Marvin Camras (January 1, 1916 – June 23, 1995) was an
electrical engineer
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the ...
and inventor who was widely influential in the field of
magnetic recording
Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ac ...
.
Camras built his first recording device, a
wire recorder
Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on a thin steel wire. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Valdem ...
, in the 1930s for a cousin who was an aspiring opera singer named Willy. He also built Willy a telephone, due to the fact that he could not afford one, at the age of 8. Shortly afterwards he discovered that using
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use mag ...
made the process of
splicing and storing recordings easier.
Camras's work attracted the notice of his professors at what is now
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has pro ...
(IIT) and was offered a position at
Armour Research Foundation
IIT Research Institute (IITRI),Greenbaum & Wheeler (1967), cover sheet (technical paper).McCormac; et al. (1967), p. i (book)."IITRI" (or "iiTRi") is used on cover sheets of technical paper documents in prior decades. also known historically and ...
(which merged with
Lewis Institute
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has pro ...
in 1940 to become IIT) to develop his work.
Before and du