The Dead Media Notebook (6 page)

PART VI. MISCELLANEOUS These embrace a large collection of Paintings, Artistic Gems, Dissolving Views and Transformation Scenes, which have been procured at great expense, and for faithfulness in perspective and beauty in design, they stand unrivalled. The whole will be enlivened with NUMEROUS COMIC SCENES

Electricity Without Extra Charge A very fine Galvanic Battery is provided for any who may wish to try it. This is an excellent remedy for Rheumatism, Neuralgia and Headache.

Be sure to come before the show begins if you want to try it.

Positively Everything Advertised on this Bill will be Shown

REMEMBER, THE PRICE OF ADMISSION IS ONLY
10 CENTS FOR ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY

Doors Open at 7 O’Clock.

Begins at 8 O’Clock.

Travels, Art, History, Astronomy, Fun & Electricity—Bamber’s Dime Show was entertainment shovelware to rival CD-ROM. First a weird gizmo, the so-called planetarium, presumably an orrery. Then astronomical slides, no doubt accompanied by a proto-Saganesque cosmic narrative from Bamber. Then telepresence—“all cannot travel,” but a virtuality is beautiful and cheap. Then a melodramatic disaster—the repeated mentions of “rolling,” “sailing” and “reefing” strongly suggests these so-called “paintings” were partially animated. Magic lantern slides were often quite mechanically complex.

A bit of mild bawdry and ethnic humor in part four. Then the statuary—their placement in the show seems odd and anticlimactic, unless the statuary included female nudes, which might make sense as the children have probably left by this time. Then, “miscellaneous” or basically the leftover contents of the professor’s trunk from the previous four tours, with a bang-up ending of eye-boggling “dissolving views.”

Bamber also boasts an interesting sideline in voltaic placebo snake-oil—“Electricity Without Extra Charge.” People can be impressed by gadgets, entertained by gadgets, forced to laugh or weep by gadgets. The truly daring charlatan can even cure the sick by gadgets. The “magic” of the magic lantern was closer to the healing magic of the witch doctor than we might credit today.

Source: THE HISTORY OF MOVIE PHOTOGRAPHY by Brian Coe, Eastview Editions, Westfield NJ, 1981, ISBN 0-89860-067-0

From Alan Wexelblat

This collection of essays deals with the philosophy, theory, and sociology of film viewing.

In “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator” Tom Gunning takes on the myth that early film audiences ran in fear from a film of a train apparently coming at them. He discusses several of the (now dead) technologies that immediately preceded film and shows how they were used/presented in such a way as to achieve maximum amazement. He shows that while audiences may have been amazed by the new moving images, they were not apt to confuse these images for reality. An important debunking of popular mythology.

In “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris,” Vanessa Schwartz discusses Parisian’s methods of self-amusement in the immediate pre-film period. Flanerie (the taking in of sights while strolling/shopping) translated itself into a bizarre entertainment spectacle whereby the Paris Morgue became a medium of reality display. Bodies of crime victims were put on display, ostensibly so the public could identify the people but in fact for entertainment. Her description of the many-days display of the corpse of a child is particularly interesting. She also discusses a couple of other dead techs—the diorama and the panorama—and talks about how the newspapers of the day combined ‘true crime’ stories and serial novels.

Source: VIEWING POSITIONS: WAYS OF SEEING FILM, Linda Williams (ed.), Rutgers University Press 1995 ISBN 0-8135-2133-5, 1995.

From Hans Moonen

[Bruce Sterling remarks: the Dutch collector Hans Moonen has the largest archive of propaganda leaflets that I’ve ever seen. The “Monroe bomb” and propaganda grenades are new to me, but he seems very well-informed.] “That the Americans saw the importance of psychological warfare can be seen from the fact that Captain James Monroe of the USAAF invented a bomb for the spreading of leaflets.

“The so-called Monroe bomb was taken into service. This bomb consisted of a paperboard cylinder in which up to 80,000 leaflets could fit. These bombs were dropped like normal bombs. A small detonator caused the cylinder to open at any given height. The leaflets were spread over a large area. All makes of bombers were used: American Flying fortresses B-17 and later B-24. Ten of these bombs fitted exactly in the bomb bay of a B-17.

“The picture shows a ground crew loading the Monroe bombs into a B-17. In England, over 75,000 Monroe bombs were produced. The only thing was that on (some very few) missions a bomb didn’t open. That’s why unopened Monroe bombs were found in Holland sometimes. Even 25 years after the war the Dutch bomb disposal had to dig up one still filled with, tightly packed, readable leaflets! “I want to ask any visitor if they could help me to get original manuals (US / GB / German or other) for this kind of leaflet-drop related equipment (bombs, shells, balloons etc.).
“The shelling method “For short range combat propaganda, another technique was used: the shooting of leaflets with artillery grenades. This method was often used in North-Africa (1942/43) and after D-day on the front in Europe.

“For this purpose, smoke grenades were used. The smoke-cartridge was removed and replaced by small rolls of up to 400 leaflets. The British used a lot of 25 pounder grenades. See the picture of a unit filling grenades with leaflets. (The picture was taken in the vicinity of my hometown in the south of the Netherlands; I also know what leaflet is being filled here).

“The Americans used lots of 105 and 155 mm howitzer grenades in a similar way. A time fuse caused the grenade’s explosive charge to expel the leaflets in air over enemy trenches. The firing of the gun often ‘pushed together’ the leaflets in the grenade which causes a very characteristic folding pattern on the leaflets. Also the expelling charge often burned parts of the leaflets. That’s why those leaflets are mostly in a bad condition if seen on expositions.

“Nowadays still sometimes unexploded leaflet grenades are being found filled with readable leaflets.

To the modern eye a magic lantern most resembles a kerosene-fired slide projector. This preconception overlooks the slides themselves, however.

Lantern slides were large, bulky, complex objects of glass, paint, wood and metal. Many had built-in mechanical features.

So the lantern’s projected images were not necessarily static, but could be graced with limited animation. Some slides could even create complex, constantly moving screen displays.

Lantern slides came in several physical formats.

Peck and Snyder’s proprietary slides were 4 ½ by 7 inches.

The “usual English pattern” was 3 ½ x 3 ½ and

The “French pattern” was 3 ¼ by 4 inches.

But specialized slides could be over a foot long, containing gears, cranks, cogs, or even belts and pulleys. Slides were attached in front of the condensing lenses, outside the body of the lantern itself. They slid into place horizontally through metal runners at top and bottom.

Lever Action Slides
A lever protruded from one corner of the slide, attached to a second, overlapping pane of painted glass. When the lever was depressed or lifted the second glass rotated through a brief arc, resulting in a single animated movement on the lantern’s screen. The Peck and Snyder catalog enthuses: “The moving effects produced on the screen are very life-like.
The horse is put in motion by the lever, and appears to be cantering
.
The children go up and down as natural as can be, and the audience can hardly believe that they are not alive. The No. 2 Electro Radiant Magic Lantern reproduces these pictures 8 to 12 feet in diameter. We conside the Lever one of the very best mechanical effects.
” Peck and Snyder sold lever-action slides for between $1.75 and $2.25. Brian Coe’s History of Movie Photography describes double and even triple lever-action slides, but the truly elaborate ones were apparently rare. Peck and Snyder does not offer any doubles or triples.

Slip slides
Slip slides had two panes of glass, with a thumb-and-finger notch cut into one corner of the wooden frame. The moving pane of glass was gripped and pulled by hand, a very simple operation. Slip slides often used black patches to obscure and reveal details of the background slide. Coe describes sub-varieties of “slipping slides” that were pulled with tabs. Peck and Snyder: “Part of the picture is painted on one glass and the other on part on another glass. The two are arranged in a frame so that one glass slips over the other, and very comical effects are produced. It is a great mystery to the uninitiated, and they cannot understand how the transformations are made.” Peck and Snyder retailed these for a thrifty seventy-five cents each.

Mechanical Slides
Rackwork and Pulley Slides. Early rotary slides sometimes used a belt-and-pulley drive, with two brass disks turned in contrary directions by belt drives and a little hand-crank. This technique was rivalled and eventually replaced by the neater and more accurate rack-and-pinion system. A single round disk of glass with a toothed brass rim could be cranked and rotated indefinitely. This caused repeated rotary animation on the screen. Rackwork slides cost $4.25 to $5.00 in Peck and Snyder’s catalog. The catalog offers no pulley slides circa 1886.

Chromatropes
Says Peck and Snyder: “These are handsomely painted geometrical or other figures on two glasses, which, by an ingenious arrangement of crank pinion and gear wheels, are made to revolve in opposite directions, producing an endless variety of changes, almost equal to a grand display of fire-works.” Chromatrope cranks could produce single rackwork rotation against a fixed background, or double counter-rotation of both disks of glass. Peck and Snyder’s chromatropes could project various brightly colored psychedelic moire’ patterns up to twelve feet across. Professional chromatrope displays in large urban theaters must have been quite mind- boggling. The Eidotrope was a chromotrope variant using counter-rotating disks of perforated metal, showing a swirling pattern of brilliant white dots on the screen.

“Tinters” or colored translucent sheets could be added to tint the display. Coe describes Eidotropes, but Peck and Snyder does not offer any Eidotropes for sale circa 1886. C. W. Ceram’s Archaeology Of The Cinema states that Eidotropes were powered by pulleys and “superseded” by Chromatropes. The Cycloidotrope (see Coe p 19) was a truly remarkable variant, a kind of lantern spirograph. A black disk of smoked glass rotated within the slide frame, and a stylus on a pivoted arm traced a pattern in the soot against the moving glass. This appeared on the screen as a brilliant white line tracing a regular geometric design, an increasingly complex animated display. The stylus could be re-set as the cycloidotrope rotated, producing interlocking rosettes and similar mechanical geometries. Peck and Snyder do not sell or mention this impressive but labor-intensive graphic device. Images very similar to those generated by the Eidotrope and Cycloidotrope are now quite popular in computer screen-savers.

Dioramic Slides.
These very elongated slides were twice as wide as normal slides, 4 ½ by 12 or 14 inches. Peck and Snyder: “These slides are exceedingly beautiful. The painting is artistic and elaborate, and the wonder is they can be sold so cheaply. A scene is painted on fixed glass, and over this is made to pass a long procession of figures—soldiers, vessels, trains of cars, caravans, as the case may be—with the most pleasing and wonderful effects.” The colored background image was small and square, but the pane with little figures was over a foot long. The figures slid along in front of the painted background. Peck and Snyder sold dioramic slides for $3 each. Panorama slides. These landscape-style slides were over a foot long and could be gently drawn past the condensing lenses, “panning” across the picture. Like diorama slides, they often had a procession of moving figures as well. They cost $3.35 to $4.50 from Peck and Snyder. Coe states that a London optician named J. Darker succeeded in attaching a kaleidoscope to the lens of a magic lantern in the 1860s. Says Coe: “His projection Kaleidoscope produced a remarkable effect when used to fill a large screen with a colorful, constantly changing pattern.”

(The Kaleidoscope itself, an optical toy which is very much alive, was invented by Sir David Brewster and patented in 1817.)

Source THE HISTORY OF MOVIE PHOTOGRAPHY by Brian Coe, Eastview Editions, Westfield NJ, 1981, ISBN 0-89860-067-0 Peck and Snyder’s Catalog (aka Price List of Out & Indoor Sports and Pastimes) 1886, reprinted 1971 by Pyne Press (LC# 75-24886, ISBN 0-87861-094-4) ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE CINEMA by C. W. Ceram, Harcourt Brace and World (1955?), LC # 65-19106

From Bradley O’Neill

Here’s some information on pre-encryption/decryption technologies of the 1930s and 40s. These creatures were the stillbirths of Vannevar Bush’s projects at MIT and OP-20-G (Naval encryption division).

Most people know Bush as grandaddy of info-science, and prognosticator of hypertext (in the famous article in a 1945 edition of
Atlantic Monthly,
Bush envisioned a hyper-linked bibliography system called MEMEX, an idealized machine that was never built).

Well, when I started looking into developmental background on BOMBE decryption devices for the German ENIGMA encryption system, I stumbled onto a source examining Vannevar Bush’s role in creating Rapid Selector/Tabulating machines for the Navy and private industry, all inventions that predate Bush’s idea of MEMEX.

THE COMPARATOR:
70mm Eastman-Kodak paper-tape based electronic crypto-analytic prototype, funded by the US Navy, built mostly at MIT, first assembled in 1938. The Comparator was plagued by years of mechanical setbacks. Bush wanted a “high-speed” (projected to be 100 times faster than 1920s tabulators) parallel processing analyser that utilized photo-cell light readings to index (and thus decode) up to 50,000 character comparisons per minute. Very low memory capability caused printing/retrieval problems. Bush realized that without microfilm density, the processing speeds were also unachievable. And if microfilm was used, then the reading/recording capabilities would suffer from insufficient resolution.