Society

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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Retrotech: Technology in 1925

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  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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Enslaved by Devices, 1920s Version

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One frequently observes people who appear to be the captives of their phones and other screen-based devices, and many concerns have been raised about the effects of this behavior. Reading Merritt Ierley’s book “Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold”, I was amused to see the following passage in a chapter about a letter written in the mid-1920s concerning the then-new technology of radio. The letter was sent to NYC radio station WEAF by a man whose family had just acquired a receiver:

It is 5:25 PM–you have just finished broadcasting; you have practically finished breaking up a happy home.  Our set was installed last evening.  Today, my wife has not left her chair, listening all day.  Our apartment has not been cleaned, the beds are not made, the baby not bathed–and no dinner ready for me.

A little quick on the trigger, I’d say…good grief, they’d just gotten the radio the previous evening.  I wonder what happened over the next few days, and how common this experience/reaction was.

Some reactions, though, were much more positive about the influence of radio.  Writer Stanley Frost thought radio had the ability to reach out to “illiterate or broken people,” making them “for the first time in touch for the world around them,” and reprinted a letter received by WJZ in Newark:

My husban and I thanks yous all fore the gratiss programas we received every night and day from WJZ…The Broklin teachers was grand the lecturs was so intresing…the annonnser must be One grand man the way he tell the stories to the children.

And in an article titled ‘Radio Dreams That Can Come True’, Collier’s Magazine asserted hopefully that radio could lead to a “spreading of mutual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts, ideals, and purposes, and making us a strong and well-knit people.”

Thoughts?

My Name is Academe, and I’m a Failure.

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I have been calling attention for years, and don’t mind at all when people with bigger platforms than mine recognize that the first step in correcting failure is to admit failure.  The refreshingly solid Republican victories in national election might be the sort of evidence that would encourage academicians to revise their priors.  Let’s start with Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western, with “We Asked for It” in the house organ for business as usual.

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.

Democracy is about emergence in government. The academic enterprise is about emergence in understanding.  It sounds like I got out just before the real nonsense took over.  Or perhaps higher education reverted to its roots in the seminary.  (Is it any accident, dear reader, that Joe Stalin was a seminarian at one time?)

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Vectors of Societal Destruction – and the Growing Pushback Against Them

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In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the characters explains a  ‘European-style gangster hit’,  which he says consists of three shots: head, heart, and stomach.  Yes, that should definitely ensure the target’s demise.

It struck me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for some of the malign happenings in America and in many other Western nations, and I wrote a post on that theme last year.  In my analogy, ‘stomach’ represents the basic, essential physical infrastructure of society–energy and food supply, in particular.  ‘Head’ represents the society’s aggregate thought processes: how decisions are made, how truth is distinguished from falsehood.  And ‘heart’ represents the society’s spirit: how people feel about their fellow citizens, their families, friends, and associates, and their overall society.

Over recent years, all of these things are under assault…and, given that 2024 is an election year, I think it’s fair to note that the ideology of the Democratic Party is a major factor in driving all of these malign trends.

Stomach: The suicidal energy policies of Germany could serve as a poster child here, but similar trends are in place in other countries, although mostly not so far along.  (The US state of California seems to want to be next on the list of bad examples.)  The destructive farming policies of Sri Lanka, implemented with the enthusiastic cheerleading of Western experts, now have echoes in Canada and in the Netherlands. And energy and agriculture are of course closely coupled…for the production of fertilizer, for the operation of farm equipment, and for the transportation of supplies to the farms and the transportation of agricultural products to process and distribution centers and ultimately to consumers.

Nearly all physical goods and products come ultimately from farms or from mines. At least in the US and in much of Europe, regulations and litigation have made it very difficult to open new mines and even to keep existing ones in operation. Yet there are very extensive materials requirements for the wind, solar, and battery systems required for the envisaged ‘energy transition’…and the answer, if one asks where these materials should come from, seems to be only ‘not from here.’

Pressuring people and entire economies for maximum use of wind and solar…while at the same time amping up the difficulties and disrespect facing the people and companies involved in the extraction and processing of the necessary materials…is a sure recipe for shortages and Greenflation.

Speaking of disrespect, the American businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg, has made some rather remarkable assertions about both farming and manufacturing.  With regard to farming, he said:

“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School.  “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

…and regarding manufacturing:

“You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs.”

All of which elides the vast array of knowledge and skills required in order to do either farming or manufacturing successfully. I doubt that Bloomberg, for all his knowledge of information technology and finance, has much comprehension of any of these areas.  What he projects here is a feeling of contempt for people who are involved in the physical world rather than his own symbolic world of information technology and media.

Journalists and politicians, in particular, seem to have little grasp of those essential technologies, which I have metaphorically classified under ‘stomach’, even at the most fundamental levels.  And too many political leaders think…even while preaching about their respect for Science, that they can ignore people with actual, practical experience with energy and the other technologies which they wish to control.  For example:

Trudeau’s green hydrogen announcement, as big an international energy policy statement as there has been in memory, was held far from Canada’s energy heartland, and included no one from the energy sector that is currently shouldering the load.

Not only were they not invited, but Trudeau went out of his way to make an absurd statement about the lack of an economic case for LNG that was akin to a drama teacher going on stage at the Detroit Auto Show and telling the audience to get rid of all their wrenches because he didn’t think they were needed anymore.

Head:  The cognitive methods that have made Western societies thrive are under assault. Such benign things as asking students to get the right answer and to show their work are denounced as racism.   Debate and discussion have become difficult as disagreement is often perceived as a threat.  In law, the adversary system itself is under attack as lawyers are pressured not to represent unpopular clients…something that has long been the case in totalitarian nations and in areas dominated by mobs and by lynch law.

A vital part of the toolkit that has driven progress–social progress as well as technological progress–has been the open discussion enabled by the spirit of free speech.  This is under severe attack, not least on university campuses.   A recent Quillette article provides multiple data points on campus hostility to allowing speakers whose view might offend somebody. Link   A 2017 study, based on a sampling of all US registered voters, shows that 30% of Americans favor banning speakers “if the guest’s words are considered to be hateful or offensive by some.”   Among Democrats–and professors and administrators are much more likely to be Democrats than to be Republicans–the corresponding number is 40%. And for Democrat women–a demographic which is in the ascendency in key roles on campus–the opposition to free speech, as measured by the above question, is 47%.   Link  Not a hopeful sign for the future of campus free speech or for the direction that American society will evolve as students who have come of age in its universities move out into the wider world.

In science, ideas and conclusions which conflict with established views and prestigious people are increasingly likely to be condemned and suppressed as ‘misinformation.’  This paper Link argues persuasively that identity politics and censorship go hand in hand.  Major scientific publications are now evaluating submitted papers based on (what someone thinks are) the moral implications of the proposed conclusions, not just on the truth or falsity of those conclusions–see Alex Tabarrok’s recent post as well as this Quillette article.

There are of course precedents for this kind of thing.  As the blogger Neo notes, “The Soviets actively squelched science that contradicted certain political messages they wished to get across.”   The agricultural catastrophe that was brought about by the nonsensical but politically-correct and politically-enforced theories of Lysenko is well-documented history, but the damage is much broader than that.  This article mentions that the Soviets at one point banned resonance theory, in chemistry, as “bourgeois pseudoscience.”  The field of cybernetics–feedback systems and automatic control–was at one point denounced as “a misanthropic pseudo-theory”, among other things.  (It is interesting to note that “few of these critics had any access to primary sources on cybernetics”…the denunciations were largely based on other Soviet anti-cybernetics sources.)

In Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, protagonist Rubashov is an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime. The book represents his musings while awaiting trial and likely execution.

A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash.  No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs.  In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.  If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him.  If he was wrong…

Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture.  When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to “interfere with” what has been determined to be the One Best Way.

The assault on what I have called “cognitive methods that have made Westerns societies thrive” has not originated only from the universities, but they have been the most influential source of this destructive challenge. Which is ironic, given that the great growth of educational institutions was driven by and premised on the Enlightenment ideals that all too many of these institutions seem focused on negating.

There was once a rather sinister toy: it consisted of a box with a switch on the side. When you turned the switch to on, the box would open, and a hand would come out, and the thing would turn itself off.  The behavior of much of western academia seems modeled after the behavior of that box.  Unfortunately, it’s not just themselves that these institutions may succeed in turning off.

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