The Dead Media Notebook (9 page)

From Bradley O’Neill

THE VODER
“At [the 1939] World’s Fair a machine called a Voder was shown [created by AT&T]. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal cords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electronically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker.” page 44 by editors Nyce and Kahn “The American Telephone and Telegraph exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair featured “Pedro the Voder” (Voice Operated Demonstrator), an electronic human voice synthesizer which produced.English-language speech using 50 phonemes” page 94, Bush, ibid.

THE VOCODER:
“In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of [the Voder] called a Vocoder. The loud-speaker is replaced by a micro-phone which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move.”

[Think your PC has limited voice capabilities? Consider the situation in the 1930s and 40s. Bush suggests how to improve the interface]

“Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing [a human language] which is better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less intelligible to the layman.

“One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments.”

[Mobile photography would have come from Bush’s never-produced ‘Cyclops Camera’ headband, sporting a microfilm cartridge.]

“If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.”

[That is, a “projection” on the Memex bibliographic/hypertext machine, a Vannevar Bush thought-experiment that was also never built.]

Source As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, 1945.

From Bradley O’Neill

[I don’t believe this qualifies as an outright medium, but the Arithmometer was a commercial mainstay of 19
^th
century calculation. Arithmometers were in fact produced up to World War I. This indicates the ever-increasing public demand for calculating machines during the early industrial era.]

THE THOMAS ARITHMOMETER
The first commercially produced calculating machine, produced by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar in France. Based on Leibniz’s calculating machine, the device utilized stepped drum gears for calculation. However, the major innovation was to reverse the operating function in the result registers (up to sixteen digits), allowing for reliable and stable calculation over extended periods of time without gear re-alignment. The machine took up an entire desk and required two people to carry it. It spurred on many rivals, eventually leading to quite sophisticated calculating machines that overcame the pitfalls of the stepped-drum design. Thomas received France’s Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for the product. Brad

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

[Many forms of media began as toys, magic, or parlor amusements. Some incubate in the toy market and then move to wider mass influence. Some stay toys indefinitely. Some toys die. The talking head, talking doll, talking automaton or artificial talking intelligence is an ancient ideal which seems to have a powerful attraction for the inventive mind.]

[Mary Hillier’s Foreword well describes this highly entertaining, lavishly illustrated book, which abounds in curiosa for the enthusiast of dead mechanical tech.]

“This book seeks to trace the history of automata and travels through the curious realms where they were exhibited and among some of the amazing characters involved in their invention. The special emphasis in from the eighteenth century onwards when the awakening of technological interest produced both the frivolous and luxury toys to amuse people and the clever robot machines wich eventually were to transform industry.”

“Inventions have often been produced by researchers who little dreamt of the far-reaching consequences. Those who first experimented with electricity had no inkling of how the new-found force would one day illumine and power the world and adapt itself for use in the manufacture of toys. Thomas Edison, assembling his first crude phonograph in 1877 was actually experimenting with a machine that could reproduce the message given by a voice on the telephone.”

[I find Hillier’s assertion that the phonograph was born as a telephone recording/answering machine to be particularly intriguing. Was the phonograph originally a network peripheral?]

“Only afterward, when others recognised the significance of significance of recording the human voice and realised the terrific potential of such an instrument for entertainment did he develop it further along these very lines. It was the realization of the ‘talking head’ man had dreamt of through the ages. Others researching along similar lines exploited the talking machine. The motorised phonograph with wax cylinders was presented to the public and for the first time actual facsimiles of the human voice were obtained and the ‘industry of human happiness,’ as it had been called, had begun. [Can anyone identify the source of this astonishing quote?] The search for a talking doll was over: no automaton could compete with true reproduction - however imperfect in the earliest attempts.

“Edison first took up a patent for a phonograph doll in 1878. [Note how quickly Edison sought a killer app in the children’s market.] His first idea was to build up a doll around a phonograph, but it was obviously more practical to use factory made doll parts and place a miniature phonograph within. It does not seem that such a veritable talking doll was mass-produced by his company until 1889.

“When wound up, this precocious creature recited nursery rhymes by virtue of a little needle tracing grooves on a wax covered disk. The unknown girls who recorded the words in his factory acheived a curious immortality. The doll was made up with a steel torso which contained the works but had a head of German bisque and jointed wooden limbs. The Edison factory is said to have turned out 500 such dolls a day but other manufacturers soon entered into competition producing similar novelties.

“In France the famous Jumeau doll-making firm produced Be’be’ Phonographe in 1893; her mechanism was covered by a small plate in her chest and she was wound from the rear. The doll herself had all the charm of the Jumeau type with bisque head, beautiful eyes, jointed arms and legs and the additional sophistication of speaking in French, English or Spanish (according to changed cylinders). She measured 25 inches as against Edison’s 22 inch baby.

“At the Paris Exhibition 1900, a special room was devoted to the Phonograph doll with girls actually recording at benches. ‘Each one sits before a large apparatus, singing, reading, crying, reciting, talking with all the appearance of a lunatic! She dictates to a cylinder of wax the lesson that the little doll must obediently repeat to the day of her death with guaranteed fidelity.’

“Edison’s phonographic doll set the fashion for dolls with a bigger repertoire in their performance (and cheaper imitations). The progress of talking machines outran the patents and there was, one suspects, a good deal of poaching of ideas on both sides of the Atlantic with all the variations produced both before and after the 1914- 1918 war. The Jenny Lind Doll Company of Chicago produced a doll in 1916 which could sing, talk and recite.

“Some of the dolls must have been unwieldy indeed. The ‘Primadonna’ produced by the Giebeler Folk Corporation of New York was not only made of aluminium but when the real hair wig on the crown of her hinged head was lifted up it contained a turntable for playing 3 ½ inch records! The doll was made in sizes 25 or 30 inches and the mechanism in the body was wound from the back.

“In 1923 the Averill Manufacturing Company also designed a phonograph doll, called Dolly Rekord, in their famous Madame Hendren line.

“Talking dolls, one suspects, became far less of a novelty when the radio and gramophone proper became more generally in use, just as cinematograph toys were displaced by television. Each phase of development introduced its new toys. and some interesting and ingenious working models were allied to the gramophone and its revolving turntable. Some were actually distributed by the company involved in producing the machines (figures 84-86).”

[FIGURE 84. Page from Scientific American, 1890, showing Edison’s Talking Doll and manufacturing processes.]

[FIGURE 85. Rare phonograph doll, Siam Soo, 1909; she shimmies and twists her head when mounted on a record shaft, as the record revolves. “SIAM SOO She puts the O- O in Grafonola. Strikingly new and novel. Works on any phonograph with a Columbia Record. Patented.”]

[FIGURE 86. Uncle Sam appears to chase the Mexican bandit, Pancho Villa, as the record revolves.]

Source: AUTOMATA AND MECHANICAL TOYS, an illustrated history by Mary Hillier. Bloomsbury Books, London 1976, 1988. ISBN 1 870630 27 0.

From Bradley O’Neill

IBM LETTERWRITER: 1941-1942. Analytical/data processing machines cobbled together as a stopgap immediately following Pearl Harbor, built for the US Naval cryptanalytic branch, OP-20-G.

“[Letterwriters] linked teletype, tape, card, and film media together. From unpretentious beginnings as data input equipment, the IBM Letterwriters blossomed into a number of increasingly complex machines that were used for a wide range of analytical tasks. The Letterwriter system tied special electric typewriters to automatic tape and card punches and eventually to film processing machines. Such automation of data processing was badly needed at OP- 20-G. Without automation, [OP-20-G] would have been unable to receive and process its wartime load of a million words a day.”

“The system centered about a special electric typewriter, a tape punch, and a tape reader. The typewriter was a modified version of IBM’s expensive Electromatic machine. The tape punch and tape reader were bread-box sized metal frames filled with relays and sensing pins. The relays controlled reading and punching and were used to convert the teletype code to the signals needed by OP-20-G’s other machines. Linked together, the punch, the reader, and typewriter covered the top of a large desk. It was hoped they would eventually allow the creation of machine-ready data directly from OP-20-G’s new international telegraph system.”

“Simple changes made the Letterwriter equipment useful for another very important but time consuming task, the analysis of [encryption device] wheel settings. When an analyst thought he had found the correct combinations on an enemy system he would set a copy of the encryption machine’s wheels, lugs, and plugboards and type in parts of the encrypted message. He then examined the output to see if it was sensible.”

“Despite their usefulness and reliability, there was a drawback to the Letterwriters. They were not rapid machines. Because of the limits set by the mechanical nature of typewriters and the punches, the system ran at eight characters per second or only 480 characters per minute.”

Source: Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex, by Colin Burke, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen N.J. 1994. LC# HD9696.C772B87 1994.

[Konrad Zuse, legendary computer pioneer, died December 18, 1995. The following obituaries and personal reminiscences cast several interesting sidelights on the birth of digital computation and the mishaps of Zuse’s museum-piece computers.]

From the Guardian newspaper in Britain:

FIRST ON THE DIGITAL TRACK by Jack Schofield
KONRAD ZUSE, who invented the digital computer while no one else was looking, has died in Berlin at the age of 85. He was born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and built his first mechanical calculating machine in his parents’ living room between 1936 and 1938. In Britain and the US. similar but later developments were supported for their military significance, but Zuse’s work was largely ignored.

When he and his colleagues later proposed the construction of a 2,000-tube computer for special use in anti-aircraft defence, they were asked how long it would take. Zuse says they replied: “Around two years.” The response to this was: “And just how long do you think it’ll take us to win the war?”

Zuse started to develop his ideas about computing in 1934, a year before he graduated from the Technische Hochschule with a degree in civil engineering. He then went to work for the Henschel aircraft company as a design engineer or statiker. This involved solving tedious linear equations, which stimulated Zuse to apply his ideas and try to build a system to solve them automatically. His first machine, the V1 (with hindsight renamed the Z1) was made of pins and steel plates, but it represented two dramatic advances.

First. it was a general purpose machine, whereas most calculating machines were dedicated to specific tasks.

Second, it used binary (on/off or stop/start) numbers instead of decimal ones, as Babbage’s far earlier machines had done.

This made Zuse’s machine far easier to construct, although it was to remain somewhat unreliable. Although both decisions seem obvious now, they were far from obvious at the time. Zuse’s choice of a general purpose approach was based on his separation of the different elements: an arithmetic unit to do the calculations, a memory for storing numbers, a control system to supervise operations, plus input and output stages.

This is still the basis of modern computers. Babbage had taken the same line 100 years earlier with his analytical engine, but it proved too difficult to build. Zuse succeeded partly because he chose the binary numbering system instead of using decimals. Binary means counting in twos, which is far more long-winded than counting in tens. However, to count in twos you only need an on/off switch, which is very much easier to construct than the 10-position decimal equivalent. Each operation mav not do much work. but the speed of the simpler switching operation makes up for it.