The quick summary is that magnetic amplifiers started in the US in 1901, but Germany came up with much better magnetic alloys during World War II. This led to a post-war boom in mag amps, which were used in industrial control, aerospace, and computers such as the Univac Solid State. These magnetic materials also led to core memory. Transistors mostly killed off mag amps, although PC power supplies used them into the 1990s.
What connection if any is there between pre-1946 German work on magnetic amplifiers and magnetic alloys and the pre-1946 German leaps forward in audio tape recording onto Magnetophons?
Comments
I wrote an article on the history of magnetic amplifiers: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-vacuum-tubes-forgotten-rival
The quick summary is that magnetic amplifiers started in the US in 1901, but Germany came up with much better magnetic alloys during World War II. This led to a post-war boom in mag amps, which were used in industrial control, aerospace, and computers such as the Univac Solid State. These magnetic materials also led to core memory. Transistors mostly killed off mag amps, although PC power supplies used them into the 1990s.
Speaking of core memory, it was a magazine ad for Deltamax which got Jay Forrester to start his work on core memory: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLpbhsE72I&t=2408s , 40m08s). Ernst Albers-Schönberg https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/archival_objects/142... from General Ceramics whom Forrester got to work on formulating an alloy for the Whirlwind cores had previously worked at Steatit-Magnesia AG in Berlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeramTec https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steatit-Magnesia .
p. ii in Elektrokeramik: Werkstoffe · Herstellung · Prüfung · Anwendungen 2nd ed., 1976, ISBN 978-3642809507
( https://www.radiomuseum.org/forum/ferrite_core_memory_some_h... also has interesting pointers from Ernst Erb and Emilio Ciardiello about the early history of magnetic core memory development.)
What connection if any is there between pre-1946 German work on magnetic amplifiers and magnetic alloys and the pre-1946 German leaps forward in audio tape recording onto Magnetophons?