Philco's Sapphire Needle

To its passionate partisans, the phonograph needle is as bellicausal a topic as that needle of the medieval theologians on which angels might or might not throng to dance. Every variety of phonograph needle --vegetable (fibre, thorn), metal (steel, brass, chromium, etc.), mineral (sapphire) --has had its champions. Meantime, most people keep on buying steel needles. Last year 750,384,450 needles were sold in the U. S. Last week Philco Radio & Television Corp. needled the phonograph industry with its first basic change since electrical reproduction (1925). Philco put on sale a machine ($129.95 to $395) with a built-in needle intended to be easier on records, and longer-lived, than any other yet developed.

In Philco's extremely light pickup, a rounded sapphire point almost floats in the record groove, transmits the groove's vibrations to a tiny mirror mounted above it. The mirror, jiggling imperceptibly, picks up a beam from a pea-sized bulb, which it transmits to a photoelectric cell. The cell converts the light waves into the same sort of electric impulses transmitted by an ordinary pickup. Philco claims that the sapphire-tipped pickup will play a disc 700 times without damage; that the sapphire will survive 30,000 to 40,000 playings--about eight years of normal use. At a Manhattan demonstration, the pickup was dropped sharply upon a record, scraped roughly across its surface, made no scratch. Tone quality: about the same as in other mass-production machines.

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