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General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

To which I totally lack good answers!

1) Whale oil was prized as a lubricant for fine timepieces. Perhaps that made people give it a try. Supposedly it was the LOW-viscosity oil least likely to gluck up and make your expensive pocket watch freeze up.

I gave a presentation at Yale Music School a few years ago on "Designing and Equipping Workstations for the Digital Archiving of Legacy Audio Formats," so I had to mention Sticky Shedding Syndrome, but I never ran across any explanation for the Whale Oil.

2) Eventually, they did come up with longer-lasting alternatives. But there was a period of 15 or 20 years where most of the master tapes now require baking.

STRANGELY ENOUGH, the spy-satellite program Clark Johnsen worked on... appears to have used whale oil:

The CORONA program was a series of strategic reconnaissance satellites produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology with substantial assistance from the U.S. Air Force.[2]

Early versions of the index camera had a slight distortion problem. The camera was redesigned with a new shutter manufactured by a commercial firm lacking any security clearance; thus the firm could not be told the purpose for which the shutter was to be used. The manufacturer used talcum powder as a shutter blade lubricant but this was not acceptable for space use.

Itek engineers suggested the use of whale oil instead. Because whale oil cost $11,000 per gallon, the manufacturer balked. This meant Itek engineers had to accept the new shutter, disassemble them, clean and lubricate them with whale oil and reassemble them. Only about a drop oil was needed for each shutter, meaning that Itek was left with a lot of unused whale oil.

from Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites by Dwayne Day[3]

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john



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  • To which I totally lack good answers! - John Marks 07/24/2207:26:23 07/24/22 (1)

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