[ This is a portion of the correspondence from Dr. Clarence
 [ Hickman to his great niece, Judy, and is provided through the
 [ generosity of Dr. Hickman's family and MMDer James Brady.
 [
 [ In this excerpt he talks about the special perforator at Ampico
 [ which adjusted the beat distance of a hand-played draft master roll
 [ to conform with the fox-trot "metronomic" style.  The same perforator
 [ also automatically generated the chain patterns and slots at the
 [ beginning and end of each of the 83 playing notes.
 [
 [ The output of this special perforator was the production master roll,
 [ which was identical with the production copies except expanded two
 [ or three times.  It also had "sprocket" holes punched on the edge,
 [ so that the master roll could be synchronized with the crankshaft
 [ of the production perforator.
 [
 [ -- Robbie

June 3, 1978

Mr. Stoddard designed a punch machine that took the record of the artist
and corrected it so that every measure was of the same length.  This
made it possible to dance by the record, something that could not be
done if the measures were not of the same length.

I did not have much to do with this machine, but once, when he was away
on vacation, the man who operated the machine was having trouble with
the valve units not working properly.  There were seven valves in each
unit, and I figured that the same result could be obtained with four
valves and less chance of mal-performance.  When Mr. Stoddard returned
from his vacation he liked the unit, which had been in service for a
long time and had never failed, [so much] that he replaced all the other
80-some units with duplicates of the unit I had designed.

The only other contribution that I made to this machine was a method
of straightening piano wire.  He had small piano wire running from the
pneumatic to the mechanism that pulled a bar into position, so when the
punch bar came down it would cause that punch to make its hole.

Piano wire comes in rolls and it is difficult to straighten it.  He
tried all the commercial methods that he ever heard of, but the wire
was too small to respond to these methods.  I told him that I could
straighten the wire for him.  I just went into our darkroom and set up
a system with a length of about 3 feet of piano wire held in a clamp,
and on the other end of the wire I placed a weight and then applied
current through a rheostat until the wire was a cherry red.  I then
turned the current off and the wire was perfectly straight.

Furthermore, it was hardened on the outside by air quenching.  It could
still be bent without breaking for the core was not hardened.  He was
not only pleased but amazed at how straight the wire was.  He changed
all the wires on his machine.

Clarence