Lyndon Johnson's telephone recordings nearly lost forever due to obsolete dictaphone technology

What was said

"When they finally got around to opening it, they discovered that it was recorded on dictaphone. The technology had been surpassed and bypassed and it was gone. And so when the archivists tried to figure out how they could access these dictaphone tapes, they looked all around and there weren't any dictaphone machines around. Finally, they found the last one in the Smithsonian in Washington. It was in a museum of technology."

Historian HW Brands reveals that crucial recordings of President Lyndon Johnson's phone conversations were almost permanently lost because they were recorded on obsolete dictaphone technology. The last functioning dictaphone machine had to be retrieved from the Smithsonian's technology museum to access the tapes. All biographies of Johnson published before 2000 missed this critical primary source material.