[NJARC] Stefan Kudelski, Polish Inventor of Recorder That Changed Hollywood, Dies at 83

[David Sica]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/stefan-kuldelski-inventor-of-the-nagra-dies-at-
83.html<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/stefan-kuldelski-inventor-of-the-nagra-dies-at-83.html>

I used his 'Nagra IV' in the late ''70s and early '80s. This guy made
elegant equipment!

--Dave


Stefan Kudelski, Polish Inventor of Recorder That Changed Hollywood, Dies
at 83

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: January 31, 2013


Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the first professional-quality portable
tape recorder, which revolutionized Hollywood moviemaking and vastly
expanded the reach of documentarians, independent filmmakers and
eavesdroppers on both sides in the cold war, died on Saturday in
Switzerland. He was 83.


His death was announced by the Kudelski Group, the Swiss electronics
engineering firm he founded in 1951. No cause was given.


The Polish-born Mr. Kudelski was an engineering student at a Swiss
university in 1951 when he patented his first portable recording device,
the Nagra I, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, about the size of a shoe box and
weighing 11 pounds, that produced sound as good as that of most studio
recorders, which were phone-booth-size. Radio stations in Switzerland were
his first customers.


The bigger breakthrough came seven years later, when Mr. Kudelski
introduced a high-quality tape recorder that could synchronize sound with
the frames on a reel of film. Mr. Kudelski’s 1958 recorder, the Nagra III,
weighed about 14 pounds and freed a new generation of filmmakers from the
conventions and high cost of studio production.


Along with the newly developed portable 16-millimeter camera, the Nagra
recorder became an essential tool for the on-location, often
improvisational techniques of New Wave directors like François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard, and American documentarians like D. A. Pennebaker, who
used the Nagra to record the 1965 Bob Dylan tour featured in his classic
film “Don’t Look Back,” released in 1967.


In various interviews, Mr. Pennebaker, Mr. Godard and Mr. Truffaut have all
credited Mr. Kudelski with helping to make possible the informality and
journalistic realism of their work.


Mr. Kudelski received Academy Awards for his technical contributions to
filmmaking in 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1990, and Emmy Awards in 1984 and 1986.


In the 1960s, Mr. Kudelski’s firm also began making miniature recorders for
what its online catalog calls “surveillance and security” work. The first
of these pocket-size machines was the SN “Serie Noire,” which the company’s
Web site boasts was “originally ordered by President J F Kennedy for the
American secret services.”


The collection of bugging devices on display at the International Spy
Museum in Washington, a privately financed archive run by former C.I.A.
employees, includes a Nagra recorder obtained in the 1980s from Stasi, the
East German internal security agency.


The Nagra’s value to customers like those was generally classified. But it
received acclaim by consensus from professionals in the radio, television
and film industries. By the early 1960s, Nagras were the standard recording
equipment in all three industries. They remained dominant until the advent
of digital audio recorders in the 1990s. The company now makes digital
recorders, as well as some analog tape devices, but does not rule the
market as it once did.


“There was virtually no film made from 1961 until the early ’90s that did
not use the Nagra,” Chris Newman, an Academy Award-winning sound engineer,
said on Wednesday. Mr. Newman used the machine in winning Oscars for “The
Exorcist” (1973), “Amadeus” (1984) and “The English Patient” (1996). He
also used one in making a celebrated 1971 action thriller, “The French
Connection.”


“We would not have the movies we have today without it,” Mr. Newman said.


Stefan Kudelski was born on Feb. 27, 1929, in Warsaw. He escaped Poland
with his family at the start of World War II and settled in Switzerland
later. After earning a degree in physics and engineering, he began his
company as an engineering design firm. It has since become a major Swiss
manufacturer of media and security equipment.


His son André succeeded him as chief executive and chairman in 1991. In
addition to André, he is survived by four other children, Isabelle,
Marguerite, Henri and Irène Kudelski. His wife, Ewa, died in 2000.


Mr. Kudelski’s tape recorders were carried on several expeditions to Mount
Everest. In 1960, the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard took a Nagra
aboard his deep-sea research submarine, Trieste, to record his impressions
as he descended to 37,800 feet below the surface of the Pacific off Guam.
It remains the deepest known place on the Earth’s ocean floor.