While organizing/cleaning out my grandma's house, I came across an old newspaper with the following article.

Tempo 2 Section 3 Chicago Tribune, Sunday, June 15, 1986

As a matter of fact... By Phil Vettel

Record speed became 33 1/3 in a roundabout way

Q—Why are records played at 33 1/3, 45 and 78 r.p.m.? What have those speeds got to do with each other? I understand tape speeds—7, 3.5 and 1.75 inches per second—because those are mathematically related. But what's the relation in record speeds? And why 33 1/3? What was wrong with 33, or 34?

A—An intriguing question. I know it's an intriguing question because no one could give me an easy answer. This query thoroughly taxed the information-gathering resources of the Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA], whose public relations director, Patricia Heimers, took the better part of three days talking to a half-dozen engineers and various staff members and pouring through a couple of books before she was ready to venture an opinion as to where these speeds came from.

The following explanation represents the RIAA's best theory of how records came to spin at 78, 45 and 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. Information comes from interviews, the RIAA publication “Inside the Recording Industry: An Introduction to America's Music Business” and Roland Gelatt's “The Fabulous Phonograph,” published in 1954 by J.B. Lippincott Co.

Through 1896, most recordings were made on cylinders, although flat discs existed. But that year, Emile Berliner introduced a new way to cut grooves into discs, resulting in a product that produced better sound than cylinder recordings. Because discs were also easier to store and more easily mass manufactured, they caught on quickly with the American public and soon captured the lion's share of the market.

Those discs were played on a Berliner machine called a gramophone, which spun the records at 78 r.p.m. Selection of that speed, Heimers says, was just happenstance. “The inventor needed a motor to drive the record player,” she says, “and he found one that turned the disc at 78 r.p.m., although it was actually more like 78.26 r.p.m. It was a fluke, really; the inventor found a motor that worked at a certain speed and invented the disc to accommodate the motor.”

The 78 r.p.m. records ruled the market for a long time. In 1931, RCA Victor introduced the 33 1/3 format, in an attempt to boost record sales that had been dropping since the stock market crash two years previously, but the lack of turntables that spun at 33 1/3 r.p.m., combined with the poor quality of the records in general, doomed the project to failure.

But the notion of a slower playing speed persisted, the obvious attraction being that more music would fit on a record that didn't spin so fast. But getting more music out of the same size disc proved to be a perplexing technical problem; the slower the record spun, the worse the sound quality became, and moving the grooves closer together was unworkable for several reasons.

In 1944, CBS commissioned more research into the long-playing record, and in 1947, achieved success. Peter Goldmark devised a record that held between 224 to 300 grooves per inch [up until the, 85 grooves per inch was the norm] and delivered high fidelity, according to Gelatt's book. The record, dubbed the Columbia Microgroove LP, was designed to rumble along at 33 1/3 r.p.m. Heimers says that the 33 1/3 figure was essentially an arbitrary number, or more precisely a final compromise between sound quality and length of play [Goldmark's Microgroove could last up to 23 minutes per side].

The CBS folks were so convinced they had the record of the future in their hands that they offered their new technology to their No. 1 competitor, RCA Victor [they of the earlier, disastrous flirtation with 33 1/3], to facilitate the mass conversion to 33 1/3 format. RCA was less than enthusiastic, so CBS went at it alone, offering the new discs, as well as inexpensive players, in 1948.

RCA Victor responded with the seven-inch, 45 r.p.m. record the following year, and the struggle that followed is referred to as “the battle of the speeds,” and it went on for years. For a brief time, many recordings were available in 78, 45 and 33 1/3 formats, but as far as sales were concerned, plummeting figures suggest that many consumers headed to the sidelines and waited out the fight. [The development of multi-speed turntables made this a bit easier.]

It didn't take long. The jukebox industry gave a big boost to the 45, but classical music and Broadway cast albums, from such shows as “South Pacific,” made the 33 1/3 the format of choice. The big appeal, of course, is that listeners could hear entire symphonies or Broadway selections on 33 1/3 while changing sides no more than once, if at all. By the mid-'50s, 45 r.p.m. had become the format for single records, and 33 1/3 r.p.m. got everything else.

You may recall a turntable speed of 16 2/3 [I do] on some record players. That apparently was the sole domain of speaking records; music didn't sound good on that format. I recall, however, endless hours of amusement gotten by playing Mom's classical music albums on 16 2/3.

So, apparently, the origin of all the record playing speeds is that, given technological limitations and market considerations, each speed seemed like a good way to go at the time each was introduced. The reason that the three speeds seem unrelated is that they are. I wish I could give you a more authoritative answer, but that's the way these things go sometimes.

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