Martin Fone's Blog

Tanzlinden

What do you do if you have a large linden tree (Tilia) with a thick trunk and large, spreading branches in the centre of your village? Well, in many German villages they were used as a meeting place and a focal point for celebrations.

Some even went so far as to create a structure around the base of the trunk, guiding the branches of the tree to create a leafy wall surrounding the platform. At certain festivals, the villagers would gather on the platform, a band would play and they would dance. They were known as Tanzlinden or dance linden.

Only a few now survive, the oldest reputed to be the Tanzlinde of Schenklengsfeld in the state of Hesse. The tree, a broad leaved linden (Tilia platyphyllos), was supposedly planted in 760 and it now stands 25 metres wide and about twenty metres tall, filling the entire square with its crown. A postcard from 1937, though, shows that it only had a height of around 10 metres, suggesting that until recently the tree was pollarded regularly.

It was described by J Hörle in 1942 in Die zwei verschwunden Gerichtslinden in Hersfeld: “strong posts stand on the wall and support the beams of the heavy, stunted branches of the strong Ancient Tree, such that the main branches, artfully intertwined with the beam structure, together with the dense branches and canopy, form a closed arbour, surrounded and protected against the weather, and yet, according to old Germanic custom, creating a Courtroom under God’s naked sky”.     

Curiously, it no longer has a central trunk, the crown growing from four loose stems that have grown independently from the root flare. A study conducted by the University of Göttingen in 2009 showed that all four stems have exactly the same origin and there was no significant difference in canopy growth between them.  

Of more recent origin is the Tanzlinde of Peesten in the state of Bavaria, said to be one of the finest. The original tree was planted, according to a sign dated 1657, between 1550 and 1600 but was removed in 1947 as it was in a poor condition. A replacement tree was planted in 1951 and it has been shaped into a square building with a dance floor in it, pretty much all of the building including the crown of its roof are made up of its own branches and foliage.

Twelve stone columns placed on a common base support the three metre high dance floor with the first layer of branches acting as the building’s frame. The branches and foliage decorate the outside of the structure which is reached by ascending a stone spiral staircase consisting of 22 steps that dates from 1837. The dance floor is 9.5 metres square and the tree’s trunk runs through the middle and is surrounded by a bench. There are eleven windows and the roof is formed by beams that shape the crown. The tree is pruned regularly by removing the thickest branches but is not pollarded.

A tradition that is thought to date back to pre-Christian times, Tanzlinden are delightfully eccentric reminder of a past long gone.

The Fingerprint

A review of The Fingerprint by Patricia Wentworth – 251003

As Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series draws to a close The Fingerprint, the thirtieth of thirty-two and originally published in 1956, treads familiar ground, the consequences of an inheritance and the changing of a will. It is rather an exasperating book as the pieces of the jigsaw are laid out in the early chapters, the culprit is easy to spot, and the book meanders its way to its conclusion, its length amplified by the repetition of key conversations verbatim.

Jonathan Field is wealthy with one peculiar hobby, his penchant for collecting fingerprints, not just of criminals but of those who have never been convicted of a crime or who are entirely innocent. A refusal to contribute to the collection is tantamount to an admission that you have something to hide. The pride and joy of his collection is a set of prints taken from a man who sheltered from an air raid with him and confessed that he had committed two murders for which he had never been brought to account.

Georgina is Jonathan’s niece and is the recognized and accepted heir to his estate, but recently he has taken a long-lost relative, a naïve, seemingly innocent young girl, Mirrie. Provoked by an anonymous letter accusing Georgina of being cruel to Mirrie, Jonathan alters his will making Mirrie the beneficiary, tells the excited girl of her good fortune, but then after some reflection, changes his mind and the new will is destroyed. However, on the night of his return after making his new will, Jonathan is murdered.

Georgina, who finds the body, picks up the gun lying nearby, thus putting her fingerprints on the gun. As the destruction of the new will is not known at the time, Georgina has motive enough to have killed her uncle, but did she? It also emerges that the page of the fingerprint album containing the dabs of the self-confessed murderer has been torn out and the notes of the accompanying story removed. Has the murderer, fearful that their identity would be revealed, returned to recover the evidence?

And so the scene is set for Detective Inspector Frank Abbott and Miss Silver to put their collective minds to solving the problem and unmasking Jonathan’s murderer. Frank, thanks to an extended family, “has more relations than anyone in England” and naturally has an invitation to Jonathan’s party where he both meets Georgina and Mirrie, and hears the story associated with Jonathan’s prized fingerprint. Given his family connections, it is perhaps a surprise that he is allowed to investigate the murder, but at least he has a head start in knowing all the potential suspects. Miss Silver, brought in by Georgina, is equally at home, blending into the background, observing, listening, asking the odd pertinent question and resuming old acquaintances.   

Her masterstroke is to cultivate Maggie Bell, whom we first met in Eternity Ring, a disabled girl who passes the time by listening in to the village’s party line, an invaluable source of both gossip and information. All the villagers know of her proclivities but in extremis often forget that what they thought was an intimate conversation could be eavesdropped by others. Oh the days of party lines! With Maggie’s help Miss Silver is able to piece together the flow and content of telephone calls between Field House and the outside world which leads to an illuminating discovery.

Thematically, the book is very similar to The Odd Flamingo, published two years earlier;   – a naïve young girl desperate to escape her surroundings and better herself but falling under the malign influence of an unscrupulous petty gangster – for Jimmie Callaghan read Sid Turner – but the atmosphere of the two books is like chalk and cheese. Nina Bawden’s book is dark and brooding while Wentworth’s is still a fluffy, cosy concoction with little shavings of nut to give some bite.

It is readable and Wentworth is a masterful story teller, but for me it was too lengthy in the telling.    

The First Downloadable Newspaper

Print or digital is a burning question with many traditional newspapers and journals finding that they increasingly have to share content digitally to attract readers and advertising revenue. Many of us download newspapers or articles on to our digital devices or use on-line news aggregators to obtain our fix of news and opinion. It may come as a shock but the idea of a downloadable newspaper is at least ninety years old, just constrained by the limits of the technology of the time.

During the 1930s the emergence of radio stations, both public and commercial, seemed to pose an existential threat to newsprint. Some like William Finch, though, saw that the two media could strike up a symbiotic relationship by delivering newspapers direct to the living room using the emerging radio facsimile technology. In 1935, after founding Finch Telecommunications Laboratories, he set out to make the vision a reality.

RCA had already developed a facsimile system, but they saw it as a tool for business. The Finch system circumvented the RCA patents by transmitting image details by varying the amplitude of an audio tone, instead of its frequency, and recreating the image by generating an electric current at the tip of a stylus to trace the image on to thermally sensitive paper. Incidentally, this was the origin of the thermal paper used in cash registers to this day.

The transmitter and receiver were synchronized using the 60 Hz line frequency and the scanning head focused a pinpoint scanning spot on the document. One motor moved the scanner across the page while another advanced the page at the end of each scanning line which was marked by low-frequency sync pulses. The result was an audio signal that could be fed into any conventional AM transmitter.  

Housed in a 12-inch square wooden box that could be connected to the speaker of any radio receiver, Finch receivers retailed at $125 and used continuous rolls of thermal paper 5 inches wide which sold for a dollar and would last about a week. The downloading process was far from instantaneous, taking about twenty minutes to produce a twelve-inch page, but by using a timer to capture transmissions from an AM station overnight a six-page, two-column news bulletin could be produced in around six hours.

Several radio stations received Federal Communications Commission approval in 1937 and 1938 to experiment with the Finch system, the first being KSTP in St Paul, Minnesota. Realising that it had dropped the ball, RCA modified its radio facsimile system to enable the downloading of newspapers overnight in partnership with the St Louis Post-Dispatch’s station, KSD, in St Louis in 1937. Using a dedicated transmitter and ultra-high frequency, transmissions took place at 2 pm and the higher frequencies meant that they were less susceptible to radio static which distorted the image quality.

The RCA system came at a  price, $260, for which the purchaser got an ultra-high frequency receiver and facsimile printer housed in a single cabinet. There were no controls or adjustments, all the user had to do was to keep it fed with rolls of carbon paper and white printing paper. In 1939 Crosley Radio Corp. launched its own facsimile system, Reado, at the New York World’s Fair with two models selling at $60 and $80 plus $10 for a timer.

Despite the advanced technology deployed, the systems were not a commercial success. There was no real appetite for newsprint delivered this way, receivers were expensive especially for households just recovering from the effects of the Depression, and the systems were prone to paper jams and outages with content lost because of static. Advertisers shunned the new medium, preferring either newsprint or the airwaves, there were two incompatible standards fighting for market dominance which muddied the waters, and the final death knell was sounded by the paper shortages in the Second World War.

By the time peace returned, the focus had turned to television. Finch’s company was declared bankrupt in 1952 and RCA took over many of his patents.

The Odd Flamingo

A review of The Odd Flamingo by Nina Bawden – 251002

Nina Bawden is best known as a children’s writer and a novelist, but she cut her writing teeth writing crime fiction. The Odd Flamingo, originally published in 1954 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is a deep dive into the murky demi monde of London in the post war years, a world of nightclubs, spivs, drugs and petty criminals. Caught up it in it all is poor Rose Blacker, beautiful in her own way but having to pay a terrible price for making some poor life choices in an attempt to escape the drudgery of her existence and her domineering parents.

Bawden chooses to have her story narrated by Will Hunt, a lawyer who is a former boyfriend of Celia Stone and a good friend of her husband, Humphrey. He is in some ways an odd choice as narrator as while he is involved in unravelling the mystery, he is less a sleuth than a collector and distiller of information gathered along the way. Initially, he seems somewhat bloodless, detached from the events unfolding around him but e gradually develops an affection for Rose. While the worlds of some of the other characters in the story are destroyed by their association with the nightclub that is The Odd Flamingo, Will seems the most affected, losing faith in the friends he once respected and in a way his own innocence. His association with the nightclub will scar him for life.

Celia turns to Will in a panic as Rose has appeared on her door claiming to be pregnant from an association with Humphrey, up to that point a respectable headmaster. To substantiate her claim, Rose is able to produce half a dozen letters written to her by Humphrey at the height of their passionate affair. As Humphrey is away in London at a conference, Will agrees to try and find him and get nearer to the truth. Will quickly realizes that Humphrey is no longer the man that he once admired.

All roads seem to lead to The Odd Flamingo, a club which both Will and Humphrey discovered in their Oxford days, a “dreadful place”, according to Humphrey’s brother, Piers, “with coarse paintings all over the walls. You’ll probably enjoy it. Provincials do. They think it is Bohemia”. The tawdry side of Bohemia perhaps, as it is a stamping ground of drug dealers, runners, and minor gangsters, one of whom is Jimmie Callaghan, under whose sinister influence Rose has fallen.

Rose disappears, a young woman, a friend of hers, Jasmine Castle is found dead, murdered, and then an old man, Mr Menhennet, for the seemingly trifling sum of £30. As the pace of the plot increases, Rose has to be rescued from a life-threatening situation and the eminence grise behind a plot to frame another comes off second best in an encounter with a bus as a thrilling car chase ends.

There is a clever puzzle at the heart of the book which Will and the more sympathetic and grounded Detective Inspector Jennings of the Yard piece together, but for me the strength of the book lies in both its social realism, its willingness to explore social issues which might seem commonplace now but were daring at the time it was written, and the strength of the characters. Although we might have enormous sympathy for Rose and her plight, she is a flawed character, capable of plunging to the depths of the moral abyss when it suits her or when she is influenced by someone she is keen to impress.        

There is a very dark feel about the book with little in the way of hope or optimism, life with all its warts and wrinkles. Nevertheless, it is a very absorbing read and is a welcome addition to the canons of an impressive series.

Old Codgers Of The Week (16)

It all began innocently enough when an unnamed 77-year-old man cycled off from his home in Saint-Julien-des-Points, Lozère, to nearby La Grand-Combe in the Gard department of France to get some shopping. A familiar enough route but on his way home somehow missed the bend on the RN106, the winding road which follows the border between the two regions.

Disaster struck as his bicycle plunged down a steep 40-metre slope taking him with him and depositing him in the Gardon riverbed. Trapped in the steep ravine, he called out for help whenever he heard the sound of a passing vehicle, but for three days no one came to his assistance. He tried to climb up the ravine several times, only to fall back into the water.

Fortunately, his shopping which consisted of some food and a few bottles of vin rouge had survived intact and he was able to feed himself, the wine no doubt helping to stave off the cold damp nights on the Cévennes mountains.

On the third day a group of workers from the Interdepartmental Directorate of Roads heard faint cries from below. Investigating, they spotted a twisted bicycle and the frail silhouette of a man waving from the ravine. Emergency services were immediately called, and firefighters, assisted by a civil security helicopter, airlifted the exhausted man to Alès Hospital for treatment.

Found to be suffering from little more than a few minor injuries and mild hypothermia, the doughty pensioner was described by Dr. Laurent Savath, chief medical officer of the Hérault fire brigade as a “miracle. In the damp and cold…he proved remarkably resilient”.

Dead Spiders

We have a lot of spiders in our garden and some venture into the house. In the autumn we are treated to the sight of large arachnids scurrying across the living room floor in the frantic dash to find a mate. Sometimes they choose to use our premises as their last resting place and usually it falls to me to sweep up their remains. It is only recently that I have paused to look at their bodies in any detail and invariably they are on their backs with their legs curled in towards. I have never paused to wonder why, that is until now.

Relative to the size of their body, the legs of a spider seem rather thin and slender. This is because they do not contain extensor muscles, only flexor muscles. Instead of using muscles to move its legs, the spider relies on a sort of hydraulic system that utilises haemolymph pressure, the arachnid equivalent of blood pressure. Its body is somewhat akin to a hydraulic system, which relies on a hydraulic chamber to through its limbs so it can stretch them out.

As their flexor muscles have grown grow larger and more powerful to compensate for the absence of extensor muscles, spiders are able to control the flow of the fluid so that they can rapidly increase and then decrease the pressure of the haemolymph fluid when they reach their prey and grip them tightly. Thei muscles also allow them to climb virtually anywhere.

However, when they are dying or have died, spiders lose control of their body fluids and without the haemolymph pressure legs, they naturally curl inwards towards their body. Also, because a spider’s centre of mass, the point at which its mass is evenly distributed, the cephalothorax and abdomen are heavier than their thin legs, gravity pulls them on to their backs when their legs are weakened from a lack of haemolymph fluid.

While curled legs are invariably a sign that a spider is dead, some spiders like the male nursery web spider, use it as part of a mating ritual while others may use it as a technique to ward off the attentions of a predator. It is also possible that a spider is dehydrated or stressed when they pretend to be dead.

If you are not sure whether a spider is dead or not, just blow on it gently. They do not like to be disturbed and a gentle waft of air will send a live one scurrying away and merely rock a dead one back and forth. Another tell-tale sign is the state of its body which immediately starts to decompose upon death. If it is dull and wrinkly like a raisin, has its legs curled inwards and is on its back, it is almost certainly dead.

Nursery Tea And Poison

A review of Nursery Tea and Poison by Anne Morice – 250925

Tessa Crichton, actress and wife of Robin Price, an up and coming star of the Yard, is one of those people that cannot resist a mystery and is something of a murder magnet. A seemingly boring and eminently unappealing invitation to come down to Herefordshire to spend the weekend with her godmother, Serena Hargrave, suddenly becomes irresistible when she learns that Pelham Hargrave, Serena’s brother-in-law, has suddenly returned to the family home after twenty-five years during which he had built up a successful career in North America, bringing along with him his young American bride, Lindy.

Their arrival has set the cat among the pigeons, causing Serena’s daughter, Primrose, to become even more difficult. Fortunately, Robin has to go to the area to help with the investigation of a car crash with murderous overtones and so we launch into what is the eighth adventure of Anne Morice’s Tessa Crichton series, originally published in 1975 and reissued by Dean Street Press.

There are precious few characters in the book. To complete the cast list there is Nannie aka Edith Childers who has been with the family for decades but has become increasingly cantankerous and curmudgeonly, Mrs Thorne the home help who had suffered a personal tragedy many years ago when her son, Alan, had died of exposure, having been tied to a tree and left overnight, Jake Farrer, Primrose’s much older boyfriend soon to become fiancé, who rents premises at Chargrove Manor for his horses, and the local doctor, Richard Soames. Even Toby, Tessa’s cousin, an ever present in the series up to this point is missing.

Despite a limited cast list, Morice constructs an intriguing tale where the identity of the culprit responsible for two murders, while becoming increasingly evident, is not clear until the final pages. The first victim is Nannie who is found dead in her room after suddenly falling unwell. Lindy also was sick at the same time and his suspicions alerted, Dr Soames insists on a post mortem to discover that the old woman, who was a regular user of Warfarin, had taken or been given a lethal dose. Lindy’s indisposition is down to pregnancy but she becomes the second victim, paying the price for being too inquisitive about the fate of Alan Thorne.

Aside from the murders there are two major undercurrents swirling through the book. The first is the sudden arrival of Pelham and concerns as to whether he would assert his rights over the estate and settle down there, disrupting a hitherto cosy lifestyle for the residents of West Lodge, a prospect made even more real by the news of an heir in the oven, so to speak. This naturally leads to questions as to who exactly Pelham is and whether, Bratt Ferrar-like, he is an imposter conniving to scoop the inheritance playing on the long absence. Nannie, of course, would know for sure and perhaps this why her removal was of paramount importance.

The other theme, much darker, is the tragic tale of Alan Thorne and the well-meaning but ultimately flawed attempts to smooth things over. When the affair rears its ugly head again, it can only have tragic consequences. While many of the Tessa Crichton novels are light and fluffy, there is a darker, more serious tone to this story, although there is still much verbal wit and sharp social observation.

This may be the only book in the extensive canon of detective fiction where a record containing Bob Newhart’s monologue about a driving instructor gives the sleuth their lightbulb moment allowing them to piece the who and why of the case to their satisfaction. Great stuff!

The MotorMat

The UK’s first drive-thru restaurant was located on Derby Street in Bolton, Henrys, opening its doors in November 1980. Although it was well known for its fish and chips and pies, its menu also matched its American diner style décor, offering burgers and banana shakes. It was not until late 1986 that MacDonald’s opened its first drive-thru in Fallowfield in Manchester.

The epitome of convenience or another sign of a lazy nation, drive-thrus are now a familiar sight but Britain was late to the party by several decades where the concept had been firmly embraced by the land of the motor car, the USA. However, in 1947 Kenneth Purdy came up with a curious twist on the concept, the MotorMat, which he patented and which was first adopted by the Track Restaurant in Los Angeles a year later.

Designed to eliminate the need for the occupant of a car to leave the comfort of their metal box, it deployed a system of conveyor belts for taking orders and delivering food, using twenty stalls arranged like stalls around a central building. A description of the system appeared in Michael Witzel’s The American Drive-In (1994):

“At a new drive-in called “The Track,” it attracted customers from as far as Santa Monica with its unique type of service. Like a group of horses at a trough, cars ringed around a central building, forming a circular pattern. Twenty semicircular parking spaces bridged a center kitchen by means of metal tracks. Food and condiments rode the rails within carrying… compartment[s] each powered by a small ½-horsepower motor”.

“The diner rolled down the car window and was greeted by a stainless-steel bin that could be made flush with the door. Inside the box were plastic cups, a water bottle, menu, order pad, and change tray. It was large, too. Food for six people could be ferried back and forth on the elevated platforms. Patrons would jot down their orders and with the push of a button”…the unit travelled back to the kitchen where the order was processed and the bill calculated.

While the meal was prepared, the box was sent back to the car with the bill to collect the money. By the time it had returned to the preparation area, the food was ready and it was sent out again together with change to the vehicle. Purdy claimed that his system increased the speed of service by some twenty to 25%.

Initially, the MotorMat created great excitement with the restaurant serving 3,000 meals on the first day and 40,000 in the first two weeks, encouraging the Track to open two more outlets using Purdy’s system in 1950. However, the bubble soon burst and by February 1952 they had all closed down, as Julius Sterns’ auction announcement for the 19th, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on the 17th sadly reveals.

Houdini And Conan Doyle

For aficionados of crime fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the doyen of writers, the creator of the world’s most instantly recognizable sleuth, Sherlock Holmes and his faithful, if rather dim, companion Dr Watson. He was also an ardent supporter of Spiritualism, known as “the St Paul of Spiritualism”, spending the last ten years of his life proselytizing for the cause, probably as a reaction to the grief engendered by the death of his son and other close relatives in the First World War. In a remarkable parallel with Houdini, he wanted to be remembered for his work with Spiritualism rather than his triumphs as a writer.

Like Houdini too, there was a final great gesture after his death. In July 1930, 6,000 people crowded into the Royal Albert Hall in London to hear a lecture delivered by Conan Doyle, who had died five days earlier. On stage there was just one empty chair, marked with the author’s name. A medium rose, claiming to see the author dressed in evening dress sitting in the chair, and she whispered a message from the great man into the ear of Lady Doyle nearby. The reaction of the crowd was a mix of reverence, incredulity, and ridicule, some regarding it as the proof positive of spiritualism while others saw it as the last act of “a sad and deluded old man who had squandered his greatness”.

Perhaps inevitably, Conan Doyle and Houdini met, in 1920, the latter biting his tongue and expressing feigned interest as the writer banged on about Spiritualism. He even participated in a séance in which Conan Doyle’s wife, Jean, a medium who specialized in automatic writing, produced a message, five-pages long, supposedly from Houdini’s beloved mother. Later, Houdini denounced Jean as a fraud, as his mother, a Jew, would never have put a cross at the top of each page.

Relationships between Conan Doyle and Houdini soured over the subject of spiritualism, the pair waging war in the press, on lecture tours, with Houdini even calling Doyle “one of the greatest dupes” in a testimony to Congress in 1926. At the behest of Conan Doyle, in 1924 Scientific American offered a prize of $2,500 to any medium who could produce physical manifestations of spirit communications under stringent test conditions. A judging panel was formed of eminent American scientists and a place was found for Houdini “as a guarantee to the public that none of the tricks of his trade have been practiced upon the committee.”

After dismissing several mediums, Margery Crandon from Boston, the wife of a Harvard-trained doctor came before the judges. While slumped in a trance, her hands controlled by others, Crandon channeled a spirit that reportedly whispered in the ears of séance sitters, pinched them, poked them, pulled their hair, floated roses under their noses, and even moved objects and furniture about the room. A very attractive woman, Crandon used her sexuality to distract and disarm her male audience.

Curiously, Houdini was not invited to her early séances, something that put his back up, leading him to criticise the contest’s chief organiser for having too cosy a relationship with her. Houdini was able to spot her tricks, after devising a number or rigorous tests, but she gave him a run for his money. Fearing that the Scientific American would award her the prize, he launched a pre-emptive strike by issuing a 40-page pamphlet entitled Houdini Exposes The Tricks Used By Boston Medium “Margery”. He won his argument.

In-Car Record Player

In car entertainment has come a long way since I started driving when an eight-track cartridge was the bee’s knees. Now we have the delights of DAB radio and the ability to stream music via our phone through the vehicle’s sound system. But how did the idea of an in-car audio system begin?

In the 1950s vinyl records were the only medium around for transmitting recorded sounds. Peter Goldmark’s first contribution to the development of audio was by playing a role in the development of the microgroove 33 1/3 rpm phonographic disc, what we now know as the vinyl record, during his time at CBS Labs. He then developed an in-car record player introduced by Chrysler in 1956 under the guise of the Highway Hi-Fi.

The technology used was different from that deployed in a normal record player. It was designed to play at half the speed of a normal LP record and the discs had twice as many grooves. This allowed them to store an hour’s worth o music on each side, two hours’ worth of music in total, compared with the forty-five minutes in all that could be crammed on to a conventional LP. The larger capacity made it ideal for use in a car, reducing the frequency of having to change sides, a manoeuvre fraught with difficulties for the driver or requiring a halt in the journey.

The player, offered as an optional extra for various Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge, and Imperial models, came at a price, $200 or the equivalent of about 10% of the purchase price. And there were some significant drawbacks. As ordinary LPs would not play on the record deck, buyers were restricted to listening to music on special vinyl records made exclusively by Columbia Records for Chrysler and, of course, they only featured Columbia’s recording stars, a roster that did not include the by then favourites like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.

The players were not very reliable, either, and if they broke down, they had to be returned to a Chrysler dealer as the technology was beyond the ken of a local garage to fix. Moreover, as the player’s tone arm was designed to apply a heavier tracking force in an attempt to minimize skipping and jumping while on the move, although it still happened frequently, it meant that the grooves were worn down quickly, rendering the record unplayable after just a few spins.

Within a year Chrysler slowly pulled support for the technology because of the high warranty service costs and complaints about the limited number of available titles and in 1958 the Highway Hi-Fi was discontinued. That was not the end of the in-car record player, though.

In 1960 RCA, another record label, manufactured its own record player, which it offered to several car manufacturers. Its problem was that it could only play seven-inch LPs, which could not store very much music and required constant stops to change the disc over, an irritating and unnecessary hold up in any journey. It proved to be a bigger flop that the Highway Hi-Fi and was discontinued in 1961.

There was always the radio, of course, but for those who yearned to hear their own selection of music, a welcome and more robust solution was just around the corner. In August 1963 the compact tape cassette was invented by Lou Ottens and his team at Philips and it soon became the standard for in-car audio systems.