Darling’s Dictation

Throughout his career, Darling produced a prodigious amount of correspondence, sometimes many letters nearly every day.  Like many professionals of his generation, Darling did not type or write much of this himself, but rather dictated it to a secretary who turned the dictation notes into finished, typed copy.  We know that by the 1940s, if not much earlier, Darling dictated into a recording device, with the recordings later transcribed and typed. In the late 1940s he acquired a portable Dictaphone that recorded 15 minutes of dictation on a three-and-one-half-inch-wide plastic belt. Unlike earlier wax cylinders, the belts could not be reused, and just over 1200 of Darling’s belts survive. They date from 1951 through 1961 and record his dictation of nearly 4000 documents. Four brief clips from this 300 hours of audio recordings are presented here. Click on a cartoon, then on “Access this item,” to hear Darling’s voice.