The Dead Media Notebook (64 page)

“Beginning in 1888 with the Theatre d’Application on the rue St. Lazare, shadow theaters eventually spread to other locations in Paris as well as to other Montmartre cabarets, Le Conservatoire de Montmartre and Les Quat’z’Arts, in particular. In addition. Salis took his shadow theater company on the road to the provinces. In 1893 Somm, Steinlen, and Michel Utrillo traveled to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to present their shadow plays. Thanks to Utrillo, by 1897 Barcelona’s avant-garde. had its own shadow theater at Ils Quatre Gats, the modernista cabaret that took its name from both Le Chat Noir and Les Quat’z’Arts. [During the Paris world’s fair of 1900] the journal Le Rire brought Montmartre shadow theater and humor to visitors around the world by installing on the fairgrounds along the Seine the Maison du Rire, which performed a repertoire of Chat Noir shadow plays and cabaret revues.”

Source: The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 edited by Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1996 LC 95-81835

From William Gibson

My friend, the artist Rodney Graham, has been building and using camera obscuras for 20 years. His first, constructed in Rome after his camera was stolen, was a matchbox with a lot of black tape. They got bigger, some of them becoming purpose-built buildings with projection screens on the rear wall, positioned to capture the image of a particular tree. The latest, commissioned by the French government, is mounted on a museum-grade reproduction of a U.S. Post Office horsedrawn delivery wagon. He makes huge prints with the bigger CO’s, and travels the world looking for perfect trees to photograph this way. Nice images, the faint inverted tree, and so odd somehow there’s no lens.

There is a Camera Obscura built into one of the base-pylons of the SF-Oakland Bay bridge. You stand inside in utter darkness and see an inverted Bayscape. This is just a rivet-hole but it’s presumed to have been left deliberately open. One of the most secret monuments of the Bay Area.

From Jonathan Prince

[Jonathan Prince remarks: Not dead media, but media for when we are all dead] A PROPOSAL FOR A PERMANENT RECORD OF OUR CIVILIZATION
“
J. Lovelock (Oxford University, UK) presents an essay on catastrophe, civilization, and information storage. The author makes the following points:

1)
      
We try to guard against local hazards, but we tend to ignore threats global in scale.

2)
      
We fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of the species. Civilizations are ephemeral compared with the species: humans have lasted a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years.

3)
      
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.

4)
      
What we need is a primer on science, clearly written and unambiguous in its meaning, a primer for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and how to survive and live well on it. One that would serve also as a primary school science text. It would be the scientific equivalent of the Bible.

5)
      
Modern media are more fallible instruments for long- term storage than was the spoken word. They require the support of a sophisticated technology that we cannot take for granted.

6)
      
What we need is a book written on durable paper with long-lasting print, a book written with authority and readable enough to ensure a place in every home, school, library, and place of worship, on hand whatever happened.

Source: Science-Week, 29 May 1998

[Bruce Sterling remarks: I discovered a charming exemplar of dead media on the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. This small glassed-in diorama is an infotainment tourist attraction. It contains a miniature group of period-clad French enthusiasts, two-dimensional colored cut-outs with beards, slouch hats, cloth coats and large wicker baskets. They are releasing their homing pigeons from the top of Eiffel’s creation, with the following legend.]

“La Socie’te’ Colombophile de Paris utilise au mois d’aout 1891 La 3e plateforme de la tour Eiffel pour y faire des experiences de communication aérienne par pigeons voyageurs.”

Source: Diorama in the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris

From Stephen Herbert

Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph

In 1876, English barrister Wordsworth Donisthorpe patented and had made a plate-changing camera for recording moving pictures. In 1878, in a letter to ‘Nature’ he suggested that his ‘Kinesigraph’ and Edison’s recently-invented phonograph could be combined to produce talking pictures on the screen. In 1889, Donisthorpe and his associate William Carr Crofts patented a novel camera and projector for taking and showing moving pictures on ‘film’(initially paper). In 1890, they shot a film of Trafalgar Square, London,of which ten celluloid frames survive. They were unable to obtain funding to perfect their projector. That’s the story as told in those few film history books that mention Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W C Crofts.

New research provides evidence for their motivation, and a link with the technology of the industrial revolution. Donisthorpe, and Crofts (his cousin) were both political activists, passionate Individualists fervent in their anti-socialist crusade. Both men were born into a linked dynasty of technologists; Donisthorpe’s father had been an inventor of wool-combing machines, and it was the technology of the textile industry that provided the inspiration for the cameras. By 1890, only three or four people in the world had managed to obtain sequence pictures on sensitised bands (paper or celluloid film). Could it really be just a coincidence that two of those people, Donisthorpe and Le Prince, came from the same industrial community in the same English city, Leeds?

From Alan Wexelblat

According to an item in the 3 April Boston Globe, the Narragansett Trail (a New England historical and recreational way) has several examples of ‘drum rocks.’ Supposedly (I have not investigated first-hand) these rocks emit a booming sound when jumped upon.

The Narragansett Indians used drum rocks to summon others, give information, and mark trails. Legend has it that a sound from a drum rock could be heard up to 35 miles away. The Globe’s brief blurb notes that rocks were used by “leaders of the Indian nation, including their sachem, tribal medicine men, elders, and even spirits of the ancestors.”

Curious necronauts might contact John Brown, tribal historic preservation officer of the Narraganset Indians (reservation near Charleston, R.I.), or the Warwick Historical Society, which is apparently responsible for labeling the drum rocks found on this trail.

Source: Boston Globe, April 3, 1998

From Dan Howland

“The transmission of matter through closed tubes by means of a current of air flowing therein is not by any means a novel idea, although its successful application to commercial purposes is of recent date. For the earliest suggestion of pneumatic transmission we must go back to the seventeenth century and search among the records of that venerable institution, the Royal Society of London.

“Here we find that Denis Papin presented to the society in the year 1667 a paper entitled the ‘Double Pneumatic Pump.’ He exhausted the air from a long metal tube, in which was a traveling piston which drew after it a carriage attached to it by means of a cord.

“At the close of the eighteenth century a certain M. Van Estin propelled a hollow ball containing a package through a tube several hundred feet long by means of a blast of air; the device, however, was regarded more as a toy than a useful invention.

“Of more practical value were the plans of Medhurst, a London engineer, who published pamphlets in 1810 and 1812 and again in 1832, when he proposed to connect a carriage running inside the tube with a passenger carriage running above it.” [Jules Verne’s recently unearthed 1863 novel, Paris in the 20
^th
Century proposed a similar transit system, in which a train would be pulled by magnetic attraction to a metal object in a pneumatic tube.] “The distinction of being the first city to install a practical pneumatic tube system belongs to London, where in 1853 a 1 ½ inch tube was laid between Founder’s Court and the Stock Exchange, a distance of 220 yards. The Carrier was drawn through the tube by creating a vacuum, a steam pump being used for the purpose. The roughness of the interior of the iron tubes gave much trouble, and when subsequent extensions of the system were made in 1858 and later, 2 ¼ inch lead tubes were used, the carriers being made of gutta-percha with an outer lining of felt.”

[”Gutta-percha” is a sort of early plastic made from the latex of Malaysian trees; it is not the punchline to a Chico Marx joke about fishing.]

“The London system has grown steadily and now includes 42 stations and 34 miles of tubes. The latter are of cast iron and lined with lead. On the shorter lines, the inside diameter is 2 3/16 inches, and on the longer lines, 3 inches. The lines are laid out radially, air being compressed at one end and exhausted at the other. Similar systems are used in connection with the telegraph service in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Dublin and Newcastle.

“Mention should be made here of the underground pneumatic railways constructed in London, the first built in 1863, 1,800 feet in length and 2 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 8 inches in section; the latter tunnels built in 1872, running from Euston Station to the general post office, a distance of 2 ¾ miles. The latter was in duplicate and D-shaped in section, measuring 4 ½ feet wide by 4 feet high, the straight portion being of cast iron and the bends of brick. It was operated by a fan which forced air into one tunnel and exhausted it from the other. The capacity of the line was about one ton per minute. It was not satisfactory and was ultimately abandoned.”

Source: Scientific American, December 11, 1897

From Dan Howland

In 1865, Seimens & Halske, of Berlin, laid down in that city a system of pneumatic tubes for the transmission of telegraph messages. The wrought iron tubes, 2 ½ inches in diameter, were in duplicate, one being used for transmitting and the other for receiving messages. They ran from the telegraph station to the Exchange, a distance of 5,670 feet. The tubes were looped together at the Exchange and a continuous flow of air was maintained by a compressor at one end and an exhauster at the other.”The modified system now in use is worked by means of large storage tanks, containing either compressed or rarefied air, and it comprises 38 stations and more than 28 miles of tubing 2.55 inches in diameter.

“The pneumatic tube system in Paris dates from the same year as that of Berlin. Here a novel feature was introduced in the method of compressing the air, for instead of using a steam engine it was compressed in the tanks by displacement with water from the city mains. The tubes of the present system are 2.55 inches diameter, and the carriers are made up in trains of from 6 to 10, with a leather-covered piston at the rear which fits the tubes snugly and drives them forward. The tubes are wrought iron and the speed is 15 to 23 miles an hour.”

Source: Scientific American, December 11, 1897

From Dan Howland

The father of the pneumatic tube system of railways in America was the late Alfred Ely Beach, who for half a century was one of the proprietors of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. His experimental railway was first exhibited at the American Institute Fair held in New York City in 1867.”Less well known but equally meritorious was the system of pneumatic postal tubes designed by Mr. Beach at about the same period.
“In 1870, also, he built an 8 inch iron tube a thousand feet long, whose interior was glazed to form a smooth surface. This lead to a large receiving box, from which a second pipe led to an exhausting engine.

A letter dropped into the pipe at any point was swept along by suction due to the exhaustion of the air from the box, from which it was easily removed.” [Illustrations show a car about the size of a backyard steam train. Above it, postal workers sort letters and drop them into slots. To maintain the difference in air pressure, at the end of each slot is a tiny revolving door, laid sideways like a paddlewheel. As the car approached, slots and tabs in the top of the car tripped the appropriate paddlewheel, dropping letters into the correct compartments of the car.

The pneumatic tube has been in use in this country on a small scale from a quarter of a century for the transmission of cash in retail stores and for general telegraphic purposes. The Western Union Telegraph Company laid down four lines in 1876 from the main office in Broadway, New York, one to Pearl Street, and one to the Cotton Exchange. To these it has since added two miles of double line which run beneath Broadway to its uptown office. The most notable event in the recent history of pneumatic transmission occurred in Philadelphia, when a system of 6 inch tubes was built between the main post office and the sub-post office on Chestnut Street, near Third Street, a distance of 3,000 feet.

The reader will observe that in all the European systems none of the tubes are larger than 3 inches in diameter, so that in respect of size alone the Philadelphia plant marked a bold advance upon any existing system, the area of the tubes being increased more than four-fold, and the capacity of the carriers in proportion. The speed, moreover, was nearly doubled, and hence, with the improved mechanical appliances for transmitting and receiving, the capacity of each tube cannot be less than twenty times as great as that in the old country systems. The Philadelphia plant was opened in 1893 and has been in successful operation ever since.