The Dead Media Notebook (8 page)

No longer was this machine called a typewriter. It was known as a cold typesetter, and Vari-Typers using the basic Hammond design were in production until the 1970’s. The Vari-Typer could be used to type Mimeograph stencils, although this was a bit cumbersome.

Much easier was its use with photo-lithography, which appeared in the 1930’s. As today, an original was created on plain paper, and a litho plate was produced from it by photography. Back then it was not as easy as it is today, but the concept was the same. Special materials were also available allowing the original to be typed directly on a thin, flexible printing plate. Thousands of copies could be printed on a small offset printing press from a Vari-Typer original.

Such devices were used to produce the surrender documents signed by Japan aboard the Battleship Missouri at the end of World War Two.

The combination of typewriters, Vari-typers, Mimeographs, Multigraphs, offset litho machines and spirit duplicators carried our developing desktop publishing technology through to the end of its first century in 1956.

Electrostatic copying, which first appeared in 1938, was just beginning to make a big impact as the 1960’s approached.

“Xerox” was starting to become a household word, but high-volume plain paper copiers would take a while to become the inexpensive fixtures they are today.

In 1956, computers had not reached desktop publishing capability, and the instant print shop was still years away.

The Vari-Typer, however, would soon find a competitor in IBM’s Selectric Typewriter, introduced in 1960, and later available in typesetting versions with all the features offered by Vari-Typers.

The first century of desktop publishing offered tremendous progress for people who wanted to turn out printed material on a small scale. However, the second century so far has been nothing less than amazing.

Who, after all, would have ever dreamed that an entire publication could be written, edited, typeset and composed before even the first drop of ink was applied to the first piece of paper?

Source: The Office Magazine; Early Typewriter Collectors’ Association

From Bradley O’Neill

“Balloons were used for observation in the sieges of Conde (1793), Maubeuge (1794), and Charleroi (1784); in the battle of Fleurs (1794) and Gosselins (1794); and later in the campaign along the Rhine (1795).. In each instance two balloonist officers went aloft in a balloon held captive with two ropes by sixteen men.

“Messages to the ground crew were communicated by the use of red, yellow, and green flags some eighteen inches square; messages to the general were dropped in bags weighed down with ballast and marked by a pennant or streamer. No one might handle these last save one of the Ballooning Corps officers. The balloon made a great impression on the Austrians, who on one occassion attempted with near success to shoot it down, but oddly enough did not attempt to imitate it.” [Author’s footnote: At Valenciennes (1793) a French balloon was captured by the Allies, and with it a pigeon carrying dispatches. The enemy indulged their humor by eating the pigeon and by firing the balloon back into the town from a cannon.]

[This book is a real trip! Plum’s headspace seems pretty visionary for his time. The first paragraph has all the gushy sweep of an Alvin Toffler book-on-tape or a speech by Labor Secretary Reich:]

“Ours is an age of rapid achievements. Cultivated aptitude has revolutionized the world. Performance has been reduced to a minimum of time and space to a question of time. Long lives are compassed in an ordinary span: distances are no longer appall: we are making the most of time and least of space.the opinion of the world has become a powerful international factor.”

Then Plum takes us through an expository evolution of speed in warfare via several advancements: running, fires, trumpets, reflections, posts, semaphore, balloon, cipher, and telegraph.

“In 1794, two companies of French military aeronauts were first deployed in balloons at Fleurs, Maubeage, Charleroi, Mannheim, Ehrenhreitstein, Solferino, and elsewhere.

“They were not used as couriers, but to observe an enemy below, and sometimes flag signals were used to telegraph from [balloon locations]. This was done in the United States Army on the Potomac and during the Peninsular campaign, in the [US Civil War]. On all such reconnaissances, the balloon was held by ropes.

“On several occasions, electrical telegraphic connection was had with the aeronaut in the sky. This was first accomplished June 17, 1861, when the War Department in Washington, was placed in instant communication with Professor Lowe, who, from his ‘high estate’, caused the operator at his side to telegraph as follows:

BALLOON ‘ENTERPRISE’ WASHINGTON, JUNE 17, 1861. TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sir: This point of observation commands an area of fifty miles in diameter. The city, with its girdle of encampments, presents a superb scene. I take great pleasure in sending you the first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station, and in acknowledging my indebtedness to your encouragement, for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the military service of country. Yours Respectfully, T.S.C. Lowe”

[Note that the Yankee tradition of naming war/exploration machines “Enterprise” even extended to a balloon.]

Source: French Inventions of the Eighteenth Century by Shelby T. McCloy, Kernel Press, 1952. # T26.F8.M2 1952

From Bradley O’Neill

HELIO-TELEGRAPHY: “As of late [read: late-mid 1800s in Europe/US] the rays of the sun are doing courier service where the electric telegraph could not be built or operated, and such has been the success of sun telegraphing, that it constitutes a new and rapidly developing wonder. This mode of signaling is variously designated as mirror telegraphing, heliographic, helioscopic, heliostatic and heliotropic, all of which seem to be essentially identical in the main principles. But the instruments by which the rays are concentrated and reflected differ somewhat, and hence some are better calculated than others to work at great distances.

The heliostat was invented by Gravesande, about a century and a half ago.[circa 1718?].

In 1861, officers of the United States Coast Survey, at work in the Lake Superior regions, demonstrated the usefulness of the mirror, equatorially mounted, for telegraphic purposes, and succeeded in conveying their signals with ease and rapidity a distance of ninety miles.

During the same year, Moses G. Farmer, an American electrician, a man of infinite invention succeeded in thus telegraphing along the Massachusetts coast from Hull to Nantasket. The next year some English officers introduced the system into the British navy, with modifications and improvement, using at night an electric or calcium light. The signals communicated are made by alternately exposing and cutting off continuous rays of light reflected from one station to another.

MANCE HELIOGRAPH, “an instrument used by the English, telegraphing is done by pressing a finger key, whereby, flashes of light, of long or short duration, are emitted. These flashes and intervals or spaces are easily made to indicate what in the Morse alphabet are shown by dots, spaces, and dashes.In this way the Morse alphabet may be telegraphed as easily as by an electrized wire. Indeed, ungodly parties have before now, at church, telegraphed across the room without awakening suspicion, by a mere movement of the eyelids.

It is reported that during the seige of Paris (1870-1), messages were telegraphed therefrom twenty and thirty miles, by the reflection of calcium lights..

The Mance Heliograph is easily operated by one man, and as it weighs but about seven pounds, the operator can readily carry it and the tripod on which it rests.

During the Jowaki Afridi expedition sent out by the British-Indian government (1877-8), the heliograph was first fairly tested in war.

THE HELIOSTAT, “is said to be the first instrument for mirror telegraphy used in war [which war is not explicitly indicated, but likely the US Civil War]. The mirror receives and reflects the sun’s rays, and a clockwork attachment keeps the mirror position to receive the direct sunbeams,which in Nevada, U.S., are said to be so bright as to be hurtful to the eye at a distance of forty miles. Behind the mirror, in the very center, some of the quicksilver is removed, leaving a very small, round, clear space in the glass, through which the operator looks and may watch the reflection from the next station.

THE HELIOTROPE reflects the rays by mirrors but has no clockwork.

Source: Plum, William Rattle, 1845-1927. The military telegraph during the Civil War in the United States, with an exposition of ancient and modern means of communication, and of the federal and Confederate cipher systems; also a running account of the war between the states. Microform. PUBLISHER Chicago : Jansen, McClurg & Co.,1882. PHYSDESC 2 v. : ill., port., maps, facsim. SERIES 1) Microbook library of American civilization; LAC 22395.

From Bradley O’Neill

[This machine was essentially an encyclopedia for the various mathematical tasks any 17
^th
century ‘learned gentlemen’ might face. The bone tablets mentioned herein can be thought of as ‘applications’ in the contemporary sense. Each tablet was a long strip swathed with specific calculation rules and tables for specific areas of learning. All of the tablets can be catalogued, retrieved, and cross-referenced from within a large slanted dais.. To my knowledge, this device was one of the first western efforts to collect disparate and specific mathematical applications together in one body.]

Built by Gaspard Schott, Rome, 1666. Based on John Napier’s multiplying rulers (aka Napier’s Bones) of the previous century, the Organum Mathematicum was “a large box in which are stored ten different sets of bone-like tablets for performing a variety of different tasks.” There were tablets used for:

ARITHMETIC: a standard set of Napier’s bones together with addition and subtraction tables.
GEOMETRY: tablets whose primary purpose was to solve problems encountered in survey work.
FORTIFICATION: tablets which would aid the gentleman soldier in constructing military fortifications.
CALENDAR: tablets used in determining the date of Easter and the dates of the other major Christian festivals.
GNOMICS: tablets to calculate parameters to construct sun dials on all surfaces independent of their direction or inclination.
SPHERICS: tablets which would help in calculating the movement of the sun, determine the times of sunrise and sunset for any given day or year, and other similar problems.
PLANETARY MOVEMENTS: tablets to perform calculations to determine the motion of the planets and to cast horoscopes.
EARTHWORKS: two sets of tablets dealing with the calculations involved in cut and fill problems for the construction of canals and civil engineering.
MUSIC: tablets which would aid the novice in composing music and creating melodies.

[The Organum Mathematicum looks quite cumbersome, taking up the space of a large desk. Of course, portability in computation was not yet a big issue, so the size probably quite impressed users of the day.]

Source A History Of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams; Prentice-Hall, 1985. LC#QA71.W66 1985

From David Morton

The “other” telegraphone—a combination telegraph/telephone from the turn of the 20
^th
century. Poulsen’s well-known telegraphone is widely known as the first commercial magnetic recording device. There was, however, another product called the telegraphone introduced about the same time, and also sold in the U.S. by a firm called the American Telegraphone Company. The following passages are quoted from microfilmed documents from 1906 located in the AT&T Bell Laboratories archive at Warren, New Jersey.

“There has been much written about the use of the telephone by railroads for assisting them in their dispatching business. This use of the telephone has already been made by several railroad companies and only reason why the telephone has not become more popular is because there have been great drawbacks to its use in connection with the telegraph lines.

“There has been a considerable advance along that line recently and now portable telegraphones are on the market, by means of which it is possible to talk over several hundred miles of telegraph line without any trouble. the name telegraphone may be confused with the other instrument of the same name that was described in this magazine a short time ago, but it is entirely different and it merely means an instrument by means of which it is possible to talk over a telegraph line at the same time that message are being sent without confusion.

Such instruments have been used on the Galveston, Harrisburg, & San Antonio railway for some time, and Mr. Percy Hewett, Superintendent of the Telegraph of that company, states that they are giving good service.

He writes as follows:

‘We have equipped our line between San Antonio and Del Rio, with a branch from Spofford Junction to Eagle Pass. The wire on the branch is No. 8 iron. The telegraphone at Spofford is bridged between the two wires. We have equipped all of our cabooses with the instrument.

‘For purposes of communication we use our duplex wire, which is a 210 pound copper. These instruments are giving first class service and are the means of saving serious delays in freights caught at blind sidings, or in case an inferior train reaches a meeting point with a superior train where the superior train has been for some reason delayed.

After waiting a few minutes the conductor attaches his telegraphone by using a connecting pole, and calls up the dispatcher, states what train he has, and asks in regard to the train which he was instructed to meet…’”

Source: “Sound Waves” [internal newsletter], November 1906, p 2. AT&T Corporate Collection, box 1362