The Fickle Needle of Fate

(Crackle.)

(Crackle.)

(Crackle.)

(Crackle.)

“Howdy, this is Steve Allen. No—wait a minute, don’t go looking in the glove compartment. I’m not there. I’m not really in the car at all. Not personally, that is. But you have to admit, that RCA Auto Victrola’s a fooler.

“You know, I enjoy sitting at my piano. I guess, uh, any musician does. But you! Man, you’re really in solid—sitting behind the wheel of a new, solid ’60 Plymouth.… Solid, man. Really solid!”

(Crackle.)

“Solid, man. Really solid!”

(Crackle.)

“Solid, man. Really solid!”

(Crackle.)

“Soli…”

(Click.)

You’re working in the parts department of a Plymouth dealership, car demo disc in your hand, campaign coverage of Nixon and Kennedy chattering away from another car in the garage.

And you’re wondering: Who the hell puts a turntable in a car’s dashboard?

*

Five years earlier, the verdict of Peter Goldmark’s son had been pitiless: “Boring.”

The radio in the Goldmark family’s Chrysler had no stories to listen to, no good music—why, the boy demanded, couldn’t they bring their own stuff to listen to in the car? By 1955, Peter Goldmark had plenty to work on already—the Hungarian émigré was an inventor of the 33 rpm LP for CBS Laboratories, and had created the nation’s first color TV system. But now, he admitted, “I kept thinking of my son’s question.”

Their car already had a radio, something almost unthinkable before the 1950s. Prior to transistor radios, getting music in your car meant installing a vacuum-tube set so monstrous that it required sawing apart the dashboard. But now Goldmark sensed an opportunity: why not hook a dashboard-mounted jukebox up to these sleek new audio systems?

Sure, there were problems—after all, the 33 rpm LP that Goldmark helped invent was too big for a dashboard. He needed something smaller, yet capable of running for an hour without skipping or switching records. Goldmark had his lab shrink the grooves down to cram three where one normally sat; they slowed the rotation; they buffered out potholes with rubber pads; they jammed the needle so hard into the record that it wouldn’t skip. The resulting “ultra-microgroove” 16 2⁄3 rpm record—a thick vinyl platter the size of a 45, but so slow and densely pressed that it took an hour to play—tested beautifully in a CBS exec’s jet black Ford Thunderbird.

Goldmark pitched the invention to Detroit, and within days found himself at a Chrysler test track. Horn-rimmed execs swapped records in and out of the player as the auto giant’s president wildly drove a car over a torture-track of cobblestone, speed bumps, and washboard test strips. Goldmark, tossed around the backseat, was on the verge of throwing up. But his player...