The Dead Media Notebook (17 page)

“The manner of using the collect-on-delivery postage system for the free transmission of news is illustrated by an anecdote told by the poet Coleridge. While travelling in the north of England he halted at a wayside inn just as a postman was offering a letter to the barmaid. The postage was a shilling. Sighing sadly, the girl handed back the letter, saying that she was too poor to pay it. Coleridge, over the girl’s objection, insisted upon paying the shilling. When the postman was gone, she opened the letter and showed the poet that it was only a sheet of blank paper; but there were a few hieroglyphics on the back of it, alongside the address, which she had glanced at while she held the letter and which told her the news. ‘We are so poor,’ the girl explained, ‘that we have been forced to invent this method of franking our letters.’

“Franks were the curse of the mail service then, not only in England, but in America and other countries as well. One twelfth of the letters sent from London went free. Members of Parliament and government officials by the hundred were authorized to frank letters, and few of them were averse to handing out whole batches of letter paper with their names written thereon to friends and constituents. By one clever scheme of the evaders of postage, a frank was made as elastic as a rubber band. Three or four friends or associates in as many cities would agree to use the name of one of them in their correspondence. A at London would then send a letter to B at Dublin, having the cover wafered and sealed so that it could be opened without breaking the seals. B would write a letter, enclose it in the same wrapper. and without changing the name would mark out his own address and write C’s address in Edinburgh, as if B had removed to that place. C would receive the letter, alleging that B was visiting him, write another letter and enclose it to D at York. Thus one frank would carry at least three or four letters before it became so covered with addresses as to arouse suspicion.”

Source: OLD POST BAGS: The Story of the Sending of a Letter in Ancient and Modern Times by Alvin F. Harlow D Appleton and Company, New York 1928 383 H227o University of Texas

From Bruce Sterling

[Harlow’s charmingly dated work takes an extensive interest in the pigeon post.]

“It is said that during the siege of Acre by Lion- Hearted Richard of England, the town kept up communication with Saladin, the Saracen leader, by pigeon. Another good story is that during the siege of Ptolemais the crusaders captured a pigeon carrying to the city news that the sultan was bringing an army to its relief, and would arrive in three days. The captors substituted a forged letter in which the sultan was made to say that he could do nothing at the moment, and released the bird again; and by this the town was so much discouraged that it promptly surrendered. When the sultan arrived three days later he found the stronghold in the hands of the Christians. “ it seems probable that they were used by the Venetian Admiral Dandolo in the siege of Candia in 1204, at the siege of Haarlem by Frederick of Toledo in 1572 and of Leyden by the Spaniards in 1575, and coming down to a later day, at the seige of Antwerp by the French in 1832.

“Early in the nineteenth century, when the lottery craze was in full blast, pigeons were sometimes used to hasten the announcement of the winning number, especially by shrewd tricksters. This was common between Paris, a great lottery center, and Brussels, a large consumer of lottery tickets. One operator, by means of very swift pigeons, gave his Belgian confederates the winning numbers, which they proceeded to buy up, if possible, before the official news arrived. In this manner the schemer acquired a considerable fortune; but his device was finally discovered, and being somehow construed as fraudulent, he spent the rest of his life at hard labor in the galleys of Toulon.

“Nathan Meyer Rothschild, head of the London branch of his family’s banking business, was one of the earliest of modern financiers to use pigeons to bring the latest market news from other capitals of Europe. He spent considerable sums on his pigeon cotes, and was always ready to buy birds noted for unusual speed. There is a story that he received by pigeon the new of the French defeat at Waterloo, which he at first pretended had been a British defeat, and thus made a killing on the Stock Exchange.

“Pigeons were thereafter used by stock brokers, especially in England and France (where they were called pigeons de la Bourse) until the invention of the electric telegraph. They usually flew between London and the French coast in an hour and a half.

“Julius Reuter, founder of the great press-dispatch service bearing his name, used pigeons in his first press line.
there were telegraph lines from Paris to Brussels, and from Berlin to Aix-le-Chapelle; and to hook these two together he established a pigeon line between Brussels and Aix
.

“Probably the most famous pigeon messenger service in all history was that which was carried on during the German siege of Paris in 1870-1871.

“One by one the great city’s communications with the outer world were severed. A telegraph line cunningly hidden in the bed of the Seine was discovered by the Germans and cut. The Director-General of Posts and Telegraphs caused light copper balls to be made, in which letters were floated down the Seine by night; but the enemy soon discovered the trick, stretched a net across and gathered them all in.

“Parisian balloons continued to land in various parts of Europe, sometimes just where they should not be. One travelled all the way to Norway and landed eight hundred and forty miles from Paris. Another fell into the North Sea and the aeronaut was drowned, but his letters were saved. The Germans devised anti-aircraft guns, but did not hit any of the mail carriers. One aeronaut told of seeing cannon balls come almost to his basket, then fall back. Some balloonists fell in or near the German lines and underwent heroic adventures.

“The Parisian balloons were made of thin cotton cloth, covered with two or three coats of a varnish composed of linseed oil and oxide of lead, and were inflated with the illuminating gas used to light the streets. From Metz, during its seige, smaller balloons made of various materials were sent out without human occupants. The correspondent of the Manchester Guardian planned the first one, which was made of strong white paper and inflated by means of a wisp of lighted straw under it, the stock of coal in the city being too small to permit the use of gas. It carried eight thousand letters in a rubber cloth wrapper, accompanied by a note promising one hundred francs reward to anyone who found the package and took it to the nearest postmaster or the mayor of the commune and got a receipt for it. Others sent out later were made of thin paper lined with muslin, or of varnished cotton cloth, inflated with atmospheric air by means of a rotary fan.

“After this modern demonstration of the value of pigeons, they were taken up by nearly all the European armies, and special attention given to their breeding and training. During the recent Great War in Europe they were extensively used. The First and Second American Armies in France had one thousand birds each, and the Third Army six hundred and forty. Counting the instruction and breeding sections, we had over five thousand three hundred pigeons in France.

“In the Meuse-Argonne offensive, 442 American pigeons were used, and 403 important messages delivered by them. One bird delivered fifty messages. The pigeons were carried from their automobile ‘lofts’ to the trenches in baskets slung on soldiers’ backs. There were gas-proof bags for the baskets in case of a gas attack. But a pigeon might be liberated during such an attack and come through safely, presumably because it rose above the gas. The pigeon-veterans’ home at Fort Monmouth still houses many veterans of the Great War, some of them bearing honorable scars. ‘Cher Ami,’ who lost a leg on the Verdun front, frequently delivered messages over a thirty- kilometer front in twenty-four minutes. ‘The Mocker’ had an eye shot out. ‘President Wilson’ was liberated with an important message on November 5, 1918, during an intense machine gun and artillery fire, and reached his loft at Rampont, forty kilometers distant, in twenty-five minutes. On the way one leg had been shot off and his breast pierced by a bullet. The message was still hanging to the ligaments of the torn leg. A few months ago President Wilson was still alive at Fort Monmouth.”

Source OLD POST BAGS: The Story of the Sending of a Letter in Ancient and Modern Times by Alvin F. Harlow D Appleton and Company, New York 1928 383 H227o University of Texas

From Rich Burroughs

[Eadward Muybridge was an Englishman, originally named Edward James Muggeridge, but it seems he changed his name for some extra flash. In the mid 1870s he was charged with murdering his wife’s lover, according to Robinson. I’m assuming he was acquitted, as that was near the beginning of his experiments and I didn’t see any accounts of them being interrupted do to jail time.]

[Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope was basically a renamed phenakistiscope, according to Robinson. Ceram says that Muybridge made some improvements on the earlier device. What seems to have set Muybridge apart was his technique of photography.]

C. Francis Jenkins in “Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television”: “But it is to the persistence of Eadward Muybridge that we are indebted for the most scientific research in motion analysis, work which he began in 1879. His animal studies became classics with artists. Wet plates only were then available and he used above half a million of them in a plurality of cameras arranged in order along a track over which his subject was required to pass.”

“The story goes that a wager between the Governor of California and one of his friends led Eadward Muybridge to set up his series of cameras. The year was 1877, and the point in the dispute was whether a galloping horse ever had all four legs off the ground at the same time. To settle the question, Muybridge stationed twenty-four cameras side by side along a race track. Twenty-four threads were stretched across the track, and as the galloping horses broke these, it tripped the shutters. (Later a clockwork device tripped the shutter.)”

[Photos in Ceram’s book show both the arrangement of cameras that is described, and the results. A photo of the Zoopraxiscope (the projector) and some of the disks is on page 124. By the way, Ceram’s book is filled with excellent photos of dead media. I highly recommend it.] [Muybridge’s photography was not limited to animals.]

Burnes St. Patrick Hollyman in “Film Before Griffith”: “He [Alexander Black] saw Muybridge’s exhibition of moving horses and scientific studies of motion as well as the Zoopraxiscope, which included a picture of a dancing girl in costume.”

“Initially Muybridge’s aim was to produce instantaneous single photographs; the production of rapid series was incidental. Over the next few years however Muybridge produced and published innumerable series of photographs of every kind of human or animal motion. In the early 1880’s he took the step of re-synthesising [sic] his analysis of motion, projecting the short cycles of movement he had recorded by means of a projecting phenakistiscope, which he called a zoopraxiscope.”

“The projected images were still not, properly speaking, photographic: Muybridge was obliged to re-draw them onto the glass disks he used in his projector, copying them by hand from his photographic originals.”

[The disks were flat and circular, and loaded onto the projector’s side in a vertical position. The images ran in succession around the edge of the disk.]

[Muybridge’s work was to influence Etienne Marey, and Thomas Edison. Edison developed the Kinetoscope after viewing Muybridge’s system.]

“On February 27, 1988, Mr. Muybridge interviewed T.A. Edison as to the possibility of combining his Zoapraxiscope [sic, I have seen the name of the machine spelled at least three different ways] projector with Edison’s phonograph, but without result, though Mr. Edison did exploit such a combination some years later.”

Robinson confirms this: “Edison met Muybridge, whose zoopraxiscope evidently gave him the idea for a machine that could record and reproduce images as his phonograph recorded and reproduced sound. He promptly charged his English-born laboratory head, W.K.L. Dickson, with the task of developing something on these lines, and issued the first of a series of caveats designed to protect the tentative researches carried on at his establishment at West Orange, New Jersey.”

Source: Archaeology of the Cinema, C.W. Ceram, First American edition, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York;

“The History of World Cinema,” David Robinson, Stein and Day, New York, 1973; “Film Before Griffith,” John L. Fell, editor, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983; “A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television,” Raymond Fielding, editor, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967.

From Eleanor J. Barnes

I was listening last night to a CD of George Gershwin playing his compositions, derived not from tinny, crackly, bass-deficient 78s, but from piano rolls he made himself. The album is called “Gershwin: The Piano Rolls” and the liner notes are copious on the technology and history of piano rolls as a means of transmitting music otherwise available only as sheet music.

It struck me that though today we usually think of the player piano (when we think of it at all) as a novelty instrument, it is really not an instrument for playing by a musician, but a playback device for recorded music, just as was the hand-cranked Victrola, hence it, and piano rolls, are a (now-dead) medium.

Notes excerpted from the liner notes for the 1993 CD, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls.”

“George Gershwin’s virtuosic piano technique and ebullient style bring the Jazz Age to life in this digital recording of 12 of the composer’s piano rolls. Rare tunes never before recorded in any form [sic] are joined with Gershwin’s singular performance of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ all transferred from the original 1920s rolls to a contemporary concert grand piano. Using the Yamaha Disklavier, a computer-driven descendant of the player piano, Artis Wodehouse has captured note-for-note Gershwin’s own arrangements of his music, in a landmark recording as entertaining as it is historic.”