Ampro Corporation
Ampro Corporation was founded by Axel Monson who was born in Sweden in 1883. He arrived in the U.S. in 1902 and was employed by International Harvester.
In 1924 he began to study the motion picture industry and by 1929 had perfected a new 16mm. silent projector, known under the trade name
AMPRO, a name coined from Axel Monson Products. The business grew to such proportions that it employed 700 people.
In the early to late 1950's Ampro also produced a line of consumer reel tape recorders.
At some point it was acquired by the General Precision Equipment Corporation (a name that may be seen on the 1954 ads). The General Precision Equipment Corporation was a major manufacturing company involved in the defense and space industries as well as educational products and control devices for consumer goods.
General Precision, Inc. was the principal operating subsidiary of General Precision Equipment Corp. headquartered in Tarrytown, New York.
In 1956 the Corporation also acquired the Graflex company and the Ampro film equipment production was moved to the Graflex plant in Rochester, NY.
In 1968 the General Precision Equipment Co. was purchased by Singer.
We could find no ads nor mention of Ampro tape recorders after 1957.
We received this information from Remy Ann David www.crowmobile.com:
Ampro Corp. was founded by Raphael Alexander Meyer, I believe around 1971. The company name basically stands for Alex Meyers Products or, Ampro. Quality control rubberstamps when made under Ampro ownership had RAM indicated on the rubberstamp because they were his initials. He went into business manufacturing the AM-10 radio station broadcast console (AM were simply his initials as he usually went by " Alex "). It was lower in cost than similar units from Gates, Collins, CCA, RCA making it much more affordable and popular in smaller and medium market stations of both radio and TV. The 10 designation indicated 10 rotary potentiometers for 10 inputs. Later they introduced a more compact broadcast mixer that could also be utilized on location, in a portable format. And I believe that console is designated as the RM 10 and also had linear slide faders instead of rotary pots. It also featured, as I recall, FET internal switching, without the customary sound of relays switching and latching.
Around the same time, he also forayed into the manufacturing of continuous loop, NAB, continuous loop broadcast cartridge recorders. Most of these recorders were manufactured for government weather stations. While these were full grade broadcasts to NAB cartridge machines, the secondary audio cue tone track, that would automatically stop the tape, at the beginning of a song or a commercial, could be defeated. This allowed the messages for the weather service to be constantly repeated until the next update notification recording needed to be made. ITC and Pacific Recorders had the bulk of the NAB cartridge broadcast market. So Ampro NAB cartridge recorders were little known. They were actually made quite well and were quite rugged.
1951 through 1957 ads for the Ampro reel tape recorder
There was another Ampro company founded around 1971. We came across information that "Ampro was sold to Scully in 197x. In November 1983, Ampro/Scully was sold to TTC" www.oldradio.com
Turns out this was a separate newer company and you can read more about that Ampro company in the Ampro Stories link.
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