The mystery of "Himmmm"

The studio tech director sent me up to do inventory last week. We've been in that building since 1991, so it was exactly as much of a hairball as you'd expect. I figured I'd find a lot of odd, slightly-outdated tech, but I really didn't expect to dig around in a cable bin and pull these guys out of the bottom:

This here is an omnidirectional desk microphone that might be 40 years old. Or possibly 60. Google is not altogether helpful. The print is mostly worn off the plastic end, but what I can decipher seems to say "Superscope" and the mic matches pictures of the Superscope EC-1 for sale on eBay and elsewhere. One of the auctions said it was from the '60s, but I also found a photo of it in a scan from an equipment catalog dated 1984. The logo design itself reeks of early 1960s "wooooo space age!", but that doesn't necessarily mean it's from that era, just that the manufacturer hadn't updated the logo since then. Companies that have a solid long-term reputation often don't.

It was last in active use 20-25 years ago, judging from the expiration date on the AA battery I pulled out of it. Two decades of quiet time with a dead alkaline battery is usually a bad thing for electronics, but there wasn't any leakage or corrosion, so this thing might still work? The plug on the end is a mono headphone jack, which has not changed at all for a century. One of the other random boxes was a UHF wireless mic system that takes 1/8" mini-jacks, so the damned thing might even still be useful.

This little dude here is an AOI ECM-1025. Aoi Electronics is still making microphones in Tokyo, but they don't appear to manufacture this one anymore. I can find very, very little on it, other than a few 20-year-old journal papers that imply it is or was the gold standard for capturing coughing sounds in medical studies.

This one is slightly more interesting than the desk mic, because it might be a very early example of its kind. The style is known as a "tie clip", because its main use case was for news anchors working in a studio, who were obviously all going to be Important Men who Wore Ties. It's been phased out almost completely in favor of the similar but smaller lapel mic, which is light enough to clip onto pretty much anything near your face. I've been trying to pin down exactly when the thing would have been manufactured, so far with no success. One auction site says it's from the 1970s, and it does frankly look like something out of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. 

I can ballpark an earliest-possible date of about 1972. Going through YouTube clips, Walter Cronkite was still using a desk mic until 1969, after which all the big boys at CBS/NBC/ABC seem to switch over to using lav mics instead. (What is often called a "lav mic" today is actually a lapel mic; a real lav mic is so-named because the microphone and cable drop straight down from the center of a neck cord, like a lavalier necklace. You can see them on the anchors here, at least insofar as you can see anything on a 1960s camera signal dragged through the quagmire of old Quad tape.) The first time I see tie clips on the major anchors for the big three is Election Night 1972, which is honest to God up on YouTube in six-hour marathon clips, if you want to watch it, which I do not. Aoi Electronics was founded in 1969 and specializes in electret condenser microphones, which they still manufacture for use in things like cell phones and cameras.