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Deeply impressed by the sound recorded on tape, Ibuka and Morita resolved to make a tape recorder no matter how difficult it might be. First, they managed to get an Occupation Force officer to bring a tape recorder to Totsuko so their colleagues could listen to its superior sound. But even more importantly, they had to persuade their accounting staff.
One day, Ibuka and Morita came to see Shozaburo Tachikawa, saying, "We are now planning to make a tape recorder. Could you arrange to get 300,000yen ready for us?" Tachikawa was at a loss for words. Even though Totsuko had been doing good business with NHK, 300,000yen was no small sum. Ibuka and Morita had been nonchalant, but for accountants like Tachikawa and Hasegawa it was not an amount readily available.
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After having them listen to the tape recorder, Ibuka and Morita took the two accountants to a nice restaurant and presented their case. Impressed by the tape recorder's good potential, Tachikawa and Junichi Hasegawa were finally convinced.
The tape recorder had just been developed and was a rarity even in the United States. Thus,no-one had thought to produce one in Japan. The only reference book available, "Onkyo Kogaku"(Acoustic Engineering), by Dr. Yasujiro Niwa, merely said: "In 1936 AEG Co.in Germany invented a tape recorder that used plastic tape which was coated with magnetic material."
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 | | The accountants Hasegawa and Tachikawa(second row,third and fifth from left, respectively). |
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What would be suitable as a tape base or as magnetic material? The Totsuko engineers had to start from scratch.
Assuming that any magnetic powder substance would do, they first tried an OP magnet, which had been invented by Dr. Yogoro Kato of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Ibuka obtained a stick-shaped piece of this material, and Kihara ground it to powder in a mortar for an hour or so. They agreed to coat this powder on an 8mm wide slip of leftover print-out paper from the Hell Schreiber telegraphic machine. "But how can we coat it?," they asked themselves. After thinking about it long and hard, they kneaded cooked rice into a paste and applied the powder onto the paper with the rice paste. They tested their tape on the Occupation Forces'recorder, but it produced only a harsh noise. Although OP magnetic powder can be used today to make metal tape, at that time it was technically impossible to make a magnetic head to record or erase such a tape, because the OP magnet was too powerful.
The Totsuko engineers learned from this experiment that a tape recorder would not require such strong magnetic material. This explained why stainless steel was used in the wire recorder. They started looking for much weaker magnetic material. They finally came across a reference to a very promising chemical called oxalic ferrite, which the book said would become ferric oxide when burned. "This is it!" Kihara exclaimed.
However, it was next to impossible to find oxalic ferrite on the market right after the war. Morita volunteered to help Kihara find it. They both went off at once, riding a street car to Kanda to scout the pharmaceutical wholesaler district. Morita always acted quickly in this kind of situation. After a long search, they finally found the only store that handled it. They bought two reagent bottles of powdered oxalic ferrite and brought them back to the company conduct further experiments.
The oxalic ferrite needed distilling, but there was no such thing then as an electric furnace. So they borrowed a frying pan from the kitchen to roast the yellowish powder with a wooden spoon. Watching its color carefully, they roasted it until it turned brown and black and then put it in water to prevent it from spraying into the air. The brown was ferric oxide and the black was ferrous tetroxide. If it was roasted longer, it would mix with oxygen in the air and solidify into colcothar, which is often used as a metal polisher. Kihara had a fine eye for color and could remove the frying pan from the fire at just the right moment. The necessary magnetic powder was thus prepared.
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