Audograph Recordings Collection

The Audograph office dictation machine is a largely forgotten sound recording device from the mid-20th century, best known to have recorded sound during the assassination of President Kennedy. The Audograph was made by Gray Manufacturing Company beginning in 1945 and lasted at least through the 1950s. Audograph machines record sound to a plastic flexible disc similar to a vinyl LP. Gray Manufacturing went bankrupt in 1976.

The recordings in this collection were made on an Audograph office dictation machine, many of which were undertaken on cruises done in collaboration with the U.S. Navy. The exercises performed by the ships were kept confidential for a time due to their connection with measuring how sound travels and disperses underwater, and the utility of this information for the U.S. Navy, including their work on SONAR. Other cruises used similar methods to study the structure of the ocean floor. During some of these exercises, underwater detonations of explosives were used as a sound source so that the scattering of the sound waves could be measured. Most of the recordings were made on the WHOI ships Atlantis and Caryn. Other ships referenced in this collection are Navy vessels, including submarines: USS O'Hare, USS Amberjack, USS Maloy, USS Somersworth (EPCER-849), USS Halfbeak, USS Sarda, USS Tusk, USS Corsair, USS Toro, and possibly the USS Cochino. John Brackett Hersey was the chief scientist on the majority of cruises during which these recordings were made. Hersey's principal scientific interests were in solid earth geophysics, marine seismology and geology, underwater acoustics, and sound scattering by marine animals.

Some recordings utilized AX58 crystal hydrophones, an audio amplifier developed at WHOI referred to as "suitcase", and multi-channel analyzers to keep track of how different audio frequencies were scattering underwater. It appears that the Audograph recordings were a secondary method of documenting underwater sound on these cruises: there is no mention of the Audograph machine or Audograph discs on the extant cruise equipment lists, nor was there any reference to the Audograph recordings in available papers which used data from the cruises documented this Audograph collection. The only mentions of the audograph in the sources available were in log books pertaining to Atlantis cruise 151 and Caryn cruise 5, specifically a frequency response test, and time logs which noted the changing of Audograph discs. The primary sources of sonic data for the aforementioned papers were seismograph recorders, as there are images from the seismograph sheets shown in a number of the papers. Some possible reasons why seismographs were used as the primary source of data for those papers are they are able to document sonic frequencies below the threshold of human hearing, and the convenience of having the sonic data displayed over time in an accessible, visible format.