Retrotech: Sending Photographs Under the Ocean, in 1925

In my post Technology in 1925, I mentioned the Bartlane process for transmitting news photographs via undersea cable. The way that this process works is so..so…the words ‘elegant’ and ‘baroque’ both come to mind..that I thought it deserved its own post.

Transatlantic cables had been around since the 1860s, originally handling transmissions in Morse Code or its cable variant. By 1925, teleprinter transmission thru the cables was increasingly common.  Bandwidths had increased but were still quite limited–a maximum of 25 to 40 characters per second, usually multiplexed into multiple slower subchannels. These cables were strictly for telegraphy: voice telephony under the Atlantic was still many years away.  News stories could be transmitted under the ocean almost instantaneously, but the accompanying photos would take a week or more: obviously there would be commercial value if the photos could be transmitted by cable as well.

So how was telegraphy married with photography?

The Bartlane process (Bartlane comes from the names of co-inventors Maynard McFarlane and Harry Bartholomew) starts with analog-to-digital conversion of the filmed image (although neither ‘analog’ nor ‘digital’ were terms in common use at the time)..varying shades of gray at particular points in the negative (‘pixels’, in our terminology) are captured as combinations of holes punched into a paper tape. The completed tape is sent to the cable office where it is transmitted using standard cable transmission equipment..simultaneously punching a duplicate tape at the other end of the cable. The received tape is then run through a device which recreates the original picture…with quality limited by the density of pixels and the number of shades of gray that the equipment can handle.

In its original 1924 released form, the Bartlane system contained no electronic components at all–it was strictly mechanical, electrical, and optical.  How did that work?

Like this…

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Cherry Blossoms

These are in Maryland, a few miles outside of DC…they generally bloom a few days later than the ones at the Tidal Basin. I’m guessing peak bloom by this weekend.

This is Bad

As almost everyone knows, the Navajo Code Talkers were a group of WWII Marines who provided secure communications by the simple expedient of transmitting and receiving orders in their own language. This procedure was much faster than conventional encryption / decryption methods, and the Navajo language was apparently so little-known and so complex that the Japanese were never able to read such messages.

Someone at the Department of Defense (or more likely some set of someones) apparently interpreted President Trump’s executive order on DEI as meaning that it would be improper to refer to the Navajo Code Talkers as…Navajos, and at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers have been removed from DoD websites.

There have been many other questionable deletions made on counter-DEI grounds, such as the deletion of items about Ira Hayes of Iwo Jima fame.  The Navajo Code Talkers deletions I find particularly bad because their being Navajo–specifically, being speakers of the Navajo language–was an inherent enabler of the work that they did.  To refer to their accomplishments without reference to their language (and hence, their tribal background) would be as silly as banning a post on codemakers and codebreakers of the more conventional sort from disclosing that many of them had mathematical or linguistic backgrounds.

I don’t know if this is malicious compliance, or arrant stupidity, or just robotic bureaucratic behavior, but I think it is really, really bad.  It reminds me of the Left’s destruction of statues.  It’s harmful to the country and also harmful to the political future of Republicans/MAGA. It’s not at all consistent with an intelligent narrative of American patriotism and identity.

Manufacturing versus ‘High-Tech’….Really?

In yesterday’s WSJ, Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux predictably argue for free trade and against tariffs and say:

We are today taking actions to protect manufacturing jobs the same way we did with agriculture a century ago. In the process, we are imperiling our access to the world market in high-tech and AI, which are the economic future.

I have often seen this assertion of a polarity between manufacturing (old, boring, low growth and low margin) and ‘high tech’ (new, cool, high growth and super-profitable) and wonder what the writers think ‘high-tech’ exactly IS.

Would they consider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (market capitalization $758B) as high-tech? It is certainly a manufacturing company!

How about ASML Holding NV (market cap $274B)?…this is the only company in the world that manufactures the Extreme Ultra Violet machines which are essential for making the highest-performance semiconductors.

Consider GE Aerospace, now trading as a separate company with a market cap of $206B. It may lack the Cool factor of the above two companies, but anyone who thinks that making jet engines doesn’t count as ‘high-tech’ should read this article: Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine at the Construction Physics substack.

The above examples are companies that sell business-to-business rather than to consumers.  For a business that sells to consumers, look at Tesla–there are many articles and videos available about this company’s innovations in manufacturing. (Here, for instance)

What, exactly, do Gramm and Boudreaux, and similar writers,  think ‘high-tech’ actually means?

Personally, I’m not particularly fond of the term, nor even of just ‘technology’ when used in a narrow and restrictive sense–I think it’s pretty odd to consider a company that sells some garden variety consumer product online (with sparkly AI algorithms!) as being ‘technology’ while excluding the making of jet engines (or power turbines) from that category.

One point that is not well enough understood: process innovation is as important as product innovation.  The manufacturing innovations of Matthew Boulton and John Wilkinson were as important for the success of the steam engine as were James Watt’s design innovations. In the case of the Model T Ford, the process innovations which allowed production at low and continuously-declining cost were perhaps even more important than the design of the car itself.

The idea of a polarity between ‘High-Tech’ and Manufacturing is unhelpful to clear thinking about policy.

Retrotech: Technology in 1925

  1. The twenties.  An era of Prohibition (and gangsters)…jazz…flappers…The Great Gatsby…and an accelerating stock market. I thought it might be fun to take a look at the state of technology as it stood a century ago, in 1925.  This post first post of a series will focus on communications and entertainment..

Radio had been pioneered in the early 1900s, but was initially restricted to wireless telegraphy for point-to-point or ship-to-shore use.  Broadcasting has to wait for the introduction and improvement of vacuum tubes and development of a viable business model. The first US broadcasting station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air in November 1920 and reported the results of that year’s presidential election. By 1925, there were about 500 US radio stations, and nearly 20% of households owned a receiver. Good receivers were expensive, though: $119 for a loudspeaker model (headset-only versions were cheaper)…that’s about $2200 in our present money.

Broadcast stations all transmitted with vacuum tubes, however, there were still some earlier technologies (spark, arc, and alternator-based transmitters) in use for other applications.

One important broadcasting event of 1925 was the debut of WSM in Nashville and its most famous program, The Grand Old Opry;  along with portable recording for the phonograph (discussed later), this would have a real impact on the national spread of music that had previously been regional or local.

The telephone was still far from universal–only about 35% of households had phones, and those that did used it mainly for local communication.  (Telephone connections were often ‘party line’, so privacy could not be assumed)   Transcontinental telephone service had been launched in 1911 (again, enabled by vacuum tube amplification) but was still very expensive. Rapid long-distance communication was usually conducted by telegraph.  Morse code was still very much in use, although printing telegraphs had long been available and were handling a growing proportion of the traffic.  One specialized form of printing telegraph was the stock ticker–these devices were shortly to get a real workout, in 1929.

Dial telephone technology had been developed and was expanding, but most calls were still completed manually by operators. There were 178,000 women working as operators in 1920 (men and boys had been tried, but did not work out well) and the number was still growing, reaching 342,000 by 1950.  And those numbers count just the employees working in phone company central offices, not the switchboard operators in businesses and government offices.

Transoceanic telegraph cables had been in use since the 1860s, but undersea telephone cables were far from being a practical possibility.  Still, a transatlantic telephone service would soon be available (launched in 1927),  based on high-power long wave radio stations at each end…but not many could afford to use it.

Movies had reached extreme levels of popularity. I can’t find specific numbers for 1925, but by 1930, the weekly movie audience would reach 65 million. These were black & white films, and without sound–musical accompaniment was usually provided by local orchestras.  Sound wasn’t too far away, though, the first mainstream sound film, The Jazz Singer, came out in 1927.  The early sound films used a process called Vitaphone, which required synchronization of the sound on a phonograph record with the stream of images on film. It would be replaced by a process in which the soundtrack was recorded on the film itself.

Newpapers were a huge deal in 1925.  Their success was enabled by a convergence of technologies: the rotary printing press, the Linotype machine, photography and halftone printing, and the telegraph.  (That line from the song The Easter Parade about “you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure” wouldn’t have made sense to people in 1925, since rotogravure printing wasn’t introduced until 1926.)

Just over the horizon (1927) was the teletypesetter,which allowed stories transmitted by telegraph to be entered directly into a Linotype machine for typesetting, without the necessity of being re-keyed…so a news item written by an Associated Press reporter in (say) New York City could be inserted into the copy for hundreds of newspapers around the country, almost untouched by human hands.

Books and magazines were increasingly popular–this phenomenon was driven more by expanded literacy than by any particular technological improvement, although mechanized binding and reduced paper costs (driven by improvements in chemical pulping processes) contributed to the growth of the book-publishing industry, while magazines benefited from highly-selective use of color. Grok says that in a mass-circulation weekly like the Saturday Evening Post you might see 1 full-color cover, 5-15 color ad pages (5-10% of total pages), occasional two-color accents (eg, blue headers) on 10-20% of editorial pages, and 80-90% black & white interior pages, and notes:

Where color appeared, it dazzled. A 1925 reader flipping to a Lucky Strike ad with a green pack and golden smoke in Collier’s (circulation ~1 million) felt the modernity of the Jazz Age. Publishers knew color sold—ads with it often doubled engagement, per early ad studies—and it became a status symbol. But for every color page, dozens stayed monochrome, balancing art with economics.

The Phonograph had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1877: for several decades, both recording and playback were via a direct mechanical process: for recording, sound vibrations were impressed on the cylinder or disk, and for playback, the process was reversed. Most home phonographs in 1925 would have been of this mechanical type, although some higher-end products had been introduced with electronic pickup and amplification.  For recording, Western Electric introduced an electronics-based system in 1925.  Some versions of this system were portable (although heavy and cumbersome)–previously, recording could only be done in studios, while with the new system, sound could be captured anywhere. Searching for new performers and new markets, record companies took the Western Electric system on the road to record music that had previously been heard only by local people: the Cash family being one example.

There’s a great documentary made in 2015, American Epic.  An original 1925 recording machine was restored by engineer Nicholas Berg (the electronics runs off batteries and the recording lathe is powered by a descending weight) and the producers took the restored machine on an extended trip, introducing 1925 recording technology to some present-day performers and having them record their own renditions of music from the machine’s younger days.  Highly recommended.  The move website is here.  The book that accompanies the program is subtitled The first time America heard itself.

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