Forgotten compatriots. Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov. Museum of Television and Radio on the Internet - memories Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov biography

120th anniversary of the Russian engineer and American businessman-inventor Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov celebrated in his homeland - Tatarstan.

On the eve of April 7, the birthday of the creator of the world's first video recorder, an exhibition in honor of one of his most famous students opened at the KFU History Museum. On the same days, the republic was filming a film about Alexander Ponyatov, the customer of which was the “House of Russian Abroad named after. A. Solzhenitsyn." Ponyatov’s great-nephew, a native of Kazan, Nikolai Komissarov, presented KFU with a medal, which the great inventor awarded in the 70s of the last century to scientists who made discoveries in the field of radio electronics.

The impossible is possible

...When in 1959 in the USA Khrushchev was presented with a cassette recording of his meeting with Kennedy, he got angry and stamped his feet: it turned out that in the USSR there was no equipment on which this cassette could be viewed. A little later, Nikita Sergeevich learned that VCRs and many other radio electronics know-how appeared in the USA thanks to the Russian emigrant Alexander Ponyatov.

“For Americans, Ponyatov is a saint,” says Nikolai Komissarov. - All television - both commercial and state channels - idolize him. In educational institutions where there are departments of physics or radio electronics, they talk about it in superlatives. But in his homeland he was still known only to specialists.”

Alexander Matveevich was born in the village of Russkaya Aisha (now the village of Russko-Tatarskaya Aisha in the Vysokogorsk region) into a large wealthy family. The Poniatovs owned warehouses made of natural stone (one of the walls is still preserved), a house, an apiary, and a mill.

After graduating from a real school in Kazan, Ponyatov entered the mathematical department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University. young man dreams of connecting his life with aviation, therefore, after studying in Kazan for a year, he transferred to the Moscow Technical School (now Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School). Due to his participation in student gatherings, Poniatov had problems with the authorities. He leaves to study at a technical school in Germany. When in 1913 his parents sent him a summons for military service, he returned to Russia. During the Civil War, Lieutenant Ponyatov fought on the side of the White Army. When the war is lost, he flees through Siberia to China, in the late 20s. goes to America. In 1944, Ponyatov created the company “Ampex”, the name of which stands for: “Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov - excellence” (in translation from English - highest quality). With the end of the war, difficult times come for the company that produced components for radars, it loses orders and is on the verge of closure. In order to survive, Ponyatov takes on an extremely daring task: to put captured magnetic recording technologies exported from defeated Germany on an industrial basis. By the way, at first this work was offered to the RCA company, n O specialists led by David Sarnov and Vladimir Zvorykin refused: “It’s impossible to do!”

It took Poniatov 8 years to produce the first video recorder. As the famous journalist Mikhail Taratuta wrote, several companies were involved in the development of tape recorders after the war, but Ampex always remained a leader, having laid down from the very beginning - and this was a source of special pride for Ponyatov - very high quality standards in the tape recording industry. In addition, this company created the most important component of all post-war technology: the memory of the first computers was based on the principle of magnetic recording. Ampex special equipment was used in medicine, aviation, and astronautics. The same company brought color to television.

In the 50s and 60s. The famous Sony company today could only dream of such fame and the level of technology that Ampex possessed. In 10-15 years, the Poniatov empire has gone from an unknown group of enthusiasts to a world leader, an industry giant. In the 60s About 12 thousand people worked at its factories. The company owes much of its success to its leader.

Russian character

“Ponyatov compared favorably with the closed American top managers,” says Nikolai Komissarov. - He set tasks for his subordinates, inspired them, and led them. He was always at the center of events. Spirituality, a penchant for goodness - this is inherent, first of all, in the Russian character.”

Alexander Ponyatov was always proud of his origins. Russian birch trees were an indispensable attribute of his offices, he supported a Russian convent, and founded the St. Vladimir Home for the elderly in San Francisco. He helped many Russians simply by hiring them to work for the company.

At the end of his life, Alexander Ponyatov admitted: “I have achieved everything, I have a wonderful company. But I have no children, there is no one to continue my work... I would pass on everything to my country, all my experience! But this is impossible. Even a branch of my company in Russia is not allowed to create...” The great engineer died on October 24, 1980 in California. His company, in the form of a small design bureau, is still operating.

Rules of success by A. Poniatov

- Study all your life. (Alexander Matveyevich had the habit of tearing the book he needed into pieces of 10–12 pages, carrying it in his pocket and reading it whenever possible).

- Do not consider anything as dogma.

- Try to do a little more than your boss expects from you.

- Avoid any conflicts, since your probability of being right is no more than 50%.

Photo caption:

The world's first video recorder was introduced on April 14, 1956.

What else have our scientists discovered:

Aniline

It was synthesized by the Kazan organic chemist Nikolai Zinin (1812 - 1880). Aniline made it possible to establish the production of complex organic paints, medicines, and photographic materials.

Color television

It was first invented within the walls of an industrial school (now KNIITU (KKhTI) by the teacher of mechanical sciences and drawing Alexander Polumordvinov (1874 - 1942). For transmission, he used a photomechanical method. Historians have already proven the priority of the invention to our scientist. Previously, it was believed that color TV was invented by a Soviet engineer Ivan Adamian.

Radiotelephones

The predecessors of today's mobile phones, which we inherited from foreign manufacturers, were already in use in Kazan in the early 60s of the last century. The author of the know-how is Alexander Bespalchik (1924 - 2011), a legendary engineer, creator of Soviet military radio electronics, who built circuits into ARS-type car radios that allow you to connect ordinary telephone sets to them. These were radiotelephones - the predecessors of our mobile phones.

An excerpt from the book “AMERICA with Mikhail Taratuta” and materials from the magazine “My Home – Tatarstan” were used in preparing the material.

Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov(English Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff, March 25, 1892 - October 24, 1980) - electrical engineer (originally from the Russian Empire), who introduced a number of innovations in the field of magnetic sound and video recording, television and radio broadcasting. Under his leadership of the company he created, Ampex, the first commercial video recorder was released in 1956.

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early years
  • 1.2 Working in the USA
• 2 Recognition and memory
• 3 Interesting facts
• 4 Notes
• 5 Literature
• 6 Links

Biography

early years

Alexander Ponyatov was born on March 25, 1892 in the village of Russkaya Aisha, Kazan district, Kazan province (now the village of Russko-Tatarskaya Aisha, Vysokogorsk district of Tatarstan) into a wealthy family. His father, Matvey Ponyatov, came from peasants, but after taking up the timber trade, he became a merchant of the first guild. The Ponyatovs owned warehouses made of natural stone, a house, an apiary, and a mill.

After graduating from the First Real School in Kazan, A. M. Ponyatov studied at the Imperial Kazan University in the mathematical department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in 1909-1910. Then he transferred to the Imperial Moscow Technical School, perhaps due to his passion for aircraft technology.

Fearing persecution by the authorities for participating in student gatherings in Moscow, A. M. Ponyatov moved to study in Karlsruhe, where he received his education at the Higher Technical School. He left to study in Germany with the recommendations of Professor N. E. Zhukovsky.

When in 1913 his parents sent him a summons for military service, A. M. Ponyatov returned to the Russian Empire. On the eve of the First World War, he managed to graduate from pilot school and served for some time as a military seaplane pilot; however, after the accident he was seriously injured and underwent long treatment.

During the Civil War in 1918-1920, A. M. Ponyatov served in the White Army, after the defeat of which he emigrated to China, where until 1927 he worked for an electric power company in Shanghai. After that, he lived for some time in France, after which he moved to the United States.

Work in the USA

At the end of the 1920s, A. M. Ponyatov arrived in the United States, and in 1932 he received American citizenship.

At first he worked in the research and development department of General Electric in New York.

After moving to California, A. M. Ponyatov married an American woman, Hazel, and lived in the San Francisco suburb of Atherton, where he worked as an engineer at Pacific Gas and Electric. Then Ponyatov moved to the Dalmo-Victor Westinghouse company, which developed electrical equipment for aircraft.

A. M. Ponyatov also experimented with electronics in his own garage. There, in 1944, he established his own company, Ampex (until 1946 - Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company, until 1953 - Ampex Electric Corporation, after - Ampex Corporation). The name of the company is an acronym formed from the first letters of the creator’s name and the word “experimental” - Alexander M. Poniatoff EXperimental. Subsequently, the ending “ex” in the name of the company began to be interpreted as an abbreviation for the word “excellent” (English excellence), denoting the high quality of the company’s products.

Ampex manufactured electromechanical devices for precision tracking of radar antennas. During World War II, the company supplied electric motors for the electric drives of aircraft radars manufactured by Dalmo-Victor.

After the war, the company's activities were reoriented to a promising direction - the development of magnetic sound recording devices. This was facilitated by Poniatov’s meeting with Harold Lindsay (H. W. Lindsay, 1909-1982), who spoke about the captured German AEG tape recorder used by Jack Mullin (1913-1999) to demonstrate the advantages of magnetic sound recording in San Francisco on May 16, 1946. G. Lindsay became the chief designer of the first Ampex tape recorder. Work to improve magnetic tape was carried out under the supervision of D. Mullin.

In 1947, a prototype audio recorder, the Model 200A, was created and demonstrated in Hollywood. In the same year, Ampex managed to attract investments from the famous artist Bing Crosby in the amount of $50,000. The following year, Ampex produced several studio tape recorders, which began to be used by broadcasting companies to broadcast a signal with a delay (broadcast delay). On April 25, 1948, ABC began regular professional use of tape recordings with the Model 200A.

Subsequently, Poniatov's company produced a number of successful models of tape recorders: in 1949 - Model 300; in 1950 - Model 400 (low cost for independent radio stations); since 1953 - Model 350 and Model 400; in 1954 - Model 600 (portable). The Poniatovs invited promising specialists to the company, for example, 16-year-old Ray Dolby (1933-2013).

Scheme of cross-line video recording (Quadruplex system) Studio video recorder Ampex VR-1000A

In 1951, 59-year-old Ponyatov and his chief technical advisers Charles Ginzburg (1920-1992), Weiter Selsted and Myron Stolaroff (1920-2013) decided to develop a video recording device using the principle of cross-line recording with rotating heads (this method allowed combine the high speed of movement of the magnetic head relative to the tape, necessary for recording the frequency band of a television signal (several MHz), with the low speed of movement of the tape itself, necessary for an acceptable recording duration on one roll).

On April 14, 1956, Ampex demonstrated in Chicago at the NAB convention the first commercial video recorder (videotape recorder) VR-1000, using Q-format magnetic tape to record a video signal. Soon the first recorded programs went on air in the United States (November 30, 1956, CBS broadcasts a video recording “ Doug Edwards and the News"; "The Edsel Show" was videotaped for rebroadcast in the western part of the country on October 13, 1957).

Until 1955, A. M. Ponyatov served as director of Ampex, and after that he was elected chairman of the board of directors. The company he headed was for a long time a leading manufacturer of VCR equipment.

When A. M. Ponyatov retired in 1970, he retained the position of honorary chairman of the board of directors. He died in 1980.

Recognition and memory

The merits of A. M. Ponyatov were recognized by a number of awards, including medals of the American Electronics Association (AeA) (“For Achievement,” 1968), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) (“Pioneer of the Creative Industry”) and honorary membership of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) . He was also elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

In 1961, AMPEX and its leader received an Academy Award for their contributions to technology.

The developments of his company have been awarded numerous Emmy Awards awarded by the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

After Poniatov's death, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the development of television technology, the American Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) established the "Gold Medal" in 1982. Poniatoff" (SMPTE Poniatoff Gold Medal), awarded for achievements in the field of magnetic recording of electrical signals.

A museum of magnetic recording (Ampex Museum of Magnetic Recording) has been opened at Stanford University with materials dedicated to Poniatov and his company.

The name of Alexander Ponyatov was little known in the USSR. One of the first to talk about A. M. Ponyatov in the Russian mass press was V. G. Makoveev, a Soviet and Russian television and radio broadcaster who conducted research in the archives of Kazan and Moscow. In 1993, he also helped M. A. Taratuta produce the TV show “America with Mikhail Taratuta,” dedicated to Ponyatov.

On April 9, 2012, the Museum of History of Kazan University hosted events related to the celebration of the 120th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov: the opening of an exhibition, speeches by physicists and relatives of A. M. Ponyatov.

• Ampex's main competitor in the development of video recording devices at first was David Sarnoff's (1891-1971) RCA company, which produced television cameras. RCA released its first commercial video recorder (TRT-1A) a year later (in 1957) and called it “Television Tape Recorder”, since the word “videotape” (Russian videotape, videotape) was registered by Ampex as a trademark.
• In the summer of 1959, the VRX-1000 video recorder was demonstrated at the American exhibition in Sokolniki. On it, the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N. S. Khrushchev was presented with an Ampex video tape with a recording of his meeting with US Vice President R. M. Nixon. The video recording was sent to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Sound Recording (VNAIZ, now VNIITR), but there was nothing to play it on.
• In the fall of 1959, during N. S. Khrushchev’s visit to the USA, he met with A. M. Ponyatov.
• At the main entrance of Ampex representative offices in various countries, by order of A. M. Ponyatov, birch trees were planted.

Notes

1. 1 2 3 4 The inventor of video recording studied at Kazan University // Kazan Gazette. - April 7, 2012.
2. Olga Lyubimova. Valuable video // “Arguments and Facts - Kazan”. - No. 16. - April 13, 2012.
3. 1 2 3 4 5
4. Ampex History. www.ampex.com. Retrieved April 9, 2016.
5. 1 2 3 4 5 6
6. Makoveev V.G. Genius from the village of Russian Aisha! // Project “TVMUSEUM.RU” - Museum of Radio and Television on the Internet.
7. Today at KFU they will honor the memory of the inventor of the video recorder, a native of the Kazan province // “Arguments and Facts - Kazan”. - April 9, 2012.

Literature

• In Memoriam Alexander M. Poniatoff // Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. - 1981. - Vol. 2: No. 3, March. - P. 221.
• Dunaevskaya N.V., Urvalov V.A., Shulman M.G. Contributions of Boris Rcheulov and Alexander Ponyatov (From the history of magnetic video recording) // Electrosvyaz. - 1999. - No. 12. - P. 46-49.
• Makoveev V. G. Alexander Ponyatov - creator of the video recorder. 110 years since birth // Broadcasting. Television and radio broadcasting. - 2002. - No. 1. - P. 86-90.
• Afanasyev A.V. The first video was invented by Russian // “Russiandigital”. - 2002. - August-September.
• Leites L. S. Developers of the first professional video recorders // Cinema and television technology. - 2003. - No. 1. - P. 84-87.
• Samokhin V.P. Alexander Ponyatov and his Ampex // Sound engineer. - 2008. - No. 4. - P. 75-79.
• Leites L. S. Contribution of Alexander Ponyatov to the creation of the first professional tape recorders and video recording formats // Magazine “625”. - 2009. - No. 1 (45). - P. 72.
• Patrick Seitz. Alexander Poniatoff Made Tape Recorders Roll // Investor’s Business Daily. - 2009, September 9.
• Piero Scaruffi. Alexander Poniatoff // A History of Silicon Valley. - 2011. - 537 p. - ISBN 978-0-9765531-8-2
• Samokhin V.P. Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov (120th birthday) // “Science and education: electronic scientific and technical publication.” - 2012. - No. 4.

Links

• History of the Early Days of Ampex Corporation. As Remembered by John Leslie and Ross Snyder - a brochure about the early years of Ampex

Ponyatov Alexander Matveevich Kazarnovsky, Ponyatov Alexander Matveevich Peshkovsky

Russian and American engineer, who introduced a number of innovations in the field of magnetic sound and video recording, television and radio broadcasting, was born on March 25, 1892.

Under his leadership of the company he created, Ampex, the first commercial video recorder was released in 1956.

Creator of the VCR

A.M. Ponyatov

Alexander Ponyatov was born in 1892 in the village of Russkaya Aisha, in the Kazan province. His father was a merchant - a former peasant who became rich in logging. As is typical for such people, the father spared no expense on his son’s education, and Alexander Ponyatov studied not only in Kazan (at the university’s Faculty of Mathematics) and at the Imperial Moscow Technical School (the future Bauman Moscow State Technical University), but also at Friederizian, the oldest technical university in Germany. Ponyatov’s hobby was aircraft engineering: he studied it in Moscow and Karlsruhe, where he went on the recommendation of the founder of aerodynamics, Nikolai Zhukovsky. In Germany, Ponyatov allegedly hid from possible persecution for participating in student societies, but in 1913, having received a summons, he returned to the Russian Empire, graduated from pilot school and served as a seaplane pilot until he was wounded.

During the Civil War, Ponyatov enlisted in the White Army, then fled to Shanghai, where he first became involved in the energy sector, working for the Shanghai Power Company. Then, through Paris, he went to the USA, where electrical engineers were especially in demand; he worked for General Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Dalmo-Victor before founding his own company, Ampex, in 1944. AMP in the name stood for Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov, and EX for excellence; According to legend, this meant not only “superiority” (in terms of the quality of goods), but also “Excellency”: Poniatov was a colonel in the tsarist army. However, the version about the word experimental, “experimental”, seems more plausible. By the way, it was at Ampex that 16-year-old Ray Dolby, the future inventor of the famous sound system, began his career.

During the war, Poniatov's company was engaged in radar antennas, and after that it reoriented itself to magnetic sound recording equipment - also thanks to the war. American recording pioneer Jack Mullin transported captured German tape recorders from AEG to America. Mullin, Ponyatov and the latter's colleague Harold Lindsay began to study the achievements of German sound recording and soon succeeded in developing their own tape recorder - from the late 1940s the company produced one popular model after another. Ampex's success, in particular, was facilitated by a skillful marketing campaign - the company signed a contract with singer and actor Bing Crosby. The main radio star of those times, he was an enthusiast of new technologies and it was not for nothing that he put Poniatov on the company: the first recorded radio broadcast (1948) became a real breakthrough in broadcasting.

Poniatov began thinking about the production of devices that reproduce not only sound, but also moving images, in the early 1950s. He wasn’t the only one thinking: RCA, the corporation of television pioneers Vladimir Zvorykin and David Sarnov, also began to work on video. However, Poniatov managed to overtake Zvorykin: together with Lindsay, Dolby and the head of the design team, Charles Ginzburg, he developed the world's first reel-to-reel video recorder using the cross-line recording method. The massive VRX-1000 (it could only be used in a studio) and its film were presented in Chicago on March 14, 1956 at the National Broadcasters Conference. And six months later - on November 30, 1956 - with the help of a new device, the CBS channel broadcast a recorded television program (it was an evening news broadcast).

For the Ampex video recorder, he immediately received an Emmy Award, and a little later, an Oscar. In 1958, NASA began using Ampex VCRs. Later, Poniatov's company invented electronic editing, mastered color video, created a slow-motion signal playback device (necessary for sports television and the filming of music videos and advertising), developed a video graphics system and became a pioneer of special effects. Just as photocopying technology is often called photocopying, video recording has long been called “ampexing.”

Ponyatov died on October 24, 1980, by which time he had long since retired, holding the position of honorary chairman of the board of directors of Ampex. He remembered his Russian origin and, according to legend, ordered birch trees to be planted in front of the offices of his company in different countries. In the fall of 1959, Ponyatov met with Khrushchev. He undoubtedly had something to tell the leader of the country he left 40 years ago, and Khrushchev knew about it: shortly before the meeting, the Soviet leader received a recording of his own conversation with Nixon, made using Ampex technology. However, Khrushchev could not watch it - there was simply nothing to watch.

On January 27, 1948, the first household tape recorders began to be sold in the United States. This day can safely be considered the name day of the device, without which not a single disco was complete until recently. The first thing the tape recorder played publicly was a recording of a show by American singer Bing Crosby. These were reel-to-reel devices from Ampex (model Ampex 200), with which you could even record on magnetic tape. The price for one is $149 each. In the first week of sales, the entire stock of the company was sold - 40,000 units. It seems that Americans gave everything they had for their favorite music.

The invention belongs to the Russian engineer Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov, who later became a businessman. The inventor founded the company Ampex in 1944, and in 1948 released a device that made him a millionaire.

Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov was born on March 25, 1892 in the village of Russkaya Aisha, Chepchugov volost, Kazan province, 40 km away. northeast of Kazan in a large family of a peasant who took up trade (according to other sources, when Alexander became a student, his father was already a merchant of the 1st guild, the largest Kazan timber merchant). The archives preserve documents about his baptism, about studying at the 2nd real school in Kazan, about passing an additional exam in Latin (without it it was impossible to enter the University after real school), about military service since 1913, etc. .

In 1909, he entered and studied for one year at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the then famous Kazan University in Russia, but in 1910 he decided to continue his studies in the capitals. I asked the rector’s office to send my documents first to St. Petersburg University, then to Moscow University, but in the end, for unknown reasons, I entered the Faculty of Mechanics at Moscow Higher Technical University. He said that he considered himself a student of Professor N.E. Zhukovsky and, under his influence, “fell ill” with aviation. However, already in 1911, Ponyatov, fearing punishment for participating in student unrest, left with the recommendations of N.E. Zhukovsky to continue his education in Germany at the Polytechnic of Karlsruhe.
Since A. M. Ponyatov was subject to conscription into the Russian army in 1913, he apparently returned to Russia this year. According to his American relatives and company employees, he was drafted into the army from Kazan during the First World War, graduated from pilot school and served as an aviation officer, had a serious accident and was treated for a long time.
Speaking once to the employees of his company, Ponyatov said that in 1918–1920 he “served in the White Army and fought with the communists,” and until 1927 he worked in Shanghai, in the electric power industry. Lived briefly in France, moved to the USA. There is information that he worked for some time as a pilot for civil airlines and flew seaplanes.

He worked at the New York Research Institute of the General Electric Corporation, then again in the electric power industry, but in the suburbs of San Francisco. Married an American. But he could not forget aviation and went to a subsidiary of the Westinghouse Corporation. The company developed on-board electrical equipment for aircraft, just as the first radars appeared. Poniatov was then a specialist in servo electric drives. In 1944, he founded his own company for the development of electromechanical devices and became a subcontractor for Westinghouse.

The Ampex company was founded in the early 1940s in California in Redwood City (about 200 km south of San Francisco). The abbreviation of the company name consisted of the initials of the founder and the first letters of the proud word “exellent” - incomparable, excellent. She began her work, as often happens, in an old garage and at first produced selsyns - electromechanical devices for the precise tracking drive of aviation radar antennas. The first employees of the company were three young engineers C. Andersen, C. Ginzburg and S. Henderson. Ponyatov knew how to choose his employees! He managed to assemble a very strong team, which was later, in 1952, joined by a very young student and the now famous Ray Dolby (the author of a unique sound system for film screening, which is equipped in the world's leading cinemas).

At the end of the war, defense production in the United States was curtailed, the Ampex company was left without orders and began to look for “new bread” - in the words of Poniatov himself. A new direction in the company's work was suggested by captured German technology for magnetic recording of electrical signals. The American radio-electronic giants, and above all RCA, neglected this technology, which was very capricious at that time - they invested too much money in the dissemination and improvement of mechanical sound recording technologies. By this time, mass production of professional and household equipment for operational mechanical sound recording on a disk made of thick plastic film had already been prepared. Poniatov’s team had nothing to lose, and Ampex was the first company in the United States to develop magnetic sound recording equipment. The new direction in the company's activities brought success, although not immediately.
The first professional tape recorders for radio broadcasting in the United States did not find demand for a long time, which very often happens with products that are fundamentally new to the market.

Help unexpectedly came from the famous pop singer Bing Crosby, who was also a passionate radio amateur. For some reason, B. Crosby was pathologically afraid of the microphone in an empty studio during live broadcasts of concerts. He happily jumped on the technical innovation and quickly appreciated the benefits of recording and broadcasting his concerts from magnetic tape. His first major order provided a good start for new Ampex products, and the pop superstar's concerts using tape recorders provided excellent advertising.
During its heyday, the number of Ampex employees grew to 15 thousand
Since then, Ampex has taken one of the leading positions in the field of professional recording equipment, which has thoroughly wiped the noses of competitors from JVC, Philips and other equally well-known brands.

Soon, no broadcasting company in the United States could operate without tape recorders. The company began to grow quickly, especially after it launched the production of magnetic tape with its own brand. Quite quickly, old connections with military customers were restored, who needed reliable equipment for multi-channel recording of telemetry signals during testing of complex military equipment, and above all missiles and nuclear weapons. Magnetic recording methods turned out to be unrivaled here. German rocketry specialists brought to the United States already had experience working with magnetic recording of telemetry during testing, and their opinion was taken into account in the first post-war years. Starting with broadcast tape recorders, the Ampex company very soon, at the behest of the times, focused on a more profitable special technology, having mastered the methods and equipment of precise, instrumental magnetic recording.

For almost half a century (from 1946 to 1995), Ampex held the world scientific and technical leadership in professional magnetic recording equipment for broadcast and special signals. She also held patents on many fundamental methods and devices in this field, which helped her for decades to fend off persistent attempts by American, European and Japanese competitors to break up the firm and buy it piecemeal. However, the truly stellar achievement of the company and its founder was the creation of the world's first professional broadcast video recorder.

Television broadcasting in the United States developed explosively after the war. The American radio-electronic industry, which created enormous production capacity during the war years and was left without orders in 1945, found work in the country's telecommunications industry. As a result, by 1952 the American market was completely saturated with black-and-white televisions, and in 1953 the practical introduction of color television broadcasting began using the NTSC system, developed in a short time. American broadcasting companies, having already tasted the delights of the new technology of audio broadcasting with magnetic recording and editing of program materials, now literally demanded the creation of equipment for working with a television signal. Many companies have tried and failed to solve this puzzlingly complex problem - after all, a television signal occupies a frequency band 500 times wider than broadcast audio. With such a stripe, the magnetic tape must “fly” past the magnetic head at a speed of at least 50 meters per second. The most obvious way to reduce this speed is through multi-track recording. But the great RCA, which developed a multi-track device with frequency division of the video signal spectrum, failed to cope with this task, and the famous Bing Crosby, who led and financed the development of a multi-track device with time division of channels, also failed.

In 1956, the ambitious youth team at the Ampex company, led by 64-year-old Ponyatov, solved the problem of magnetic video recording better than anyone else and before anyone else in the world, making their company, as well as its founder and owner, famous throughout the world. They came up with a cross-line recording method on a relatively wide tape (50.8 mm, or two inches) with four rotating heads. At the same time, a compromise was reached: the tape was pulled in the apparatus at the usual speed of 38 cm/sec., but the head “drew” transverse lines on it at a speed of more than 40 m/sec., and each magnetic line contained 16 television lines. This world's first video recording standard, known as "Q", was used for almost 20 years and was replaced by the "C" standard (for one-inch tape), developed by the same Ampex.

You must understand that the VCR itself is only the top of the technological pyramid, and at that time there were not enough “bricks” to create it. It was not easy to make an apparatus for magnetic recording of sound, but it turned out that creating a video recorder was tens and hundreds of times more difficult. The video recorder, by all accounts, turned out to be the most complex serial radio engineering device of that time, and in order to develop and organize the production of the device itself, video tape, new components and materials in a small company and with limited funds from Ponyatov and his team, it took a combination of heroic organizational efforts with brilliant scientific and technical solutions. Ponyatov himself understood this well and formulated it this way: “For seven years, only God was ahead of us in this matter!”

On March 14, 1956, at the National Association of Radio-Television Journalists in Chicago, A. Ponyatov’s company first demonstrated its creation - the VRX-1000 video recorder (later renamed “Model-IV”). And six months later - on November 30, 1956 - CBS first used Ampex for the delayed broadcast of the Evening News program with host Douglas Edwards. Since that time, Ampex has become a leading developer of video tape recorders.
In 1958, the American space agency NASA chose Ampex video recorders to service space flights and has not yet changed this principle. Two years later, the American Film Academy awarded the Ponyatov company an Oscar for technical achievements.
In the summer of 1959, the VRX-1000 video recorder was demonstrated at the American exhibition in Sokolniki. On it, the General Secretary of the CPSU N.S. Khrushchev was presented with an Ampex videotape with a recording of his meeting with US Vice President R.M. Nixon. The video recording was sent to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Sound Recording (VNAIZ, now VNIITR), but there was nothing to play it on. The first Soviet video recorder "Kadr" appeared in 1960.

With the help of Ampex's developments, the process of video recording with mechanical fixation and reproduction of images and sound became controllable already in 1963, that is, electronic editing appeared. Having gone through the stage of mastering the recording of color images (1964), the company in 1967 created the “Ampex HS-100” slow-motion signal playback device, which completed the revolution primarily in the coverage of sports competitions, and then was widely “promoted” in the creation of music videos and advertising.

It is difficult to list everything done by the Poniatov company.
In 1978, she developed a video graphics system, and three years later mastered digital special effects. Ampex's creation of videotape made a very strong impression on television program makers. For many years, photographs of A. Ponyatov hung in video recording rooms all over the world, and the recording process itself was called “ampexing” for a long time.
In 1971, a portable video recorder was released, costing 1,500 USD. The highest level of production standards established by Poniatov became the corporate philosophy of AMPEX, which has earned the role of a world leader in the production of audio and video recording devices, magnetic tapes, and data storage systems. From 1952 to 2003, the company registered 50 patents.

Alexander Matveevich worked as president of Ampex Corporation until 1955, then he was elected chairman, and in 1970 honorary chairman of the board of directors. According to the recollections of his friends and colleagues, he regretted that he could not do his business in Russia, and he was also upset by the lack of direct heirs. A. Ponyatov died on October 24, 1980.
Together with I. Sikorsky and P. Malozemov, Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov is included in the list of the most significant business leaders in America.
He lived for 88 years and was awarded in the USA and a number of other countries every honor imaginable for a scientist and businessman. The Russian diaspora in northern California reveres him almost like a saint - he gave jobs to thousands of Russians, helped create an Orthodox convent, a shelter for the elderly and spared no expense in charity. But in his homeland (Russia) he is still known only to specialists.

60 years ago, the first commercial video recorder, the VR-1000, was demonstrated in Chicago. Its appearance became possible thanks to the ideas of the Soviet inventor Isupov and the former lieutenant of the White Army, engineer Ponyatov

The fate of VCRs in the USSR was determined by the meeting of Nikita Khrushchev with US Vice President Richard Nixon on July 24, 1959 at the American exhibition in Sokolniki. The Americans recorded their conversation, the so-called kitchen debate, on an AMPEX studio video recorder and presented the tape to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. But there was no apparatus for its reproduction in the USSR, and therefore Nikita Sergeevich’s indignation knew no bounds.

In the late 1980s, VCRs were an indispensable attribute of semi-underground video salons, where citizens of the USSR could see pirated copies of Western “action films” and “soft” erotica. Before the advent of a device that made it possible to record television images and sound on tape (video tape recorder), the recording and subsequent storage of television programs was carried out using so-called video recorders. They were bulky devices consisting of a movie camera synchronized with the frame scan of a video monitor.

“Film Registration” had a lot of shortcomings. The main one was the low image quality, but at least it provided the opportunity to exchange and sell television programs. Later, by the early 1950s, in addition to low quality, another drawback appeared: television broadcasters literally “gobbled up” kilometers of film, and already in 1954 they consumed more of it in total than all Hollywood film studios. Even the fact that a system for relaying television programs appeared did not solve the problem - different time zones still “left” the film recorders in operation...

The principle of the inventor Isupov

...Nowadays, many cannot even imagine that some thirty years ago there were no all kinds of “gadgets”, that telephones were landline and with a disk, “photos” were not posted on social networks, and one of the distinctive qualities of a real photographer was ability to insert film into a tank for subsequent development. What can we say about the “patina-covered” times of the 1930s-1940s, when tape recorders were produced in single, if not prototype, copies. And the greatest successes were achieved in the field of sound recording... Well, there’s no need to even guess: like in many other areas and technologies, in sound recording, with the prospect of video recording, Germany was ahead of the rest. In particular, AEG and its Telefunken brand.

Firstly, German scientists have made the furthest progress in creating magnetic tape. Secondly, the Germans, who themselves are no strangers to the search for discoveries made by scientists from other countries, made a lot of effort to implement what was proposed by the Soviet inventor K.L. Isupov back in 1932, the principle of recording sound on magnetic tape in transverse lines when placing magnetic heads on a rotating disk. Isupov’s principle, which remained unrealized in the USSR, made it possible to solve the most important problem - the speed of film rewinding and its volume. After all, a different principle for installing magnetic heads for video recording required a speed of at least five meters per second. Thus, it turned out that to record 15 minutes of low-quality video, a reel of film 4500 meters long and almost 13 centimeters wide was required.

However, in Germany they could not implement Isupov’s principle. The idea of ​​video recording was left for the future, but the future for German manufacturers of video and audio recording equipment immediately after the end of World War II looked somewhat vague.

And then the American company AMPEX and its founder and chief engineer Alex Ponyatoff came into play. He is Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov.

Alexander Matveevich was an amazing person - an amazing destiny, outstanding discoveries, grateful students. One of them should be noted, first of all, who later became famous and was invited to work at AMREX at the age of 16, Ray Dolby, the creator of the noise reduction system named after him. Moreover, Dolby, from a young age, became involved in the development of a video recorder, which became the best achievement of the AMPECH company and Mr. Ponyatoff. But - in order...

Lieutenant of the White Army

...Alexander Ponyatov was born on March 25, 1892 in the Old Believer family of the merchant of the 1st guild Matvey Ponyatov, in the village of Russkaya Aisha, Kazan district, Kazan province. After graduating from a real school in Kazan, Ponyatov studies at the Kazan University at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, goes to Moscow, where he continues his education at the Imperial Moscow Technical School (now Bauman MSTU), but participates in student unrest and, in order to avoid possible persecution from police, went to Germany, where in 1913 he entered the Higher Technical School in Karlsruhe. In enrolling Poniatov here, he was helped by the recommendation of the “father” of aerodynamics, Nikolai Zhukovsky, who saw in the young Poniatov the hope of Russian science. Alexander Ponyatov did not have time to finish school in Karlsruhe - he received a summons sent by his parents for military service and returned to Russia. And soon the First World War began, before which he graduated from pilot school. While piloting a prototype seaplane, Ponyatov had an accident, which was followed by long treatment in the hospital, then returning to duty and participating in hostilities.

During the Civil War, Alexander Ponyatov served in the White Army, after the defeat of the “Whites” he emigrated, until 1927 he worked at the Shanghai Power Company in Shanghai, then lived for some time in Paris, and finally in 1929 he ended up in the USA. There he first settled on the East Coast, worked in the research department of General Electric, and in 1932 received American citizenship and moved to California. Here, working at Westinghouse and developing the first radars, he commits two fateful acts - he marries an American woman, Hazel, and after experiments in his garage, he founded his own company, AMREX, in 1944.

At first, Ponyatov’s company was called Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company, then Ampex Electric Corporation, then Ampex Corporation, but the main thing is that the first word in the name of the company comes from the letters of the founder’s first name, patronymic and last name and two letters from the word experimental, that is, “experimental” " Later, based on the consistently high quality of the company’s products, “ex” began to be considered as the first letters of the word excellence, that is, “superiority.” The existing versions, that “ex” comes from the word “Excellency”, because Ponyatov supposedly was a colonel in the White Army, do not stand up to criticism - Alexander Matveyevich finished his service as a lieutenant and could not count on being addressed as “Your Excellency”...

...Everything that Ponyatov produced was truly excellent in quality. And his first tape recorder, based on the design of a captured German company AEG, and his Model 200A tape recorder, demonstrated in Hollywood in 1947. The Model 200A impressed the famous Bing Crosby so much that the singer and actor immediately invested $50 thousand in AMPEX. Crosby was right - all subsequent models of Poniatov’s tape recorders were better than the previous ones. Ponyatov produced tape recorders for large radio stations - Model 300, and relatively inexpensive ones for independent radio stations - Model 400, and portable ones - Model 600, which became a favorite recording tool for reporters.

But Alexander Ponyatov was not only an outstanding engineer. He had a great sense of the situation and understood that whoever developed the VCR would not only go down in history, but also earn millions. In addition, he had an amazing talent for attracting the most capable engineers, without any fear that they would want to take a bite of his pie: while they work with him, the developments are his; If you want to go on a free voyage, you are welcome. Ponyatov could help start his own business, but saw only good in future competition.

Therefore, not just good engineers, but the best worked on the first video recorder, work on which began in 1951 - Charles Ginsburg, a future member of the National Academy of Engineering, and Miron Stolyaroff, who later became famous not only for his technical achievements, but also as the founder of the psychedelic movement. in clinical psychotherapy...

Poniatov's first video recorder

...The best minds of the AMPEX company understood that in order to eradicate film recorders, it was necessary, using the principle of cross-line recording with Isupov’s rotating heads, to combine the high speed of the magnetic head relative to the tape with the low speed of the tape itself, since otherwise it was impossible to obtain a high-quality recording of the television signal or ensure long-term video recording on one roll of film. And Ponyatov succeeded - almost exactly sixty years ago, on April 4, 1956, the first commercial video recorder VR-1000 was demonstrated by the National Association of Television and Radio Broadcasters in Chicago. It was heavy - almost half a ton, cost 50 thousand dollars and was not intended for domestic use. If only because it required a specially equipped vehicle to transport it. But the quality of the images recorded and reproduced using the VR-1000 shocked the seasoned members of the association. It was a real breakthrough. Just a year later, Ponyatov took the stage to receive an Emmy Award for outstanding technical achievement. And when he was asked to prepare one of the VCRs for the American exhibition in Moscow, he agreed...

...Khrushchev was shocked by the recording of his conversation with Richard Nixon, but did not know that in Leningrad, at the Lenkinap plant, whose library received a magazine with articles by AMPEX engineers, work had been going on using video recordings for two years. He transferred the reel of film both to Leningrad and to the Moscow Institute of Sound Recording, where, unlike the Leningraders, they decided to reproduce the American recording format - it allowed both the reproduction of foreign recordings and the sale of domestic ones abroad. It is now difficult to say how closely Poniatov’s work was used, but, be that as it may, already on February 20, 1960, an experimental program recorded on tape was shown on Central Television. The first domestic studio video recorder “Kadr-1” was produced in the amount of 160 pieces, and the video recorder “Kadr-3”, which made it possible not only to record color television programs, but to edit them, served until the end of the 1970s.

Home video recorders began to be developed after Nikita Khrushchev retired. The first - in 1967, black and white "Malachite", was produced by the Riga Radio Plant. This was followed by models of Elektronika video recorders and many others, but they all bore the stamp of the “Soviet” attitude towards private consumption - they were distinguished by low quality and a very high price - up to two thousand rubles.

Our "Frame-1"

...In the late 1980s, Soviet citizens gained access to foreign household video recorders, as well as domestic ones, for example, the famous “Electronics VM-12”, which used not film, but VHS cassettes (also, by the way, the hero of the day - in 2016 This format is celebrating its 40th anniversary.) “Electronics” was also not of high quality, it was “copied” from foreign samples, but now the private consumer of video products could not visit video stores, but watch at home - a market for video recordings also appeared - the classics of world cinema.

The appearance of household cassette video recorders, while the active import of foreign-made devices into the country began, entailed serious consequences. Firstly, despite attempts to stop the flow of Western film production by introducing into the Criminal Code articles on liability for the distribution of pornography and the cult of cruelty (Article 228 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), the VCR gave millions of Soviet people access to foreign cinema without ideological control. Secondly, VCRs played an important role in the collapse of the domestic film distribution and film industry. Soon, control, even through the management company, became a thing of the past, “videos” became even more accessible and cheaper, video stores gave way to video rental stores. And then the VHS format, which seemed unshakable, became an anachronism - “digital” came along, the so-called laser players, which are now giving way to compact flash drives. After all, modern TVs can play recordings directly. And flash drives turn out to be unnecessary when using the principle of online playback, directly via the Internet...

...And what about Ponyatov? His brainchild, AMPEX, was a leading manufacturer of studio video equipment for many years. By the way, Nikita Khrushchev, during his visit to the USA, specifically agreed to meet with Mr. Ponyatov. The meeting took place, but what the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and the former lieutenant of the White Army talked about is unknown.

Ponyatov proposed to create a branch of his company in the USSR, but was refused

While video cassette recorders are being produced, their manufacturers make royalties to the account of AMPEX, where Poniatov was chairman of the board of directors until his resignation in 1970. He always ordered birch trees to be planted at the entrance to the offices of his company, supported nursing homes, and when hiring, he gave preference to engineers who had Russian roots. At the very end of his life, Ponyatov admitted that he once proposed creating a branch of his company in the USSR, but was refused. Alexander Matveevich died on October 24, 1980 at his home in California. In Poniatov's honor, the American Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers established a commemorative gold medal. AMPEX still exists today, producing audio and video equipment of exclusive quality in small batches. Those who have used the products of this company consider it correct to say not “video recording”, but “ampexing” as a sign that the quality of the devices created by Poniatov is higher than all others.