• Science Week: What was the favourite invention from your childhood?

    To celebrate Science Week bloggers are being invited to talk about the effect that science has had in their lives through a range of topics – each day the organisers will reward the best post with a Nintendo Wii console. This post is one of my entries to the competition.

    “Q1 – What was the favourite invention from your childhood?”

    While I was born a few years after the creation of the Compact Disc and so grew up during the time that its prominence began to take hold, I’d have to say that my favourite invention during my childhood was its predecessor the Compact Cassette, or as they were usually called, the tape.

    For me, a tape was a unique source of entertainment with any number of uses. It was a way to capture and listen to a particular song of the moment from some radio station like Atlantic 252 (before it went crap, of course). It was a way of checking out some album a classmate was big into at a time when MTV was one pop-centric TV station and the internet had yet to be invented. It was a way of piecing together songs you loved in an attempt to create the ultimate mixed tape (which you soon got bored with and taped a new one over). Finally, with thanks to the microphone input on my family’s old tape deck, it was an opportunity to “broadcast” a radio chat show, which usually consisted of me interviewing my cousin, who played out some character or another, whenever he stayed over.

    Of course it wasn’t just about pretending to run a radio station. I quite fondly remember one occasion when my brother and I recorded an interview with my sister and then edited it to sound like she was saying funny things about herself – so for example we’d edit in one of us asking her if she smelled bad to which she would magically say ‘yes, I do’. This kind of stuff was both fascinating and hilarious at the time.

    I think it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary the cassette tape was but that chances when you realise how inaccessible music was before the tape hit the mass-market. Portable audio was confined to FM radio players and the closest thing to a home-made compilation was to manually swap records around after each song.

    There were plenty of things that frustrated me about tapes too, although they formed such an integral part of the process that they’ve now become part of the fuzzy nostalgia I feel for the invention.

    I smile when I think about having to put cello-tape over the top of the cassette to cover the tab (that had been pushed in to stop it being recorded over). I laugh when I remember sitting like a dog in front of the tape deck with my finger over one button or another, waiting for a song to start or end so I could get a completely uninterrupted recording of it. I feel a mischievous pang of guilt when I think about the times I’d swipe one of my parent’s tapes that I knew they never listened to, just so I could record another ultimate compilation. And I can’t help but chuckle at the hi-tech way in which you would know if your batteries were running low on your Walkman (basically the tape’s speed would start to slow down and the singer’s voice would start to get slower and deeper).

    Of course there’s no doubt that CDs were worth the upgrade, likewise DAPs. But both have their limitations and neither have the ceremony to them that cassette recording did. There’s nothing wrong with that, I guess, but what is a little bit sad is that while the great format of vinyl has found a constant following despite its imperfections the cassette tape has not and is now all but dead.

    Some more of today’s entries: Simon, Conor, David, Catherine, Joe, Kevin, Joe, Paul (leave a comment if you have an entry you want added)