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While perusing Ebay, I saw listed a V disc 78 which caught my interest. Can somebody explain to me how they managed to squeeze more music onto the disc while still maintaining the 78 rpm speed, and why it would appear they didn't gain more popularity?

They were made for use by the Armed Forces, in short, and were used in WWII to entertain troops in the field.

There's some good info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Disc

HTH
Sean

Even though the wikipedia article talks about how many of these discs were destroyed, the truth is a LOT of these discs made it back to the mainland in the bottom of soldiers' suitcases. I've been to a number of yard sales and thrift stores where stacks of them were available for cheap.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a picture of the type of military phonograph used to originally play these records. It's a very late wind-up phonograph, because of the lack of electricity in many areas:

http://www.worldofgramophones.com/gramo2.html

Yup, my Grandfather brought a lot of them back. I have all his and for a time was buying them up whenever I could. The neatest V-disc artifact I have is an original shipping crate, complete with the records and unopened pack of needles that was sent with each box. There is some GREAT stuff on V-disc and they held up well. Even a V copy usually plays very well. I was lucky enough some time ago to find a pretty hefty stash of new old stock ones and bought a few dozen of them for 50 cents each. That's where my box came from with all the records in it, in fact. In hindsight, I should have bought them all, there must have been 300 of them, but I was a starving college student at the time and needed to be sure I had enough money for beer on the weekend!

Sean

Thank you, Sean and Shane!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the later era V-discs the very first records ever made out of vinyl? I thought I remembered reading that somewhere.

The RCA Victor long-playing Program Transcriptions were of vinyl, in 1931. Some (all?) of the 10" versions were the regular 'shellac' material, for some reason.

Shane wrote:Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the later era V-discs the very first records ever made out of vinyl? I thought I remembered reading that somewhere.

I don't know about first ones, but I definitely have 2 made out of vinyl. Unforunately they have worn out since some silly soldier played it with a heavy pickup!

What I like about V Discs is the fact that a lot of recordings that bands did exist in V Disc only - they performed some great arrangements exclusively for the forces.

Here is mine:

Edisone wrote:The RCA Victor long-playing Program Transcriptions were of vinyl, in 1931.

Or 'Victrolac' as it was called.

Shane wrote:Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the later era V-discs the very first records ever made out of vinyl?

I'm not sure of the composition of the very early Marconi 'Velvet Tone' records. But I don't think they were vinyl.

I think the Marconi records were pressed in some kind of shellac with a cardboard core