Miscellaneous

Retrotech: Sending Photographs Under the Ocean, in 1925

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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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Opening Day

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So today is Opening Day.

Well, not really. Baseball began its season last week with a two-game series between the Dodgers and Cubs in Tokyo, but you get the idea.

There are plenty of pieces out there about the day, everywhere from the umpteenth predictions to the “Does Baseball S*ck?” However, I’m not going to do a George Will-type poseur piece like “Why The Pitch Clock Violates Natural Law” or “How Federalist 68 Predicted the Free Agent Era.” Just some memories about baseball, family, and home.

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Cherry Blossoms

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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.

Questions for Our Time

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I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.

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This is Bad

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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.