Columbia Debuts the Long-Playing Record

On June 21, 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record to the world at a press event in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. The new discs were pressed in a nearly unbreakable vinyl called Vinylite and spun at 33 1/3 rpm instead of the standard 78, packing about 25 minutes of music onto a single side instead of under five. The work came out of CBS Laboratories, where chief scientist Peter Goldmark set out to fix something that had annoyed every classical listener in the country: a single symphony spread across five or six records that had to be flipped and swapped every few minutes. Columbia's president, Edward Wallerstein, made the point in person at the demonstration, standing next to a towering stack of old 78 albums while holding only a slim handful of the new records. Inside two years, every major label that had held out, RCA included, switched over.