F. V. Hunt and the disc recording arts

If necessity is the mother of invention, F. V. Hunt surely was its father. Confronted with the need to play some delicate recordings of the Harvard Tercentenary in 1936, Ted invented the first phonograph pickup capable of operation with five‐gram bearing forces—a 10:1 advance in the state of the art—thereby ushering in the era of high‐fidelity sound reproduction. This was followed in rapid succession by a definitive study of tracing distortion with Pierce and Lewis, including an uncanny prediction of the feasible parameters of a long‐playing record. In 1941 and 1945 he received patents on inventions related to pickup and stylus structures, and in 1962 he again reduced the pickup bearing weights by an order of magnitude, producing successful 110th‐gram models which are yet to be commercialized. But Ted's favorite saying was that he would receive most accolades for the work done through and by his students. Two among them, Frank G. Miller (1950) and James V. White (1970), made significant contributions to t...