The Elizabethan Popular 200 tape recorder is about 50 years old.
It was made in Romford, Essex, and was, apparently, a popular item. It
enabled ordinary people to record sound in fairly high fidelity on a
shoestring budget. My father bought one of these machines sometime in
the mid 1960s, and used it as a device to play commercially recorded
music, and also to tape the audio from TV broadcasts, and sporadically
record the voices of his family.
The tape recorder was once part of a network of related accessories: reel-to-reel tapes, valves, microphones and so forth. It was possible to buy these items easily, for the machine was owned by thousands, possibly millions of people. Today, they are relics, available in junk shops and sometimes on eBay. The machine is esoteric. It no longer possesses widespread utility. It’s very existence is of a different order. We might say, with the philosopher Heidegger, that it’s existence was once ready-to-hand whereas today it’s present-at-hand, an object of abstract contemplation rather than something with an everyday utility. A lot of my father’s technological,possessions now belong to this category of present-at-hand. His 8mm cine projector, and his 35mm film camera, for example, were,once worldly items, common, useful, contemporary. Today, for me, they are primarily objects that facilitate an encounter with the past, and with the world of my childhood. These old, dusty, broken down machines created the family archive, and allow me to tell my story in a variety of media, but the machines themselves demand close inspection. Old technology has a different way of being in the world. In some ways they are like old people who no longer feel that they are part of any social or political network. As we age our sense of belonging in the world begins to diminish, and fade. We cease to be as useful as we were in our blooming days of youth. We increasingly become objects of contemplation, objects of scholarly inspection, curios in a junk shop full of detritus.
The tape recorder was once part of a network of related accessories: reel-to-reel tapes, valves, microphones and so forth. It was possible to buy these items easily, for the machine was owned by thousands, possibly millions of people. Today, they are relics, available in junk shops and sometimes on eBay. The machine is esoteric. It no longer possesses widespread utility. It’s very existence is of a different order. We might say, with the philosopher Heidegger, that it’s existence was once ready-to-hand whereas today it’s present-at-hand, an object of abstract contemplation rather than something with an everyday utility. A lot of my father’s technological,possessions now belong to this category of present-at-hand. His 8mm cine projector, and his 35mm film camera, for example, were,once worldly items, common, useful, contemporary. Today, for me, they are primarily objects that facilitate an encounter with the past, and with the world of my childhood. These old, dusty, broken down machines created the family archive, and allow me to tell my story in a variety of media, but the machines themselves demand close inspection. Old technology has a different way of being in the world. In some ways they are like old people who no longer feel that they are part of any social or political network. As we age our sense of belonging in the world begins to diminish, and fade. We cease to be as useful as we were in our blooming days of youth. We increasingly become objects of contemplation, objects of scholarly inspection, curios in a junk shop full of detritus.
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