Bing Crosby made Silicon Valley possible

Ted Gioia, How Bing Crosby Made Silicon Valley Possible, The Honest Broker, Dec. 21, 2023. The opening:

Bing Crosby was the most successful entertainer in the world during the first half of the 20th century. He rose to the top in everything he tried his hand at—records, movies, radio, live performances.

He even defined a new cultural tone, which people called ‘cool’.

I once heard a music critic describe Crosby at his peak as the coolest white man on the planet. That’s not a bad way of conveying his appeal. Cool started out as a jazz style, but Crosby turned it into a consumer lifestyle.

Gioia then goes on to explain how, in the late 1920s, Crosby figured out how to use the technology of microphones and amplification to invent a new style of singing: "They called this new low-key style “crooning.” And no crooner was more popular than Bing Crosby." But by the mid-1940s Crosby was overworked and feeling exhausted. He needed technological help.

Because of the time difference, Crosby had to do two different live broadcasts—and the network refused his proposal that they pre-record the later West Coast show on 16-inch transcription disks, basically a very large phonograph record. NBC had good reason for this. The sound quality on the disk recordings of that day were noticeably inferior. And the disks were cumbersome to edit—negating one of the major advantages of pre-recorded shows.

Crosby needed better recording technology. And in 1947, a stranger from Northern California made the trek to Hollywood with a big box that not only solved Bing’s dilemma, but set the wheels in motion for a whole host of later innovations.

What Jack Mullin did at MGM Studio that day is almost like a magic trick. He set up a live performance behind a curtain, and then followed it with a playback from his magnetic tape recorder. The audio quality was so true-to-life that many listeners couldn’t tell the difference. A private demonstration was arranged for Crosby at the ABC Studio on Sunset and Vine.

Crosby knew immediately that this was a huge breakthrough. But the price of a single Ampex 200-A machine was $4,000—more than many people paid for a home back then. In fact, the average median family income in the US that year was just $3,000. But Crosby wanted to buy 20 of these machines. He offered to pay 60% of the money up-front.

Thus, a few days later, a letter arrived in the Ampex office with a Hollywood postmark. Inside was a check from Bing Crosby for $50,000.

Gioia then launches into the story of how Ampex got started. This, that, and the other, leading to:

Ampex, launched in San Carlos, California in 1944 is the key connecting point between music storage and data storage. That tiny startup, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was involved directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”

And so Mr. Cool gave high tech a boost. 

And here he is singing a duet with the real King of Cool, Mr. Louis "Satchmo" Armstong. You'll hear Bing make an aside about having a "piece of Gary." That's Gary, Indiana, home to a major steel mill. Gioia remarks that Crosby was a prolific investor.