Marvin Camras

Marvin Camras (1916 to 1995) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who was widely influential in the field of magnetic recording. He built his first recording device, a wire recorder, in the 1930s for a cousin who was an aspiring opera singer, and soon found that magnetic tape made splicing and storing recordings easier. His work caught the notice of his professors at what became the Illinois Institute of Technology, which offered him a position at the Armour Research Foundation to develop it. Before and during the Second World War his wire recorders were used by the armed forces to train pilots, and recordings of battle sounds were amplified and placed where the D-Day invasion was not going to happen, a deception kept secret until after the war. His 1944 patent, Method and Means of Magnetic Recording, was one of more than 500 he received, mostly in electronic communications. In 1962 he wrote a speculative paper predicting portable solid state media players, downloads and online banking, and in 1990 he received the National Medal of Technology.