How Walt Disney Pictures helped start a tech giant

Walt and the many of the smart folks that worked with him were great tinkerers and inventors.  You know all the history behind the Multiplane Camera, the Omnimover, and any other number of fantastic inventions.  What you may not know (I certainly didn’t) is that Walt Disney’s little film company had an indirect hand in starting one of the monsters (in size anyhow) of modern technology.

It turns out that when Walt’s engineers were building Fantasound they did not have an effective way to test and tune it.  No surprise really, since nobody had really done 8 track recordings of this type before.  What they needed was an audio oscillator. 

An audio oscillator is a test device that allows the operator/technician to set a frequency and an associated output level.  The device puts out a constant tone at the frequency set, which allows the technician to observe how well the system it’s plugged into works.  All sorts of other ‘listening’ devices can be placed on the other end of the system to measure things like distortion, amplification, etc.  These devices are very handy, but as you can note in the YouTube link above, they can also be very dangerous when used incorrectly resulting in damage to hearing and even property. 

I think you can imagine how effective that would be in helping engineers and technicians working on Fantasound make sure the system worked as intended… to reproduce Leopold Stokowski’s soundtrack as precisely as possible.  So where did the Disney Company get such a device in the late 1930’s?

It turns out, a young guy by the name of Bill Hewlett, an electrical engineer, was working on his graduate thesis at Stanford.  He had come up with a way to make a better and cheaper audio oscillator using a 3 watt incandescent light bulb.  That invention lead to the first product ever built by a little company in a garage in Palo Alto now know the world over a Hewlett Packard.  That little company sold 8 of the HP200B audio oscillators to Walt Disney Studios in 1939 for use on Fantasound. 

In 1999 HP split the company and formed Agilent.  Agilent took over the test and measurement systems that had defined the young HP and that of courses traces its roots all the way back to that garage, $500 bucks and two friends.  In a twist of fate, WWII would go on the cement HP as one of the greatest technology companies with massive growth throughout the 40’s and 50’s.  The same war, along with the nasty strike that crippled the company in the early 40’s, would almost destroy the Walt Disney Studios as markets dried up and Walt and Roy struggled to keep the company afloat.

You can read more about the HP 200 audio oscillator here, here and here.