manufactured by BASF/IG Farben.¹⁵ This certainly fascinated him. During the war his firm, Rangertone, could, by radar sub-assemblies on a subcontract basis, only just make ends meet. There was no profitable product in sight which could be manufactured after the war.

In this situation the AEG magnetophone came to Ranger as a godsend. Magnetic recorders played an important role in the Second World War. They were widely used for intelligence purposes, for the reports of war correspondents, and, installed in radio stations, for propaganda. During the D-Day invasions magnetic recorders – in this case wire recorders, the precursors of tape recorders – were, in order to mislead the enemy, used to play strongly amplified battle sounds at locations where the invasion was not taking place.¹⁶

In the early 1940s, researching at the German Radio Broadcasting Company, the ‘Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft’, the engineers Hans Joachim von Braunmühl and Walter Weber rediscovered high frequency biasing which reduced background noise and significantly improved the quality of reproduction. Shortly afterwards the AEG company manufactured these magnetophones under license which, together with magnetic tape produced by BASF as part of IG Farben, constituted a major improvement in recording technology. Ranger took a few magnetophones back with him to the United States and his company set out on a project of ‘reverse engineering’, disassembling the recorders, putting them together again and thereby learning how they worked and what its novel features were.¹⁷ In 1947 Rangertone produced a tape recorder called the ‘Rangertone’ which was modelled on the AEG Magnetophone. Several radio stations showed an interest and used it in their studios; the singer Bing Crosby and his technicians were particularly keen on it. Unfortunately for Ranger, his firm was only a small operation and had soon to succumb to the superior marketing power of the Ampex corporation and its chairman, the engineer Alexander Poniatoff, who came from Russia and made precision equipment for the military.¹⁸ In the early 1950s the Rangertone Studios in Newark, N.J., were frequented by American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and John Cage. After this, Ranger concentrated on his studio work.

V

Winston E. Kock (1909–1982) studied electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati and, at the same time, piano and organ at the Cincinnati College of Music.¹⁹

In the early 1930s he built an electronic organ as practical fulfilment of his degree in electrical engineering. Since vacuum tubes were expensive he used