Manufactured by Peirce for the U.S. Navy and Army Air Force. Wire recorders were used in military aircraft to allow the crew to record notes during flight. Packaging the wire in a metal cassette made it easier to swap and reduced breakage and tangles. After the war, Peirce sold these for office dictation well into the 1950s. This example appears to be for military use, based on the packaging.

The Peirce Wire-O-Matic was adopted in 1950 as part of the i/o mechanism for the SEAC computer, the first stored-program computer in the United States. Output from the computer was faster than a teletype or tape punch could handle. Instead, results were output to the wire recorder at high speed, then transferred to punched tape, which was then read and printed by a teletype.