From: Buddy McPeters
Date: June 24, 2005
No, they actually had a mobile remote field recording unit come out with a disc cutter that cut the discs right on site, which in the 30's and 40's was not an uncommon thing in the recording industry both in the private sector and the Armed Forces Radio Network in conjunction with the War Dept. I asked Leon McAuliffe about this and he told me he saw them cutting the records which were presented to the person or persons who bought them during the war bonds rally.
I know one man who actually 'trailed' this one time only disc of SAR with Bob & Bing to the family of the man who was the President of the Oklahoma Natural Gas Company. There was a photograph of Bob & Bing with this man holding that recording and it was not a wire, it was a record disc. It was known that he had kept that record as well as others he 'bought' that day in his personal vault but these records had been somehow lost from the vault.
Even the famed Robert Johnson recordings were made with a portable field recording unit as were many recordings made by Bob Wills & The Light Crust Doughboys etc. See this website for a couple of examples with detailed info on them with great photographs: http://www.btinternet.com/~roger.beckwith/bh/repwar/wr_recorders.htm
It is very likely that the Presto unit is the one that was employed for the recording of Bob & Bing on SAR etc. Presto also manufactured blank recording discs which is where the Bob Wills Presto transcriptions got their name.
Wire recording dates as far back as 1878 with the idea of recording telephone signals onto a length of steel piano wire. See here: http://www.videointerchange.com/wire_recorder1.htm
By the '30's they were used in commercial use for dictating and telephone recorders. During WWII, the machines found their way into the BBC who employed banks of them for sending messages to the French underground. Meanwhile the US Army & Navy also employed them for similar purposes in their operations centers. Following the war from 1947 to 1952, wire recorders became popular in America and across Europe, in radio usage for recording radio shows (obligatory Bob Wills content: ie the Jergen's Lotion shows were ALL recorded on wire!) During this period wire recorders became the 1st audio recording unit sold to the public at large and soon showed up in many homes across the world, a great deal of these were made by the Wilcox-Gay Company. Portable disc cutters also emerged right after the war simply because the war effort had actually saw a need for them and almost immediately after the war home units emerged, though most were used by radio personnel. One of which my dad had which was a Meisner Phono-Cord unit he bought in 1947 which he cut live air shots & dances right off the radio or set up a microphone at a dance and cut the music on the spot ie Bob Wills, Spade Cooley etc. (Sadly ALL of these discs my dad made were lost!) As to whether the discs from this war bonds recording summit of Bob & Bing ever surface, that remains to be seen. But is very possible that they are in a stack of records somewhere just waiting to be found!