The Dead Media Notebook (56 page)

From Tom Jennings

Once a very important medium, they are now obsolete pretty much everywhere. The noontime horn, “air raid” and Civil Defense alerts, fire-whistle tests, they are definitely in a mode of the past.

These systems all assumed a large number of people within hearing distance of the local government building that hosted the siren. Fire alarms (e.g., a “two alarm” fire) are the last function of public sirens used in urban/suburban areas that I am aware of. I wonder how many functions that once had, that are now forgotten?

At least as of 1996 in San Francisco, there was a Tuesday noontime whistle; presumably at a fire station, but I don’t really know. Los Angeles streets are covered with Civil Defense sirens. They sit on top of their own poles, approx. 15-20 feet, and look like birdhouses. They were pointed out to me by a local artist who once wanted to work them into a coordinated performance, but the local authorities were stumped as to jurisdiction of the relics and skeptical of the project anyway. They’re one of those odd things. effectively nonexistent, but once spotted, they appear everywhere.

My project load is such that I will never pursue this subject, but I thought it should be recorded. I assume their origin dates back to ringing alarm bells in church towers of ages old, but I don’t really know.

[Bruce Sterling remarks: Telecommunication alarm systems pre- date Christianity. Swift warning of disaster or enemy attack is one of the primary reasons for building such a system in the first place. Smoke signals, tribal drum- beats, Gaullic stentor shouting, fire signals in Roman imperial forts, alarm fires on the Great Wall of China, in the optical telegraphy towers of revolutionary France. not to mention the later vast proliferation of telegraphic fire alarms, burglar alarms, and Distant Early Warning stations. There is little question that dead alarm systems are “dead media.”]

From Trevor Blake

Marginally related were the “tornado drills” I took part in during my first years of schooling in the 1970s. It was not until I was an adult that I thought back on the profound lack of tornados in the Eastern Appalachian part of the United States. while on the other hand, Oak Ridge and Knoxville were ‘ground zero’ cities for their nuclear and other power resources.

We would silently line the hallways, squatting on the floor with books held over our heads. You have to get out of the big cities into the countryside in the mid-west.

Sirens and horns are still fairly common. And there used to be “foghorns” on foggy days and nights, long after ships needed them for navigation, until the cost of maintaining this romantic relic was made known to the bean-counters at City Hall, who axed them from the budget.

Big Ben, of course, is still broadcast live by the BBC; but its notes have become more of a signature tune than a time signal. These systems are dead as media by which people’s time is managed (people use their own watches and clocks), but persist as honoured rituals. It was so loud in my building that all conversation had to stop for the five seconds or so that the whistle blew.

I recall being on the phone several times when the whistle went off, and having to explain later what had just happened. The whistle, installed in the 20s, was no longer effective by the 1950s, when the campus had grown larger. But it is still used today.

In Marmet West Virginia, where the volunteer fire department covers fires and mine accidents, the eerie two- toned wail of the call-in siren echoes up and down the hollows for up to five minutes. A fair number of people up in the hills either don’t have phones or are on party lines, so the telephone isn’t a good method of contacting people, thus the siren is still the best way to inform volunteers they’re needed. Heard it today (paying a little more attention than I would normally!) at its usual 11:58. Not sure where it comes from but believe it’s a single location somewhere downtown. You probably should re-label them as ‘doddering’ rather than totally dead.

From Bill Burns

“Telegraph Served AP for 8 Decades” By Libby Quaid Associated Press Writer Thursday, January 22, 1998; 2:57 a.m. “WASHINGTON (AP), The Associated Press once had an army of 1,500 telegraphers who spread the news to the world in staccato bursts.

“’There’s only four of us left,’ says Aubrey Keel, whose career spanned bureaus from coast to coast and whose world was the 46 combinations of dots and dashes that made up Morse Code.

“For the eight decades the news cooperative depended upon the telegraph, a good fist was in demand. His own could tap out up to 45 words a minute, the 96-year-old Keel boasted as he demonstrated his trade Wednesday as part of the AP’s 150
^th
anniversary observation at The Freedom Forum’s Newseum, a museum in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Va.

“From his home in Kansas City, Mo., Keel brought the tools that once ruled the business, a vintage green Western Union telegraph like the machine he started on, and a Vibroplex ‘lightning bug’ that is still made today.

“Smoothly, swiftly, he flicked his wrist, and the ‘dahditditdidahdahdididit’ became verse received by a retired Illinois railroad telegrapher, George Nixon, seated with his own machine in the back of the room: “’Along the smooth and slender wires, the sleepless heralds run.

“’Fast as the clear and living rays go streaming from the sun.

“’No peals or flashes, heard or seen, their wondrous flight betray.

“’And yet their words are quickly caught, in cities far away.’. “(Telegraphers) had to know three ‘languages’ of Morse Code; American, International, and Continental (created because the space letters C, O, R, Y and Z and the long L couldn’t transmit along submarine cables) as well as Phillips Code, a shorthand version of Morse.

“First recruited by the railroads during a telegrapher shortage in World War I, Keel took years to develop the skill that now comes so easily.

“’I don’t know how else to explain it. After you do it for a while, it’s like music,’ Keel said. ‘It’s like riding a bicycle or playing the piano. You get rusty at it, but you don’t forget it.’. “But the newspaper telegraphers ‘had it made,’ Keel said. When he was hired by the AP in Lubbock, Texas, Keel made $32.60 a week for 48 hours of work. The average railroad salary was about $25, he said.

“Older operators had a reputation for hard living, but Keel had learned his lesson as a novice in an earlier job. It was Prohibition, and he decided to drink a bottle of home brew with his more experienced colleagues.

“’I came back, and the wire started up, I could hear it, but I couldn’t get it down,’ Keel said. ‘You never saw a man sober up as fast as I did.’ “He remembers when the Texas AP phased in the Teletype printer in 1928, letting 30 operators go in one day. ‘Someone said, ‘Those Teletypes will never work, they’ll have us back in a week,’ Keel recalled.

“But they didn’t. Keel weathered the storm, eventually becoming communications chief in the Milwaukee, Des Moines and Los Angeles bureaus. He retired in 1966.

“Today, he often ‘talks’ to retired telegraphers transmitting via ham radio, unless he’s busy using email from a home command center that includes two computers, radio gear and a digital camera and scanner. His old employer now transmits news at 9,000 words a minute.

“He glanced down at his old ‘green key,’ adjusting the Prince Albert tobacco can that changes the telegraph’s pitch.

“’It’s hard to think that AP started and for 80 years, that was their means of communication. And look at what they are today,’ he said.”

Source Museum recalls when news moved in dots, dashes by Libby Quaid, Associated Press, January 22, 1998

From Bruce Sterling

“The Jan. 12 Federal Page article on the Defense Department’s year-2000 problem discusses serious issues affecting our computer-dependent government. But the nation also faces a second digitally based crisis that might, in time, do great harm.”

“We run the risk that digital information will disappear. Indeed, portions of it already have become inaccessible. Either the media on which the information is stored are disintegrating, or the computer hardware and software needed to retrieve it from obsolete digital formats no longer exist.”

“The extent of the problem will emerge as more and more records are requested for retrieval and cannot be read. There are already documented examples of this, and government and industry representatives are concerned about the potential large-scale consequences.”

“Given the problems now surfacing as existing digital files are retrieved, the prospect of major losses to come grows increasingly likely.”

“Military files, including POW and MIA data from the Vietnam War, were nearly lost forever because of errors and omissions contained in the original digital records. Ten to 20 percent of vital data tapes from the Viking Mars mission have significant errors because magnetic tape is too susceptible to degradation to serve as an archival storage medium.”

“Research conducted by the National Media Lab, part of the National Technology Alliance, a consortium of government, industry and educational institutions that seeks to leverage commercial information technology for government users, has shown that magnetic tapes, disks and optical CD-ROMs have relatively short lives and, therefore, questionable value as preservation media.”

“The findings reveal that, at room temperature, top- quality data VHS tape becomes unreliable after 10 years, and average-quality CD-ROMs are unreliable after only five years.”

“Compare those figures with a life of more than 100 years for archival-quality microfilm and paper. Current digital media are plainly unacceptable for long-term preservation.”

“Finding a late-model computer to read a 5.25-inch floppy disk, a format common only a few years ago, or the software to translate WordPerfect 4.0 is practically impossible. On government and industry levels, the problem is magnified: old Dectape and UNIVAC drives, which recorded vast amounts of government data, are long retired, and programs like FORTRAN II are historical curiousities.”

“The data stored by these machines in now-obsolete formats are virtually inaccessible. The year-2000 problem concerns only obsolete formats for storing dates. It is merely a snapshot of the greater digital crisis that puts future access to important government, business, and cultural data in such jeopardy.”

“Librarians and archivists have long worried that hardware and software manufacturers show more interest in discovering new technology than in preserving today’s data. It is important for federal, state and local governments to set digital storage standards that will ensure future access. If private industries hope to sell their wares to governments, they will need to comply with those standards. And all of us will benefit.”

Source: Washington Post, 1998

From David Morton

[David Morton remarks: The Philips-Miller audio recording system was invented by an American, J.A. Miller, and licensed to the Philips company of Eindhoven. Philips marketed this system to radio broadcasters beginning in the mid 1930s, but apparently did not revive it after World War II. The system was in use at Radio Luxembourg and the BBC for several years, and the Norwegian broadcasting authority also installed a Philips-Miller recorder in 1936 and used it until it was replaced by tape recorders in 1950. In the U.S., station WQXR in New York briefly experimented with a Philips-Miller recording around 1938.)

“In the Philips-Miller method, as in the photographic sound-film processes, a sound-track is recorded on a strip of film. However, this is not done by optical means as hitherto, but by mechanical means. The film material, the ‘Philimil’ tape, consists of a celluloid base, which in place of the usual photographic emulsion is coated with an ordinary translucent layer of gelatine about 60 microns in thickness, on which a very thin opaque surface layer about 3 microns in thickness is affixed.

“Perpendicular to the tape, a cutter or stylus shaped like an obtuse wedge moves in synchronism with the sound vibrations to be recorded. This cutter removes a shaving from the gelatine layer which is displaced below it at a uniform speed.
“Now if the cutter moves up and down in synchronism with the sound vibrations to be recorded (perpendicular to the tape), a transparent track on an opaque background will be produced on the moving tape whose width will vary in synchronism with the sound vibrations.

“The recorded sound is reproduced by the usual method employed in optical sound-film technology. The film carrying the sound-track is moved between a photo-electric cell and a small, brightly illuminated slit (transversal to the direction of the motion of the film). The intensity of the light falling on the photo-electric cell thus varies with the variable width of the sound-track, and the resulting current fluctuations in the photo- electric cell are amplified and passed to a loudspeaker.

“The Philips-Miller system is thus a combination of a mechanical recording method with an optical method of reproduction. This unique association offers distinct advantages over the methods hitherto in use. ”

[The article claims a frequency response of 25-8000 cycles for the apparatus, +-2 decibels.]

Source: Philips Technical Review, Volume 1, April 1935, pages 107-104 Transmission by Tape: N.Y. Station Uses Innovation for the First Time in America, Newsweek (September 26, 1938): page 27.

From Bruce Sterling

“PHILADELPHIA, Researchers studying apes in the wild have found that African bonobos use complex trail markers to silently communicate in the dense tropical forests where they live along the Congo River.

“The discovery is contrary to the belief of many scientists that apes lack the brain structure for the use of symbolic language in complex communications, said E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of Georgia State University. . “Bonobos, apes that closely resemble chimpanzees, live in very dense forest with only faint trails. They live in bands of more than 100 and each night rest together in trees.