The Format Wars

products from different manufacturers. Because of standards, you can use a USB cable from one company to connect to a computer built by a totally different company, and then connect that to a device built by a third company and it can all work. But standards don't just magically pop into being. It's not like people just start building new technologies and then they all magically morph into a universal standard. Nope.

We humans have to figure out what final form stuff should take, and then we have to cooperate to make sure everyone conforms to that decision. Sometimes a group of people from multiple disciplines will form a hopefully impartial committee whose job is to determine these things. Other times things are a little more messy, with a lot of give and take. I'm going to talk about a few of those other times. We can think of these as format wars.

I've covered some format wars in the past. On May one, two thousand nineteen, I published the episode Blu Ray Versus h D DVD about how two different groups of manufacturers faced off in a fight to determine which format would succeed the DVD home media format, and spoiler alert for those who have been oblivious for more than a decade,

it was Blu Ray that won. That story is pretty darn good and it involves stuff like companies quickly switching alliances and a rapid descent into obsolescence for the poor h D DVD. Way back on June six, two thousand and eleven, we published an episode called The Current Wars, describing the battle between George Westinghouse and the alternating current that he favored versus Thomas Edison and his direct current.

This is another format war that achieved legendary status, complete with public demonstrations of the dangers of alternating current and a fierce competition to be the provider of electricity for the Chicago World's Fair, and in that case, alternating current would win out as the standard being used for long distance transmission of electricity, so I'm not really going to go into those two stories in this episode, because I

do have other episodes dedicated to those. We'll look at a few other instances of format wars, some of which I have touched on in the past. In fact, it would be good to start off with one of those, and it's a format war that was going on just as I was growing up as a kid in the seventies,

the home video format war, which had several contenders. Now, the two big ones that most people have heard about are the two primary video cassette recorder formats, VHS and Beta Max, and we will get to those, but first I thought I would chat about a few other formats that made a go of it but ultimately fell short

of becoming the standard format for home video. So it's good to remember that before the nineteen seventies, there really wasn't such a thing as home theater in the sense of being able to watch recorded media at home on any real scale. You could watch television broadcasts, but once the show was over, that was it. You would only see that show or that movie or whatever again if someone were to rerun it. Otherwise it was just gone.

The film experience was still largely one where you would go to a cinema and you would sit there and you would watch a film. The emergence of technology that would allow people to view recorded media on demand at home was a truly revolutionary one and also one that caused more than a little hubbub in Hollywood as various studios grappled with the implications anyway. One of the technologies

to emerge in this era gradually, anyway, was the laser disc. Now, this started out more than a decade earlier with a fellow named David Paul greg who came up with a means to record video and audio information onto a essentially a plastic disc. This case, the disc was transparent and in the original pattern which you can read if you

want to, and the idea was really cool. You take a transparent disk and you encode video information onto it using a quote unquote metallic deposit, essentially creating opaque areas on the disc that light cannot pass through. So in a player, you would have a transducer like a light sensor on one side of the disk, and on the other side of the disc you would have a light

shining up through the disc. So as the disc spins, the light and the transducer keep pace with a spiral of data that has been encoded on the disc itself. With these metallic deposits, the transducer ends up generating electricity depending on how much light is hitting it, so it varies as the metallic deposits pass in between the transducer and the light, and that gets converted into the electrical signals that go to be interpreted as a video signal.

It's decoded that way. So Greg invented this technology in the early nineteen sixties. He filed for a patent for it in nineteen sixty seven, received it in nineteen sixty nine. Other inventors made related advancements in technology that would go toward the foundations for what would become laser disc. M c A would purchase the rights to the patent from Greg in the late nineteen sixties. Meanwhile, the Dutch company Phillips was hard at work on a similar technology, except

this one used reflective discs rather than transparent ones. So a laser would shine a light onto a reflective surface of the disk, detecting sequences of little pits and lands. So a land is essentially a bit of the disc that hasn't been carved into a pit. The pits and lands would represent the information of the video recording. Now these days, we would call it just binary information zeros

and ones. Now, normally this is where I would go into more detail about how all this works, but I've actually heard this type of technology fairly extensively in other episodes. It's the same basis for compact discs, which would come out a little bit later. Anyway, Phillips and m c

A joined forces to bring the technology to market. They first gave a public display of the technology in nineteen seventy two, but it wouldn't be available for purchase until nineteen seventy eight, when it debuted under the name m c A Disco Vision. It was a very different time, my friends. Interestingly, according to the sources I found, it originally launched in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, and the very first film available on the format happens to be

my favorite film of all time. It's also the movie that was number one at the box office the day I was born, Jaws, And yet my family never owned a laser disc. So that's where my personal connection to this particular technology ends. The disks could hold old sixty minutes of content per side when it was in extended play mode. With extended play, the motor would rotate the

disc at a slower speed. Standard play speed was faster and allowed for more features that you could use with the laser disc player, but you could only fit thirty minutes of content per side on the disc in standard play playback speed. And yes, this does mean that for a two hour film with extended play, you would have

to flip the disc over halfway through the movie. Though later on towards the tail end of the laser disc era, some players could actually automatically switch sides, you wouldn't have to manually do it. Sometimes films would include a special standard play disc with the extended play feature film, and the extra disc would include stuff like bonus footage and interviews and the sort of features that we would later

come to expect on DVD releases. A laser disc format could provide superior video and sound compared to the VHS and Beta Max formats, but it had a couple of major disadvantages. One is that it was far more expensive than cassette based technologies, and when I get to those and tell you how much they cost. That's going to raise some eyebrows. But another drawback is that you couldn't record to a laser disc, so you were restricted to

watching prerecorded stuff from major studios. You would have to buy a movie or TV series or whatever on laser disc. You couldn't just you know, recorded off the television. That was a difference between that cassettes. Cassettes you could do that. And these drawbacks meant that fewer people would purchase laser disc players, which meant the technology couldn't really scale to a level where prices could drop significantly. The very last laser disc movie was in two thousand. This was the

last film printed to laser disc. That's interesting to me because DVDs were already on the market by two thousand and The last film on laser disc was Bringing Out the Dead, which is a Nicolas Cage film that I have never actually watched. But LaserDisc never made a huge impact on home video. It was kind of a cult favorite among a small group of enthusiasts, but it never

had an enormous impact. It also became a little bit of a novelty in arcades, however, because it was the basis for games like dragons Layer and Space Ace, but that's another story. Another technology that took a stab at becoming a standard home video tech and failed was the capacitance Electronic disc player or ce D, which was developed by our c A. Now, as I record this, I am actually looking right now at my old c e D player, which may or may not be functional. I honest,

we don't know. I haven't plugged it in in years. Plus I don't have a television with the proper connectors, so even if it works, I wouldn't be able to verify it anyway. But this is the technology that my family had obviously while I was growing up, though we only ever had a relatively small number of films for it, like Singing in the Rain, uh Raiders, Lost Arc, a couple of Woody Allen movies, that sort of thing. And the c e D is a disc based system, but

unlike the laser disc, it's not an optical system. That means there's no laser shining on this disc. No. Instead, these discs which were housed inside these plastic envelopes that kind of made them look like a cross between a giant computer disc and a record album sleeve. Anyway, the actual discs inside the envelopes had very small grooves in them, just like a vinyl record album, but much smaller and like an old record player. The ce ED player used

a special needle to move through these grooves. However, instead of the needle vibrating and then transmitting those vibrations to a transducer that converts the vibrations into an electric signal, the ceed player's needle and the disk in the player

would complete an electronic circuit. The needle would not actually make contact with the bottom of the groove on the disc, but the groove would curve up toward the bottom of the needle, or it would curve away from the needle, and that would affect the capacitance between the stylus and the disc itself. The changing capacitance would then affect a resonant circuit, which in turn would send the generated fluctuating signal to a decoder to transmit as video and audio.

And I know it sounds super technical, but in reality, it was using a quality of electricity as a sort of evolution of the old vinyl record technology. One advantage of the c e ED is that it wasn't as expensive to produce as VCRs and definitely less expensive than laser disc players. The video and audio quality were around the same level as that for cassettes, maybe a little bit better, but they definitely did not measure up to

the superior quality of the laser disc format. But like laser discs, you could not record programming to c D. You could only buy existing media and play it at home. Also, like laser discs, you had to flip a movie halfway through because each side could only hold about an hour's worth of video. I seem to recall, although I have not verified this, that for Raiders of the Lost Arc, the point where we would have to flip the disc was right around the time where Salah would say to Indiana,

they're digging in the wrong place. Our c A had this technology in development as far back the nineteen sixties, but various problems within the company and the project in particular, delayed it to market until the early nineteen eighties. By that time, the laser disc was already on the market and VHS and Beta Max were well established too, so

C e D really never stood a chance. Our c A only would produce them for a couple of years before throwing in the towel, so in a way, I own a piece of tech history, or, as I like to call it, a very large paper weight. There were other media contenders besides C E D and laser disc, but the real battle raged between Beta Max, which was backed by Sony, and VHS, which was backed by j v C. Sony had hoped to create the standard format

for home video. They tried to get buy in from all the other manufacturers in the early nineteen seventies, but j v C, which had been developing its own technology, held out and made the risky decision to back their competing format. The Beta Max hit the market first in nineteen VHS would debut about a year or so later, probably like early nine, I believe, And while both formats recorded media to tape that was inside of a cassette,

they were also incompatible with one another. The Beta Max video cassettes were not as wide as the VHS, but they were longer or taller, depending on how you're looking at them, and at first, the Beta Max is faster playback speed resulted in a slightly superior resolution over the VHS format, so you might think Beta Max thus had the edge. It was better picture, right, but VHS had

a couple of advantages of its own. One was that JVC chose to go with a less expensive set of components than Sony did, which kept the costs of production down, and that meant the company could sell VHS e c rs at a lower price point than Sony's Beta Max VCRs. Now, when I say lower price, we have to remember that

the VCR technology was crazy expensive when it first came out. Now, this is typical for new technologies, particularly in the area of media technologies, where the early examples are priced at a point where most of us can't afford it, and over time, due to stuff like early adopters and the scaling up of production, the price comes down to a point where we lowly peons can also enjoy the technology.

When the Beta Max first launched, the models ranged from just under two thousand dollars for the base model up to two thousand, two hundred nine five dollars for the top end model. And this was so if we adjust that for inflation, let's see that means that a top end model of a Beta Max machine would set you back more than eleven thousand dollars in today's money. Hatchi Machi that's a princely summoned no mistake. But but hey, I said that the vhs came in at a lower price, right,

So what did those go for when they first came out? Well, the VHS style VCRs retailed for between one thousand dollars and fourteen hundred dollars, So that's between hundred bucks and six thousand dollars today. That is a hefty price to pay to watch my old night Court tapes. But beyond that, a huge differentiator came down to recording time. With the original Beta Max machines, users could only record one hour

of content per tape. The original JVC VHS machines could record up to two hours of material onto a tape, and to be clear, this was more of a limitation on the machines than on the cassette tapes themselves. See, by running the tape more slowly through the machine, both for the recording and playback of media, you could cram

more video content onto the cassettes. But you did this knowing that you were also compromising the video and audio quality at slower speeds, like super slow speeds, where you can cram like ten hours of material onto one video cassette, you could end up having a lot of cross interference and other issues that would affect the quality of the audio and the video. Sony and JVC initially were loath to budge on this. They didn't really want to give

on quality. But as j VCS approach was gaining more favor because it could record twice as much content per tape, Sony would push out new players and video cassettes that could hold more content. So JVC then response the same way, or would allow other manufacturers like our c A to build VCRs capable of recording at slower tape speeds and thus more hours of content per tape. The VHS format got the edge and held it long enough that eventually

Sony capitulated. This was a format war that was decided in the marketplace rather than by a standards committee, and it was a long and costly war, both for the manufacturers and for consumers. For people who backed Beta Max, they ended up supporting a format that eventually went obsolete, and switching over to a different format tends to be pretty irritating, both because it means that you've got to spend more money on stuff like a new player, but you also have to figure out what to do with

your library of content. Do you keep a working Beta max machine around or do you go ahead and replace all the films and shows that you've either recorded or bought on Beta Max with new VHS copies. It is a mess, and it's one of the reasons standard committees form in the first place to avoid that kind of situation. When we come back, we'll turn the clock back a good way to talk about a totally different type of

format war all aboard. Now, I'm sure a lot of you have already figured out what format I'll be talking about based on my lane transition into the ad break earlier. We're going to talk about train railway gauges. That is the distance between the inner edge of the two rails on a train railway. The standard gauge for most of the world is known as one thousand, four hundred thirty five millimeters or four feet and eight and a half inches, because here in the good old USA, we just don't

cotton to that their metric system, gosh darn't it. And to be clear, that's not every single railway around the world, but more than half of them do conform to this. Now, there is a charming story that the whole reason that train rails are this distance from each other ultimately depends upon the rear ends of a pair of horses. And as I said, the story is charming, but not necessarily totally accurate, at least in the grand scheme of things. But let's go through the story anyway, so we know

where we're coming from, all right. So, back in the days of the Roman Empire, you had Roman soldiers who would use chariots a lot in war or just to get around, and chariots would be pulled by a pair of horses, so by necessity, the chariot would need to accommodate two horses side by side in the front, which in turn meant that a chariot could only be so

wide before it would become difficult to maneuver. The wheels need to be wide apart enough to provide stability, but not so wide apart that you couldn't do stuff like take a turn easily. And generally the distance between the two wheels of the chariot that would provide decent stability and maneuverability was about four feet eight inches or so. Now, the Roman Empire needed to produce a good number of chariots. They were important for military conquests and for maintaining a

presence in the large Roman Empire. The chariots all followed a fairly close set of standards, and all that chariot traffic on roads started to create ruts in the road. The wheels were wearing down paths in the roadways, and these were like little ditches where the wheels of the old chariots were just hitting the road over and over. Over time, the ruts get fairly deep, and then the Roman Empire falls. This has nothing to do with ruts, although I guess you could argue that the empire was

in a rut. But I suppose you could also argue that a few horses rear ends were involved in the process as well. Anyway, flash forward to areas that had formerly been part of the Roman Empire. As people began to build more vehicles like wagons and carts and stuff, they tended to gravitate back to that four foot eight

inch distance between the wheels. Now, you could argue that this is because of those ruts, and that a cart with wheels that are closer together or further apart than that would have trouble navigating roads because the ruts are of a certain width, and if you're if you have one wheel in a rut and one wheel that's out of a rut, or you're constantly moving in and out of the ruts, it's not very easy going. Your animal has to work harder, it's not efficient. That's how the

story goes, and that probably does play a part. But another part is just the practical considerations that the Romans had made were still in play centuries later, and that really that had more to do with the limitations of relying on vehicles that are powered by using critters to

haul them. Anyway, the story goes on to say that when inventors in England first started building steam engine locomotives, the tools they were it upon to build out rails were based on the early horse horse drawn tram system where you would have rails and a cart, but a horse would pull the cart along the rails, and that those in turn were based on, you know, the the old ruts in the roads, you know, based off the carts that had to go through those roads, and that

in turn was based off the original roaming chariots and hardy Hart horror. That means that train rails are the way they are because of the patutis of a pair of horses, which isn't true. Now, it is true that some early railway companies would use existing carriage bodies that had been intended for use on roads, and then they swapped out the wheels on these carriages and put them with wheels that could ride on top of rails like

train cars. That was just playing practical. I mean, why would you spend all the money to reinvent the wheel or at least the wheeled carriage in you can just repurpose existing vehicles. But that's not the full story. George Stevenson, a nineteenth century engineer in England who came from truly humble origins, would be an early innovator with locomotives, not the inventor, but he made a lot of improvements with them, and he was creating powerful engines capable of transporting tons

of coal long distances at a pretty slow pace. His early locomotive had a speed of around four miles per hour or about six and a half kilometers per hour.

Stevenson's machines ran on rails that were four ft eight inches apart at least in the early part of his career, but by eighteen twenty six, when he and his son Robert began working on the Liverpool in Manchester railway, he made the decision to go with a rail width of four ft eight and a half inches, and this wasn't the first time that anyone had done that, but he had adjusted this largely because it helped with turns. It it prevented more bunching up when you had to take

a turn with a long train. And there wasn't just one set of train gauges from the get go. There were actually several competing train gauges in the UK and then later in other parts of the world. Some of them gravitated towards Stevenson's four ft eight inches, with the official standard eventually settling on that four ft eight and a half inches, but there were some railways that had

narrower tracks and some that had wider tracks. In the state of New York there was an entire network of train tracks there were six ft wide, and the thinking at the time was that the trains on this network we're going to be carrying even heavier loads, and that a wider track would be best for that, while also providing greater stability. Even in the UK, there were tons

of different train gauges. The Great Western Railway, which linked London with regions in the southwest of England and then off to Wales in the west, had a much wider gauge of rails. Their rails were seven ft one quarter

inch apart or two thousand, one hundred forty millimeters. Back in the United States, just before the Civil War, the Confederacy or what would be the Confederacy, had a few different train gauges running through the South and that was one of the big contributing factors to the South being

less capable than the North during wartime. Meanwhile, up north, the States had largely gravitated toward that four ft eight and a half inches as the standard, and that proved to be a huge advantage over the South when it came to supply chains and logistics. So what's the big

deal anyway, Well, it's all about compatibility. Like I said at the top of the show, These different rail gauges led to what engineers called break of gauge, Meaning let's say you've got a route from point A to point C, and it passes through point B, and at point B you have a change in gauge of railway lines. So from point A to point B it's a narrower gage,

and from point B to point SEE it's a wider gauge. Well, you can't take the same train all the way from point A to point C because the train can't run on a wider gauge. It has wheels that are in fixed positions on the bottom of the train. They're mounted on what we call wheel trucks here in the United States. In the UK they're called bogies. They're at a fixed wid you cannot magically go further apart from one another

or closer together. There are special train cars that can account for slight differences in rail gauge, but those would come later, so you're stuck with a solid frame. So one type of rail car can ride on one type of railroad track, but you have to switch if you're gonna change gauges. So it doesn't take much imagination to

see how this leads to a major problem. If you're transporting stuff, whether it's people or cargo, and you have to pass through one region that relies on one gauge width to another that has a different one, you've got to change trains. For people, this can be a nuisance, and it might mean having to travel by carriage from one train depot to a different one in the same town.

For cargo, it's a much larger hassle because you've got to offload the cargo from train number one, probably loaded into some other form of transportation like wagons, then take that wagon or whatever to the other train, offload the wagon and loaded onto train number two. It is inefficient and wasteful, and it was clear that standardizing rail gauges would be a practical solution. Having one standard width would simplify matters and allow for the faster transportation of passengers

and goods. The broad gage of the Great Western Railroad in the UK and the so called narrow gauge favored by Stevenson, we're gonna duke it out over there across the pond. Here in America, we had a whole different host of different railroad get gauges to contend with the two that I was talking about earlier. That was just an example. There were like almost a dozen different rail gauges in the US. It was a mess, so it wasn't easy. The various parties involved all had a vested

interest that their gauge would become the standard. For one thing, I mean, they wouldn't have to spend more money building out or buying new materials. And in some places like Erie, Pennsylvania,

there were other issues. You see, Erie marked the termination point for a couple of different railroads that had different gauges, which meant people traveling from say the East Coast to the Midwest, might have to stop an Erie along the way, and that meant that there were always reliable jobs related to transferring passengers from one railway to another, or to accommodate people as they did for the next outbound train,

like restaurants and hotels. That break of gauge of Erie Pennsylvania was seen as a source of employment and revenue in many ways, so that was a major disincentive to move towards a standardized railway gauge. In fact, the people of Erie, Pennsylvania took this pretty far. From December eighteen fifty three to February eighteen fifty four, citizens and Erie politicians which I mean Erie Pennsylvania not spooky spooky politicians, they tried to stop a move to standardize the tracks

with the narrower of the two gauges. A railway company had bought controlling interest in another railway company, and the decision was they were going to rip up the wide gauge tracks and replace them with narrow gauge so that you would have a single gauge going through Erie, Pennsylvania. And they didn't like that, so things escalated. The mayor ended up ordering police to remove railroad tracks that violated ordinances that said the new tracks would not be allowed

to cross city streets. Uh then the mayor started to bring on one hundred quote unquote special constables or a brute squad in Princess Bride terms, to take it upon themselves to tear up railroad tracks, usually by the cover of darkness in the middle of the night, and things eventually would come to a head. The United States sent lawman out there to calm things down, and eventually they

did calm down. The standardized track was laid down and mostly left unmolested, though there would be trouble that would spring up occasionally over the next couple of years, just not on the scale of what had been called the gauge War. But again, this whole conflict had nothing to do with the actual battling standards. It had more to do with the consequences of settling on a single standard and removing that incompatible without trains stopping an eerie by necessity.

Many local businesses saw a drop in revenue and some jobs were eliminated altogether. Kind of reminds me of stories about how when highways would come in and bypass a traditional route, entire towns would kind of dry up and die well. The shift to standards of rail gauges was gradual around the world. The UK passed a Gauge Act back in eight that set the standard at the four

ft eight and a half inches. The US moved more toward a standard after the Civil War, when much of the rail lines needed repairs, so the reunified United States took the opportunity to swap out the wider gauges in parts of the South with one closer to the northern standard. A little more than half the world uses that one thousand, four hundred thirty five millimeter as the standard gauge for railway lines. UH The other forty percent or so of railways make up a mix of different gauges, with not

a single like dominant one with this format. War it was more practicality that guided most of the decisions rather than anything else. When we come back, we'll look at yet another war of formats. But first let's take another quick break. One of the things that format wars often illustrate is how even something that is seemingly frivolous can be affected by a battle for standards. In the late nineteenth century, as railways were slowly conforming for the most part,

to the Stephenson standard, another format war began. Kind of this one was more of a format conflict that was resolved fairly quickly and then not that much longer afterward became more or less obsolete. And I am talking about player pianos, yep, pianos that have a mechanism that allows them to seemingly play themselves. And it's actually really fascinating. See player pianos suck. That's not a judgment call, it's actually what they are doing. The old player pianos worked

on a principle of pneumatics. Now we usually think of pneumatic systems as using pressurized air to do work to push against something, for example, and player pianos do use pneumatics, only they do it by creating lower pressure inside the piano than the atmospheric pressure that's outside the piano. As opposed to pumping pressurized air through the system, it's the outside air rushing in that provides the pneumatic force. I'll

explain how they work from a really high level. All right, So first let's think about the base of a player piano. The bottom of it, you would have a pair of pedals, and they weren't like sustained pedals the way you would find with classic pianos. They were actually foot pedals that

would uh power some bellows. Later on you would have electric motors that would do this, but the early ones used foot power, and so you would generate the suction needed for everything else to work by pedaling these pedals. You would alternate left right, left, right pumping air out of this piano. And you've got a set of bellows for each pedal. So the left pedal has a bellows, the right pedal has a bellows. Now, as you do this motion where you're pumping left, right, left, right, there's

actually a slight gap in suction as you're alternating. It's it's not a continuous uh suck. I guess. Is the way you could put it so to compensate for that player. Pianos typically have what was called a vacuum reservoir are essentially a sealed box. So as you pump the bellows suck air not just out of the piano, but out

of the reservoir as well. And so as you would reach these little breaks where one foot is about to go down in any other foot's about to go up, that reservoir would allow for the continued air pressure that you needed. It would be because there was a vacuum pumped into the reservoir. It would create the sucking that you would normally have with the bellows. And so you keep this up, You keep on pedaling the entire time.

And these bellows in the reservoir connect via hoses to two other major components, perhaps more, but two ones for sure. One was an air motor, and an air motor is what it sounds like. It uses air to provide the force needed to make the motor turn. In this case, it was device being powered by a vacuum. The vacuum suction causes the motor to rotate in that road. Stational motion was transferred to a role of piano paper, technically to a spindle that the role of piano player UH

paper would sit on. It's hard to say piano player paper. Anyway, You put the the the roll of paper on the spindle and the rotating motor would provide the force necessary to rotate the paper. The second component that the bellows were pulling air from was what was called a track bar. Now, this is a bar. It's above the keyboard UH and it's typically made off of something like brass, and the role of piano player paper would stretch across this bar,

making contact with it. So while you're pumping the bellows, the holes in this track bar there's a bunch of holes in it would be trying to suck in air, but the paper blocks the air from going through. However, the role of piano player paper also has some holes in it, and occasionally those holes aligned with the holes in the track bar and air can pass through. And it shouldn't surprise you to learn that those holes also

correspond with specific notes on the piano. So you get the player piano started, you're pumping the bellows and the section goes to the air motor, which begins to turn. It pulls the player piano paper over this tracking bar. That has suction, and whenever a hole in the paper lines up with a hole in that track bar, air passes through into the piano. Otherwise the paper is blocking

the air. So air rushes into the piano through the hole in the paper and the corresponding hole in the tracking bar, and each of those holes connects to a hose, and that hose goes to a pair of little pneumatic valves or bellows that correspond with a specific note, a specific piano key, or more are appropriately the hammer connected to the piano key, and the standard piano has a eight keys total, so a full player piano would have eight of these little valves or bellows at least, and

possibly some extra ones for some cool other effects. So the air coming in powers that bellows or valve pairing and then turn connects to the striking hammer for the corresponding note and causes the hammer to strike the correct piano string with the appropriate amount of force. The force and old player pianos was just standard. You couldn't play loudly or softly with just a regular player piano without

some alterations. So the player piano is constantly trying to suck air the holes in the paper where the air can pass through, and nearly all the early player pianos worked on this basic principle, but lots of companies were building them and no one had yet settled on a standard size for the player your piano roll. Some of them were wider than others, and some player pianos had a more limited range of notes, not covering the full

eight eight keys. Some used paper that was much wider than others, and that poses a problem because if you went out and you made the extravagant purchase of a player piano. Let's say you own a bar and tin pan alley and you want this player piano in your bar, and then you want to go and buy the latest songs to play on this player piano. You want to make sure that whatever format you're buying is compatible with the piano you have, or else you've just wasted money.

But with all the different sizes out there, that was complicated, and you couldn't be sure unless you were paying really close attention that you were buying the right stuff. So if the paper was too narrow, it wasn't going to cover all the holes in the pianos track bar, and you'd have a pretty hard time keeping suction up because a lot of air would be going through the uncovered holes. Uh. And technically they would be holding down a note, though

that wouldn't be really noticeable after the beginning. And if the paper were too wide, it wouldn't fit on the spindle in the first place. And if the holes don't line up properly, the music would come out wrong, would be the wrong notes being played, kind of like what

sounds like whenever I tried to play piano. So from eighteen nine six, when Edwin Vody invented the first really practical player piano using a pneumatic system, all the way up to nineteen o eight, various companies were making different style player pianos, and there were three major musical scales, one that had sixty five notes, one that had seventy two notes, and then one with all eighty eight notes

of your typical piano. And there were a lot of different sizes of piano paper rolls all hitting the market, and that leads us to the great event known as the Buffalo Convention of December tenth eight. It was this convention that established the standard width for player piano rolls, which was two D eight six millimeters or eleven and one quarter inches. In addition, they settled on two musical scales, the note scale and then the full eight notes scale.

Although both of those scales still used paper that was eleven and one quarter inches wide, manufacturers fell in line. They built out new player pianos designed to hold a piano role of that width, and that made it much easier to shop for player piano music because he didn't have to worry if it would fit the size of your player piano, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

By the way, if you want to hear an interesting example of player piano music, although this has been reinterpreted for a modern computerized piano so it's not played on an old player piano, I recommend you check out the album Gershwin Plays Gershwin the Piano Rolls. Gershwin himself was said to have recorded these piano roles over the course

of like a decade. On some pieces, such as the famous Rhapsody in Blue, he over dubbed himself so that meant he would play through Rahapsody and Blue on piano that would then end up corresponding the playing too punching holes in a role of player piano paper. Then he would rewind the paper, put it back through, and play additional parts in sequence with his original playing, which allows a single player piano to play more notes at the same time than a human pianist would be able to

manage on their own. It's like being able to play a four handed piece all by yourself. The pieces on that album are fantastic, and they offer the chance to hear how Gershwin would have played these famous bits of music himself, particularly early, if he happened to have four hands,

and I highly recommend it now. I've covered a lot of the other format wars in various episodes like I mentioned before that talked about companies like Columbia and our Cia and how they battled it out over vinyl records. You know, should the standard be thirty three and one third rpm that was Columbia standard, or should it be

forty five rpm with r C as smaller records. That format war fizzled out not because one side capitulated, but rather because record player manufacturers eventually built turntables that could operated either speed, which made both styles compatible with the same player machines, which kind of sidestep the thing. And then the music industry started to make a shift from singles two albums, and that kind of dictated which form

would end up taking precedence. And of course I've talked about the early days of personal computers, when lots of companies battled it out with different hardware and operating systems. We sure you had Apple computers way back in the day, but you also had Commodore and Tandy and Atari and more.

The format war would eventually shake out with two major players in the personal computer space, Apple with its Apple computers and later the Macintosh line, and then IBM, or rather IBM compatible machines with MS Dawson, then Microsoft Windows, and then eventually IBM itself would get out the PC market. But those would be the two dominating formats at that point, and there are lots of others. But I felt that these that I covered today were kind of fun ones.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I almost included another format war in this, but I realized that that would put me way over time. If you enjoyed this and you want to hear more about different format wars throughout the ages, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff, H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. M tech

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