Just connect the phone to the car via Bluetooth or a USB connection to let your entire catalog of your own music reverberate through the speakers: nowadays it is a matter of course even on the smallest cars. In the recent past, you needed a whole mountain of CDs for that. In all its cumbersomeness, that pales in comparison to the very first possibility to play your own music in the car: the record player for on the road.
Playing your own music on the go was simply not possible in the 1950s. You had to make do with the sounds that could be heard on the airwaves, if you had a radio in your car at all. At the time, the record player was the only way to listen to your own music. It was only a matter of time before the record player and the car would be combined. In the 1950s, Peter Goldmark, the director of record manufacturer CBS Laboratories, came up with the idea of developing a record player for the car. Reportedly, he got the idea because his son asked if he couldn’t put something on the radio for the road.
The biggest challenge for an in-car turntable was size. A 12-inch LP with 33 rpm is in fact quite unmanageable for in the car. 7-inch is better in size, but a 45rpm record can only play one song per side, so you’re either listening to the same song the entire ride, or constantly flipping the records. Apart from the fact that it is very irritating, this is of course not very responsible in terms of road safety. Goldmark moved away from these two types of pictures and came up with a new solution. He reduced the distance between the grooves to a third of the space on a regular LP. He also slowed down the speed of the record player to 16 2/3 rpm. Thanks to these ingenuity, a 7-inch record could contain as much music as a large 12-inch record: ‘ideal’ for in the car.
Chrysler
Goldmark used its own Chrysler as a test rig. To ensure that the record did not ‘skip’ on bumps in the road surface, the casing of the record player was individually sprung and the needle pressed harder on the record. The record player was concealed in the dashboard and emerged at the push of a button. Goldmark then tested the system in other cars from CBS management, among others, before taking it to Chrysler. CBS itself saw no market for the system, but Chrysler was impressed. Thus, the ‘Highway Hi-Fi Phonograph’ found its way into the Chrysler Corporation brands: Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto, Imperial and Chrysler. An advertisement for the system can be seen in photo 5.
Swap a picture. Source: The Art of Sound.
Chrysler supplied the turntable from 1956 to 1958 as a $200 option. Today, that would translate into a significant additional cost of around $1,800, or $1,560 converted. Despite Goldmark’s ingenious invention, the record player in the car was not a success. In addition to being quite expensive, the system proved to be less good in mass production than in Goldmark’s tests. This was mainly because the suspension of the lower-positioned Dodges and Plymouths was not as good as that of the more luxurious Chryslers. It led to the plates skipping and in some cases even breaking. In addition, only records developed specifically for the system could be played on it, which meant that the choice of music was considerably limited. The marketing for the sale of the extra records would also have fallen short.
Other solutions
In 1958, Philips launched the ‘Mignon’, an automatic record player for cars, in Europe. In contrast to the Goldmark system, the Mignon (photo 4) played the regular 45 rpm records, which meant that you often had to change your music. An advertisement of the Mignon shows that it was offered for 75 guilders. Ultimately, the Mignon remained on the market until the late 1960s. Chrysler, despite the failure of the Highway Hi-Fi, did not let go of the turntable in the front of the car and came on the market in 1960 with the RCA Victor, which also included the 45- playing tour records. The Victor was in fact a record changer with room for 14 ‘singles’. You could then switch them with the push of a button.
In the end, despite its inconveniences, the Mignon remained on the market the longest. The main reason for this was that the Mignon could be mounted in many more car types, unlike the Highway Hi-Fi and the Victor. The advent of the cassette tape in the 1960s logically put an end to the record player in the car. The record player takes an honorable place in the history books as the first way you could listen to music of your choice in the car.
Images: The Art of Sound, Dual Board and mcrfb.com.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl