forget that afternoon when my necktie fluttered.

W. L Nelson, PhD, GSAS '59

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