History
of the
Macalester College
Foreign Languages Laboratory
All
images are clickable
| The Humanities Building was built in 1963 as part of the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center. The installation of a Foreign Languages Laboratory was an important tool for the language departments located in the building. This 50 position lab consisted of 30 booths in the center of the lab with 20 small rooms surrounding the central area. |
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Chester Electronics was chosen to provide the equipment for the new lab. Each of the 50 positions had the typically uncomfortable headphones with an attached microphone, a telephone-type dial, a volume and microphone controls, and tape machine control buttons. By dialing the code for the lesson posted on the board at the back of the room, a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the back room would start, or if it was already running for someone else, the student would join the program in progress. This system would allow 50 students to be listening to 50 different programs or all to the same program. |
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| In the original installation, 40 tape recorders were installed back-to-back in specially designed equipment racks. Notice how Lab Director and German Professor, Franz Westermeier, a student assistant and Lab technician, Jerry Bohn are admiring the new, state-of-the-art equipment. |
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The telephone type switching for this system was mechanical. It was a nightmare of color-coded wires and stacks of rotary switches which would tilt out for service. There were four full-sized equipment racks of these switches. |
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| In the front of the Lab area was a raised platform for the console. The "teacher god" could control the room and secretly listen to an individual or send out any of four channels of programming to an individual or group or allow the students to chat in one of four groups. |
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A recording studio and control room was used for many of the recordings used in the old Lab. The microphones in the studio could pick up several voices but communication from the control room to the studio had to be done with the telephone. Editing of all materials to make them useable on the four-track Chester system was done with specially made recorders. Records could be transfered to tape in this facility as well. |
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Sixteen special record/compare decks were added in 1969. A different design from the original decks they were plagued with troubles and, therefore, infrequently used.
The entire installation, although still working, was removed in the summer of 1982. Six Sony cassette machines and Stearns (not quite IBM compatable) computers replaced the old equipment. In 1987, a network of Macintosh Plus computers with a server, two 20 Mb server drives and a laser printer were installed. As it was in 1963, Language Lab was again at the cutting edge of technology.
The last remaining piece of equipment from the 60's finally died in 2000. The belt broke on the green IBM Selectric typewriter, then used only to type cassette labels. Since it would have cost many times what it was worth to repair, it went to the dumpster. A slightly newer, correcting Selectric has taken its place. Cassette tapes have also disappeared from the facility so the replacement type writer is used very little. Some video tapes still need labels but they will be gone as well soon.
The current facility, the Humanities Resource Center, was completed in 1991. The college has just begun to explore the possibility of another renovation of the entire Fine Arts Center.