The Dead Media Notebook (11 page)

“After establishing the little theatre by the waterside and running it for some twelve years, Takeda left the operation of it to his young brother Kiyotaka (Takeda Omi II). The repertoire. is pictured in a lively manner in a little three-volume book published in 1730, Karakuri Kimmo Kagamigusa (‘Instruction in Kamakuri’) with woodcut illustrations by the well-known Ukiyo-e artist Kawaeda Toyonobu. The show was obviously intended mainly for adults although a few children are also watching the curious mixture of wizardry, trickery and mechanical expertise.

“Among 28 separate items pictured in Karakuri Kimmo Kagamigusa some seem to have been worked by actual clockwork (always with wooden cogs and gear wheels) others by purely physical power, driven by running sand or water movement or even on a system of levers and pulleys.

“One of the acts is a fortune-telling doll pointing in turn to portraits of different gods. From the snatch of conversation it is clear that this also involved a sort of lottery. One of the cleverest inventions was a little tumbling man: ‘An acrobatic doll that turned head over heels down three steps.’ This. seems to have inspired later European toymakers who were producing a miniature version based on the same idea by the end of the eighteenth century.

“The fame of the theatre and these makers of automata spread, and through the first half of the eighteenth century there is reference to them in various books. Kagami Choja Kagami 1714 described a very rich man’s house and how it contained an artificial tiger made by Takeda Omi I. It blew wind from its mouth into the guest room when the weather was hot like a sort of automatic fan.

“The Karakuri performances enjoyed such a vogue that competitors also opened up other theatres. A young man called Yasagoro was spoken of as an unrivalled master of the art in 1705 and especially good at ‘Water Magic:’ the close proximity of the river meant that wheels and machinery could be worked by water power.

“With the second generation of Takeda Omi the mechanical devices were put to a more serious purpose. The great Japanese playwright Chikamatsu, who devised dramas in the classical tradition of the Kabuki stage, was no more than a child of eight when the Takeda theatre opened in 1662. By 1705 when he was already famous, we find Chikamatsu settling down as the playwright of another prosperous Osaka theatre, Takemoto, run by yet another member of the Takeda family (Takeda Izumo, himself a playwright). Instructions which accompany some of his plays include such comments as ‘Grand karakuri in which Princess Jamateru changes into a mermaid,’ or ‘Princess Ikoma’s spirit runs after Izuta along the pine tree branch. Grand karakuri will be shown in this scene.’ [Takeda Omi III had his greatest triumph in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1741.]

“This was the greatest performance in his lifetime and created such a furore that the crowd rushed his theatre and the doors were closed at opening time for three consecutive days. Apart from their skill in performance, the dolls must have been most beautifully constructed and attractive in appearance since they appealed to so many contemporary artists. But perhaps the public taste became more sophisticated. It is possible also that the standard of performance had deteriorated. We are told that by 1758 the theatre performed 27 programmes a day, starting at 8 in the morning and ending at 4 in the afternoon. By 1772 the last of the theatres had closed down and a tradition which had flourished for over 100 years died.

“In modern times enthusiasts have skillfully reconstructed some of the toys after Takeda’s originals, and using the same materials, Professor Tatsukawa built a model of the tea-serving doll which worked so successfully it was given a programme on television.”

Source: AUTOMATA AND MECHANICAL TOYS, an illustrated history by Mary Hillier. Bloomsbury Books, London 1976, 1988. ISBN 1 870630 27 0.

From Bradley O’Neill

1. THERMAL MEMORIES
“The idea of thermal memory was tried by A.D. Booth, who, through the lack of other suitable material being available in Britain after the Second World War, was forced to experiment with almost every physical property of matter in order to construct a working memory. The device was never put into production because of the inherent unreliability of the system.

“Booth’s thermal memory consisted of a small drum whose chalk surface was capable of being heated by a series of small wires. These wires would locally heat a small portion of the surface of the drum and, as the drum rotated, these heated spots would pass in front of a series of heat detectors. When a hot spot was detected, it was immediately recycled back to the writing mechanism which would copy it onto a clean (cool) part of the drum. The back of the drum was cooled (erased) by a small fan so that, by the time the drum had rotated to a bring the same area under the heating wires again, a fresh surface was available to receive the recycled information.”

2. MECHANICAL MEMORIES
Built by A.D. Booth in post-WWII, mechanical memory consisted of a series of rotating disks, each of which contained a tiny pin which was allowed to slide back and forth through the hole, and as the disk rotated, a solenoid was used to push the pins so that they protruded from one side of the disk or the other. A small brush made electrical contact with those pins which were sticking out of one edge of the disk. It was this brush which enabled it to read the binary number stored by the pin positions.
“By putting a number of such disks together on one shaft, it was possible to produce either a serial storage unit (where one number is stored on each disk and the readout is done bit by bit as the disk rotates) or a parallel storage unit (where one number is stored on the corresponding positions of a series of disks and the readout of all the bits of a number takes place at the same instant).” [Booth constructed a ‘disk-pin memory device’, which looks like a small typewriter. About 20 reading heads are lined up along the spool, which houses the rotating disks. Booth’s ARC computer used this technology at one point in its early development.) pages 308-311

3. ACOUSTIC MEMORIES
The first reliable memory system.. Utilized in the following computers: EDSAC EDVAC UNIVAC 1 the Pilot ACE SEAC LEO 1
“The basic concept behind the device was to attempt to delay a series of pulses, representing a binary number, for a few milliseconds which, although a very short time, was a relatively long period as compared to the electronic cycle time of the machine. After they had been delayed for a short time, the pulses would be fed back into the delay system to again store them for a further short period. Repeated short delays would add up to a long-term storage.”
“The mercury delay-line was developed by William Shockley of Bell Labs and was improved upon by J. Presper Eckert, one of the people who designed and built ENIAC..

“(T)he mechanism would take a series of electrical pulses and convert them into sound waves by the use of a piezoelectric quartz crystal. The sound waves would then make their way, relatively slowly, down the mercury-filled tube. At the far end of the tube, the sound waves would be detected by another quartz crystal and the pulses, amplified and reshaped, would then be fed back into the front of the delay again.”

[Various problems including computer temperature, modulation/demodulation electronics, and delay time ultimately doomed this memory format. In the 1950s, advances led to the magnetostrictive delay, extinct by the 1970s.]

OTHER DEAD MEMORY STORAGE SYSTEMS:

4. Electrostatic storage (early CRT based systems)

5. Rotating Magnetic Memory (used in proto-disk drives, as in the ‘Mail-a-Voice’ recording machine)

6. Static Magnetic Memory (magnetic cores)

Source: A History of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams; Prentice-Hall, 1985. LOC#QA71.W66 1985

From Andrew Siegel

“I was quite amazed to learn in Mark Schubin’s September column [’Synching Fast’] of the existence of sound films dating back before 1900. Yet more amazed was I to read that said films had been transferred successfully to videotape. “Can you tell me where I might see these films, or better yet, acquire copies? Joe Salerno Industrial Video Services Bellaire, TX

“Mark Schubin responds: In 1894, Century Magazine carried an illustration of a projection room with a phonograph attached to a film projector for synchronized sound. The process was known as either Kinetophone or the Kinetophonograph. William Dickson claimed to have demonstrated sync-sound motion pictures as early as 1889, but that date has been disputed by others. Between the Century illustration and other American and European sources, however, there’s little doubt that there were sound movies sometime in the Nineteenth century.

“More recently, while poring through the archives of Sveriges Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Corp.), American Art Shifrin came across some Edison sound recording cylinders of unusual size. These turned out to be Kinetophone cylinders. Searching various archives, Shifrin found 48 existing Kinetophone cylinders and seven existing Kinetophone films, six of which match sound cylinders.

“Films were transferred to 1-inch videotape, and, after much construction of appropriate playback mechanisms, the sound was synchronized to the images and recorded on the same tape. The results were shown at a meeting of the New York section of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1983. Neither picture nor sound quality match today’s standards, but there’s no question that they are sync-sound movies. Exact dating of these films has not yet been determined.

“Shifrin would be willing to show you the tape version if you are in the New York area. He would also very much like to continue to pursue the “Kinetophone Project,” improving the transfer of both sound and image with modern digital techniques and searching for more old sound movies.

Source: Videography Magazine, December 1995, Letters to the Editor, pp. 20-21.

From Bill Wallace

“Animated or ‘living’ pictures made by Schoenhut, a Philadelphia toy maker, adorned Victorian walls. In one entitled A Good Joke (ca 1890) two clerics enjoying their wine move their arms and jaws while rocking with laughter. Concealed behind the lithograph is an array of clockwork, string belts, cardboard cams, and wire levers with counterbalancing weights. The scene is animated by a belt-driven cam from a slow-moving shaft in the clockwork while the highest speed axle carries a fast-moving fan that acts as a governor.

“Other patterns for living pictures were provided on flat, lithographed printed sheets to be cut out and animated according to the pleasure of the assemblor.” Also intriguing, but brief, is the description of the serinette, a miniature hand-operated barrel organ “used by 18
^th
century ladies to teach canaries to sing.” The illusionist Houdin allegedly built an automaton of a young lady winding a serinette, followed by her mechnical bird singing. Dead media within dead media.

Source: Mechanical Toys, by Athelstan and Kathleen Spilhaus, Random House, 1989, $7.99 ISBN 0-517-0560-4

From Nick Montfort

Parker, Parageographer and Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, writes in a note to his 1964 translation of the Lysistrata, on page 121 of the paperback edition:

“Askytale, a tapered rod which was Sparta’s contribution cryptography. A strip of leather was wound about the rod, inscribed with the message, and unwound for transmission. A messenger then delivered the strip to the qualified recipient, who deciphered it by winding it around a rod uniform in size and shape with the first. Any interceptor found a meaningless string of letters.”

If I correctly recall my conversations with Professor Parker on the matter of this code-stick, the device is pronounced something like SCOO-TA-LA.

In the Lysistrata, the women of Sparta and Athens conspire to deny their husbands sex until the two cities end their ongoing war. The men, therefore, wander around with hard-ons the whole time. The code-stick appears in Aristophanes’s comedy in the following scene between an Athenian commissioner and a Spartan messenger: (From page 92 of Parker’
s Translation)

COMMISSIONER [Throwing open the Spartan’s cloak, exposing the phallus.] You clown, you’ve got an erection!
HERALD Hain’t got no sech a thang! You stop this-hyer foolishment!
COMMISSIONER What have you got there, then?
HERALD Thet-thur’s a Spartan epistle. In code.
COMMISSIONER I have the key. [Throwing open his cloak.] Behold another Spartan epistle. In code.

Source THE LYSISTRATA OF ARISTOPHANES, a Modern Translation by Douglass Parker. Mentor Books, NY 1964, 1970.

Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe is an extraordinarily interesting new book that deserves a place of honor on the shelf of any dead tech enthusiast. Some of its speculations (the ancient Peruvians may have had hot-air balloons, the Parthians apparently had chemical batteries) seem a tad far-fetched; but the book is all the more interesting for that. This book is remarkably erudite, well- documented, very wide-ranging, over six hundred pages long, and its illustrations are particularly apt. The book’s brief chapter on “Communications” in very close in spirit to my idea of an eventual tome on Dead Media, if I ever get around to writing one.

“Airmail Service “The earliest mention of domesticated pigeons comes from the civilization of Sumer, in southern Iraq, from around 2000 BC. Most likely it was the Sumerians who discovered that a pigeon or dove will unerringly return to its nest, however far and for however long it is separated from its home. The first actual records of their use as carrier birds comes from Egypt. By the twelfth century BC pigeons were being used by the Egyptians to deliver military communications. And it was in the Near East that the art of pigeon rearing and trainind was developed to a peak of perfection by the Arabs during the Middle Ages.

“The caliphs who ruled the Moslem Empire after the death of Muhammed in AD 632 developed the pigeon post into a regular airmail system in the service of the state. Postmasters in the Arab empire were also the eyes and ears of the government, and with the local postal centers stocked with well-trained pigeons there was little chance of the caliphs failing to be warned of potential troublemakers in the provinces.