The first viable device for recording on a magnetised strip of wire was developed by the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen as early as 1896. However, in the absence of suitable systems of amplification, it could not compete commercially with gramophone recording technology until the 1930s, when the British company, Marconi developed a steel tape recorder for the BBC.
Steel tape had the advantage over competing systems that it could used more than once. However, it was not only heavy and awkward to handle, but editing was problematic since any joins had to be soldered or welded together and heating the tape up in doing so meant that the recording was lost in the tape immediately adjacent to the edit point.
In the course of the 1930s and 1940s, steel tape and wire technology would be replaced by recorders that used the much more flexible and easily editable acetate tape. However, wire recorders were still in use in the early 1950s both in the BBC and among ethnographic film-makers: in 1953, Heinz Förthmann and Darcy Ribeiro are reported to have taken a Pierce Wire Recorder with them when filming a funeral among the Bororo of the Mato Grosso, Brazil.
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