221 minutes per side - 10 times as long as the subsequent mass production LP: a true long player! What went wrong?
A playing speed of 331rpm, almost 10x the subsequent vinyl LP is amazingly fast - but the
the grooves to have both 10x the speed and 10x the playing time must have been real microgrooves (nanogrooves) - and will have required very low amplitude, with resultant poor S/N ratio, limiting sound quality compared to 33 rpm vinyl, I wonder if it sounded better than 78s?
[Edited because I originally misread as 331 revs per hour!]
As it also said 331 rpm, i suspect the 221 should really be 22 and 1/2 minutes. Which would be about right. Or 22 and 1/3.
Everything a factor of 10 out? So actually only a 1.2” disk?
What seems to have gone wrong is that the typesetting code they used for this article made the decimal points disappear in 33.1 and 22.1 and instead turned them into a superscript 331 and 221, each followed by a superfluous slash as well.
Some people use a convention where everything after the decimal point is printed as superscript, so maybe their code for this is buggy.
Ah, that would make sense of it! (There was clearly something amiss, though without that knowledge the probable cause was mussing!)
Just guessing based on some googling. Or they messed up 1/3 and 1/2 somehow. In any case, surely they didn’t have a 331 rpm vinyl disc in 1948 with 221 minutes music per side 
Newspapers never lie!
They do when you scan them with a Xerox-machine 
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