The Dead Media Notebook (51 page)

One of the machines is shown without a disc. Underneath the drive arm is a small rectangular platform that has what look like eight small buttons. or are they bolts? What might be a cylinder is mounted directly under the drive rod as well. The exact method by which the notes are struck is not apparent. [What might be the metal tone-comb is visible underneath this mechanism. The tongues run the full width (21”) of the case.

The three Reginas each use differently sized tune sheets, and have 41, 56 and 156 tongues respectively. Most have a clockwork drive; a cheap ($8.70) variant of the first model is hand cranked. Here is the description of the largest Regina:

“No. 7305. Regina music box. Case is made either of mahogany, maple or oak beautifully polished. Size is 21 inches long, 18 ½ inches wide by 9 ½ inches high. Working part contains 156 tongues, while the tune sheets are 15 ½” in diameter, rendering possible the rendition of the most difficult and classical music with perfect precision and charming execution. With this magnificent instrument, you can have rendered in your home, such music as the most brilliant pianist is capable of and that without the slightest musical talent or the expenditure of the hundreds of dollars necessary to secure a musical education. The extra music costs little more than would the same were it in paper form. Weight boxed, about 40 lbs. Our special price, complete with all attachments and one tune sheet . . . . . . . $78.95”

“Extra tune sheets 76 cents each. List of over 300 musical selections free on application.” [By contrast, Sears sold pianos for $125 - $169, and organs for $38.95 - $56.00. The best violin cost $46.95; the toniest autoharps and accordions cost $18.50 and $11.25 repectively. Folios of sheet music (120 - 200 pages) cost $.30 - $.45.

[Who did the Regina appeal to? Did it sell well? Did people sing to it, or was it used as “muzak?” We will probably never learn the answer to these questions. I would be willing to bet that the poor thing didn’t last long once Berliner’s disc gramophone was introduced. I imagine the Regina sounding like my Creative Labs 8-Bit Sound Blaster playing a MIDI file of harpsichord music: Perfect, precise, pure and soulless. Even indifferently recorded music from live musicians would beat it hands- down. And, or course, the Regina could not reproduce the human voice.]

Source: The 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue (Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1968)

From Stephen Herbert

Re: 3-D without glasses - VISIDEP and similar systems. Vision III Imaging Inc. developed a 3-D system described in the SMPTE Journal, Vol.100 No.6, June 1991. I saw a test reel at the time. Only effective while the camera was moving, and then had only a limited effect. It was carefully thought out, but basically, it wasn’t impressive enough to be worth the trouble of shooting with the necessary special two-camera rig. The article also includes information on related experiments in the 1980s. Dead Media fans will be pleased to know that the origins of this system go back much, much further. It was first proposed by an English experimenter Theodore Brown, in 1903 (following experiments and observations dating back to the 1890s).

“Brown’s Method of Relief Projection” is described by the inventor in THE BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY edited by Paul N. Hasluck (Cassell & Co.Ltd,1905). Brown called his system, variously, Oscillatory Projection, Motional Perspective, and Direct Stereoscopic Projection. He worked on it, with occasional demonstrations, until at least 1930. An attempt was made to market a short film, DANCING, in 1912. (It was advertised in the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly).

Source: SMPTE Journal Vol. 100 No. 6, June 1991 The Book of Photography ed. Paul N. Hasluck, 1905 Theodore Brown’s Magic Pictures, the Art and Inventions of a Multi-Media Pioneer by Stephen Herbert

From Greg Riker

“Wired Horses “The cavalry announced plans to equip its scouts with a new type of mobile telephone. Like earlier horse-phones, it had a cord. Wire stored on a 5-mile reel played out as a scout rode. The improved model let a rider make calls without having to first dismount and then drive a spike into the ground to complete the electrical connection. Instead, the grounding wire was attached to the horse’s skin. The mild electrical current would pass through its body to its hoofs, one of which was almost always touching the ground.” [Bruce Sterling remarks: How many “earlier horse-phones” could there have been? It’s not hard to see why this bizarre telephony experiment failed to prosper; how can a surreptitious, fast-moving cavalry scout deploy a five- mile long telephone reel? Still, this medium may have been developed for some time. The fact that the horse itself became an integral part of the network: this cumulative improvement conveys a real sense of design elegance.]

Source: Popular Mechanics, Sept 1997 page 16: 90 Years Ago: September 1907 (includes photo)

From Patrick Lichty

Marvin Camras’s Model 500 Wire Recorder Recently, I had the good fortune to have a meeting at the Inventors’ Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. While walking through the exhibits, I happened upon Marvin Camras’ Model 500 wire recording system. It was invented independently of its German wire-recording predecessors. The Camras recorder used spools of rapidly-moving wire which moved through a transducer assembly, creating the necessary impulses for amplification. The model measures approximately 10” deep x 16” high x 18” wide. The spools of wire are externally mounted on a sloping front panel, and the emblem reads, “Armour Research Foundation”, which was Camras’ own institution. About 100,000 of these units were sold to the U.S. Navy, and the recorders were popular with hobbyists until around 1955. -From the Hall of Fame card next to the machine: “In the 1930s Camras developed a successful wire recorder. Before and during World War II his early wire recorders were used by the military to train pilots. Battle sounds were recorded and equipment was developed to amplify it by thousands of watts. The recordings were placed where the invasion of D-Day was not to take place, giving false information to the Germans. The public first heard of Camras’ work after the war had ended.”

Source: National Inventors’ Hall of Fame (Akron, Ohio, USA) Illinois Institute of Technology Archives

From Bruce Sterling

“Number’s Up for Minitel.” “The French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, has admitted that a marvel of local electronic technology, the unique Minitel system, is putting a brake on France’s access to global communications, writes Paul Webster in Paris.

“While the Minitel, a small table-top telephone-linked terminal, gives low-tech access to thousands of services, 15 years of trying to convince the rest of the world of its usefulness have left foreigners cold.

“There are 14.5 million businesses and home users of the Minitel in France compared with one million plugged into the Internet. Furthermore French Telecom earned nearly $1 billion a year with the system. But government policy will be aimed at weaning the public off the French system and onto the global web.

“Only mass Internet use can fulfil government hopes that schools will be fully on-line by the end of the century and that access to main state research centres will be free for everyone.”

Source: Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol 157 No. 10. Week ending September 7, 1997.International News article by Paul Webster, page 9

From Bruce Sterling

Flipping through ANTIQUE TYPEWRITERS at random floods the mind with insight. The sheer scale of production for the once ubiquitous typewriter is astonishing in itself. This work is an instant Dead Media classic. Many, many Working Notes might be derived from this comprehensive tome, but serious students of the typewriter and its history should not rest content without owning the book. An excerpt from page 34, describing a particularly freakish 1920s mechanical precursor of the PC, should be proof of this. page 34 “Burroughs is a name mostly associated with adding machines rather than typewriters. In the 1920s, however, the company marketed its Burroughs Moon-Hopkins, a remarkable combination typewriter and calculator.

“This monstrous machine originally consisted of a caps- only (double-case was offered later) upstrike typewriter with a huge, glass-sided calculating machine mounted on the back. Later sold as the ‘Burroughs General Accounting Machine,’ is is obvious that this device was intended as a do-all for any office needing to do billing or use figures in its correspondence.

“The calculating module of the machine could be equipped with multiple registers, so that numbers could be calculated and stored for later use, a kind of primitive memory akin to today’s computers. The Burroughs Moon- Hopkins was one of a very few direct multiplying machines, meaning it did not multiply by doing successive additions as on most calculators of the kind. It also automated a number of other tasks, including rounding off fractions of a penny to the next highest whole cent.

“The Burroughs machine was successor to the earlier Moon-Hopkins apparently produced by the Moon-Hopkins Billing Machine Co., which was founded in St. Louis in 1911. Burroughs acquired rights to the machine in 1921.” [Bruce Sterling remarks: The accompanying photo on page 34 shows an enormous glass-sided office machine with no fewer than six rows of keys. Black, somber, weirdly elongated, and obviously very heavy, the Burroughs Moon-Hopkins resembles a typewriter crossed with a hearse. One can only wonder if family scion William S. Burroughs ever saw or used this device.]

Source: Antique Typewriters & Office Collectibles: Identification and Value Guide by Darryl Rehr Collector Books 1997 $19 plus $2 postage available from Darryl Rehr P. O. Box 641824 Los Angeles CA 90064 ISBN 0-89145-757-7

From Bill Burns

“News Code Words Vanishing” By Mike Feinsilber Associated Press Writer Wednesday, September 17, 1997; 1:27 p.m. EDT “WASHINGTON (AP), It is the 1950s and in Tokyo and New York two guys in white shirts, ties undone, are communicating electronically with the latest technology.

“’SOS ETWIFE HEADS TOKYOWARD SMORNING SANSTOP,’ New York tells Tokyo. ‘MUCHLY APC EYEBALL ARRIVAL. URGENTEST NEED THUMBSUCKER CUM ART.’

“These were marching orders for the fellow in Tokyo. Put into English, the message said, ‘The secretary of state and his wife will fly nonstop to Tokyo this morning. We need you to be on hand for their arrival, but first we urgently need a news analysis and pictures to go with it.’

“Tokyo sighs and replies with a word: ‘ONWORKING.’ “Years ago, this imaginary exchange might have been plausible among journalists (a fancy word that they’d probably shun). It is written in vanishing languages, partly ‘cablese,’ partly the Phillips Code, itself a shorthand version of the Morse Code, and partly in ‘wirespeak,’ the jargon that The Associated Press and its erstwhile strongest competitor, the United Press, devised for internal communication, and to save money.

“Now, quickly, before they vanish from memory the way they’ve pretty well vanished from use, Richard Harnett has compiled the catchwords that the wire services once used and put them into a self-published book, “Wirespeak: Codes and Jargons of the News Business.” He printed 500 copies and figures he’ll be lucky to sell half of them.

“Harnett, 71, is retired from 36 years at United Press and its successor, United Press International. He started as a wire filer, someone who decided which stories reached Western papers, and wound up San Francisco bureau chief, and until recently was the energy behind ‘Ninety-Five’ a newsletter for UPI veterans that is crowded with nostalgia and obituaries.

“In an interview, Harnett, son of a traveling dry goods salesman in North Dakota, said these codes were used as much for esprit as for saving words.

“’If you could use them, it meant you were in the know,’ he said.

“One chapter is on the Morse Code, devised by Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, who invented a way of interrupting an electric current in a controlled manner to send short or long pulses.

“Cablese, subject of another chapter, was a money- saving code employed when it cost as much as 50 cents a word to send a message abroad by undersea cable. Cable companies permitted the combining of words, as long as they didn’t go beyond 15 letters, to save money. Thus ‘Tokyoward.’ Thus ‘antiauthorities’ for ‘against the authorities.’

“Giving away secrets no longer kept, Harnett reprints samples of the codes both AP and UP employed for confidential messages. The codes were printed in codebooks, kept locked and available only to top brass.

“In AP’s code, ‘levit,’ ‘liban’ or ‘liber’ stood for the competition, UP. And UP’s names for AP were ‘castor,’ ‘henagar’ and ‘wingate,’ all terms the origins of which are lost.

“The rank and file had their own nicknames for the competition. AP used ‘opsn,’ standing for ‘opposition;’ UP used ‘Rox,’ said to be a play on the last name of Melville E. Stone, who for over two decades was AP’s general manager.

“Harnett’s longest discussion, four pages, concerns ‘30,’ the symbol some writers still put at the end of their stories to mean ‘the end.’ “Its origins have long been the subject of after- hours discussion among news people, but Harnett leans to the most accepted theory, that ‘30’ was borrowed from a telegraphers’ code adopted by Western Union in 1859. In that code, many numbers were assigned a term. ‘73’ meant best regards; ‘95’ preceded an urgent message; and ‘1’ meant very important.

“Now, of course, computers and satellites allow the virtually instantaneous transmission of stories and pictures. Harnett had to hurry to capture a chunk of journalistic lore, probably just before it reached ‘30.

Source: Associated Press article by Mike Feinsilber, Sept 17 1997; Wirespeak by Richard Harnett

From David Casacuberta

Spanish whistling networks; a fascinating subject, but seldom studied by linguists is speech surrogates. They are communication systems that replace the use of speech by other sounds, sometimes made with musical instruments, like drums or, in this case, by means of whistles. Whistle language has been observed between some ancient Central and South American tribes and also in some of the South Pacific Islands (I don’t know much about these other surrogates, so any further information is welcome).