The Dead Media Notebook (31 page)

“’It will be noticed that the zinc and carbon plates on one disc are reversed on the other, hence the necessity of placing the porous cells on opposite sides of the glass jars.

“’The collar to which the two discs are secured is provided with a screw sliding up and down in the long groove in the rod, which prevents the collar from turning around, and with a catch which drops into a notch on the opposite side when the discs are lifted high enough, and holds the plates out of the liquids. If they are allowed to remain down when the pen is not in use, the sulphuric acid and water would soon eat the zincs away. To prevent this, they should always be lifted out after using.

“After considerable use the mercury with which the zincs are amalgamated becomes eaten off, and the action of the acid upon the pure zinc is more intense, causing what is termed ‘boiling.’ This can be obviated by removing the zincs from the discs, washing off all superfluous matter, and allowing them to remain in the acid and water a few moments; then remove and add a few drops of quicksilver to them, making them good as new. By this precaution, zincs will last a long time. [Unlike the operator, who will soon the suffering the tremors of “hatter’s madness” if he inhales enough of those mercury fumes.] “’The battery fluid should last from one to two weeks, according to the amount of work it has to perform. When it is in daily use, for an hour or so at a time, it is recommended that it be changed once a week. Operators will have to be guided by experience.’”

Source: MENLO PARK REMINISCENCES. Volume One by Francis Jehl, Dover Publications Inc 1990, originally published by the Edison Institute, 1937 ISBN 0-486-26357-6 page 9

From Bruce Sterling

“With the coming of the typewriter and the subsequent use of that machine in preparing stencils, the electric pen passed from use. At one time, however, more than 60,000 were in offices, and its use had spread outside the United States. It could be found in many government offices in Washington, D.C., as well as the majority of large industries such as railroads.

“The electric pen was not confined to circular letters and the like, but could be found in restaurants where it was used for making up the bill of fare. I well remember buying a book on ‘How to Learn to Telegraph,’ containing many different diagrams of sounders, relays, and switches, which were all printed by the Edison Electric Pen process.

“Then there was a comic sheet, which was circulated by some sort of telegraphic fraternity. [Note: this “comic sheet” may be the earliest known “net fanzine,” telegraphic net-gossip reproduced in hard copy with an Edison Electric Pen.] It was also prepared with the Edison pen, and you would be surprised at the artistic designs which could be produced by this little device.

“Among the treasures in the Edison collection at Dearborn [Michigan, USA] is a scrapbook. The book contains pictures, calling cards, letterheads, invoice forms, menus, and many other examples of work actually done with the electric pen back in 1875.”

Source: MENLO PARK REMINISCENCES. Volume One by Francis Jehl, Dover Publications Inc 1990, originally published by the Edison Institute, 1937 ISBN 0-486-26357-6 page 9

From Bill Crawford

This describes the talking drum in the village of Peri on the south coast of the Great Admiralty Island in Papua New Guinea.

“The drum language the children understand but make no attempt to execute. This language consists of formal phrase beginnings which mean ‘Come home =’ or “I am now going to announce how many days it will be before I do something,’ etc. The first one will be followed by the individual combination of beats which is the call of a particular household for any of its members.

“The second is followed by slow beats, interspersed with a formal spacing beat. Every one in the village stops work or play to count these beats, but only a knowledge of who is beating the drum and what he is planning to do in the near future make it possible to interpret the announcement.

“The children stop their play to hear which house call follows the formal introduction, and go back to their games if it is not their own. They seldom bother to further identify the call. If a date is announced they mechanically count the days and may stop to guess who is beating the drum. There their interest ceases. One ceremony is too like another to matter.

“But there are three drum calls which do interest them, the beats announcing that some one is about to die, that some one is dead, and the drum beat which means ‘Trouble,’ = theft, or adultery. For these they will pause in their play and possibly send a small boy to inquire into the cause.

The drum beat for death is so simple that children can make it and are sometimes permitted to do so in the event of the death of an unimportant person.”

Source: Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea, William Morrow; New York, 1930. p. 43 ff.

From Richard Kadrey

Cat Piano: “What should we say about the cat piano? The idea that such an instrument could have existed gives a lot to think about, even if it was built on an experimental basis: a piano where strings are replaced by cats, each of them giving a different note.

“It seems that Father Kirchner, a German Jesuit of the XVIIth century with an interest in musical things, gave the first description of this weird and cruel instrument.

“’Not long ago,’ says he, ‘an actor, as ingenious as illustrious, built such an instrument to cure the melancholy of a great Prince. He gathered cats of differing size and therefore in the pitch of their voices. He enclosed them in a basket specially built for this purpose, so their tails, coming out through holes, were held in tubes. He added keys with thin needles instead of hammers, and installed the cats according to their voices in such a way that each key would correspond to the tail of an animal, and he put the instrument in a suitable place for the pleasure of the Prince. Then he played it, producing chords corresponding to the mewings of the animals. Indeed the keys pressed by the fingers of the musician, by trotting the tails of the cats, would enrage the poor animals and make them scream with a high or low pitch, producing a melody that would make people laugh or even incite mice to dance.’” .

“Johann-Christian Reil, renowned neuro-anatomist from Germany, mentions the cat piano (Katzenklavier) in a list of therapies for mental illness, published in 1802. He even specified that the patient has to sit ‘in such a way that he does not lose sight of the physiognomy and the mimicry of the animals.’

Man-Tiger-Organ

“Of all the noise instruments in history, one of the least equivocal in its intent is Tipu’s Tiger. Captured in India by the British army after the defeat and death by bullet and bayonet of Tipu Sultan in 1799, this large and amazing object is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

“The most succinct and evocative description was written by an employee of the East India Company: “’This piece of Mechanism represents a Royal Tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European. There are some barrels in imitation of an Organ, within the body of the Tyger, and a row of Keys of natural Notes. The sounds produced by the Organ are intended to resemble the Cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a Tyger. The machinery is so contrived that while the Organ is playing, the hand of the European is often lifted up, to express his helpless and deplorable condition.’

“John Keats saw Tipu’s Tiger in the East India Company’s offices and later referred to it in a satire he wrote on the Prince Regent: ‘that little buzzing noise, Whate’er your palmistry may make of it, Comes from a play- thing of the Emperor’s choice, From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.’

“And when the tiger was first exhibited in the newly- opened Victoria and Albert Museum, the public cranked the handle to make it roar with such sadistic, joyful frequency that students in the adjacent library were driven half-mad by the distraction.

“In a technical analysis of the instrument, Henry Willis speculated that ‘the intended method of use for the keyboard organ was to run the knuckles up and down the scale to produce the effects of a screaming man being killed by a tiger.’ Because the design and materials suggest a European rather than an Indian maker, Willis suggested that the tiger and its victim were constructed by either a malicious Frenchman or a renegade Englishman.

“But whoever made this wonderfully macabre sculpture, Tipu certainly enjoyed it. He was obsessed with tigers, for one thing; for another, as a Muslim whose wealth and land had been plundered by the colonialists, he hated the British. Reportedly, he used to circumcise them when he took prisoners. His walls were decorated with scenes depicting soldiers being dismembered, crushed by elephants, eaten by tigers and other fates too obscene for the British major who saw them to form a verbal description.

“’Better to die like a soldier than to live a miserable dependent on the infidels on the list of their pensioned rajas and nabobs,’ Tipu said at his last military conference. Delicious irony: through the preservation of imperial spoils, albeit mute and frozen in the act of mauling within a glass case, the objectification of Tipu’s hatred endures.”

Source: LES MEDECINES DE LA FOLIE by Dr. Pierre Morel and Claude Quetel Pluriel-Hachette Pub., from photocopy; date unknown translated by Francois Baschet

From Bruce Sterling

“But the true center of the new Chat Noir was the Theatre d’Ombres, the shadow theatre, a brain child of Henri Riviere which put all the Paris beau monde into a state of wonder by the brilliance of its technique and artistic innovation.

The Theatre d’Ombres was a discovery in the true cabaret spirit. It was a genre which could be used for a variety of effects and incorporated all genres into a small scale replica of Wagner’s ‘total art work’ (Gesamtkunstwerk).

“Using an ingenious combination of shadow and light play, decor painted or superimposed on glass and paper, cut-outs and Japanese-style puppets, Riviere created unparalleled pre-cinematographic effects on the screen- stage. These were underlined by musical accompaniment, with a choir of sometimes up to twenty people backstage, piano or organ; by narration, either of the story-telling or satirical commentary kind; and by acting.

The diversity of the shadow plays does credit to the eclectic black cat. One could pass without transition from the mysticism of Georges Fragerolle’s L’Enfant prodigue, to Maurice Donnay’s Athenian drama, Phryne, to the parodied naturalism of Louis Morin’s, Pierrot pornographe, to the heroic epic, Epopee, which put Paris once again into a Napoleonic mood of patriotic jubilation. Epopee, a military play in two acts and fifty tableaux, was created by Caran d’Ache, one of the epoch’s leading poster artists. Witnesses say that some of the shadow plays equalled in beauty Turner’s impressionistic effects.

“One kind of shadow play consisted of a satirical montage of current events, piece bonemontee, a newsreel with a difference. Salis [Rodolphe Salis, impresario of the “Chat Noir” cabaret]. would improvise a commentary, drawing in references to any notables in the audience. He had respect for nothing and no one, and with an insolent loquacity, Salis would allow his sharp sense of the actual to demolish bankers and the treasury, politicians and parliamentarianism, ‘the grand monde, the demi-monde, tout le monde.’ In this room, with its profligacy of cats in diverse positions and styles, Salis cast the mould for what was to become the cabaret tradition of the conferencier.”

[The Chat Noir cabaret was founded in 1881 and the shadow-play seems to have faded circa 1900]

Source CABARET by Lisa Appignanesi. Grove Press, Inc. New York. Originally published in Great Britain in 1975 by Studio Vista. First published in the United States in 1976 by Universe Books. First Evergreen Edition 1984 ISBN 0-394-62177-8, LC 84-47500 pages 21-24

From Stephen Herbert

The Kinora was a miniature mutoscope (“flip-book” principle viewer) intended for home use. While the Lumiere brothers were working flat out developing their Cinematographe camera/projector in 1895, they were also developing the Kinora. They had no way of knowing that they were “inventing” cinema (a bunch of people in a dark hall watching films projected on a screen), only that they were creating a moving picture machine.

This technology could have taken off in a number of directions in terms of exhibition: (in arcades, or in the home). So the Lumiere brothers ‘hedged their bets’ with the Kinora home mutoscope viewing machine, patented in Feb 1896. The Kinora was a development of an idea already patented by Casler (of American Mutoscope & Biograph fame) in America.

As it happened, their ‘cinema’ projections were very successful, and they didn’t bother with the Kinora. A few years later they passed on the idea to Gaumont, who marketed it in France around 1900, with approximately 100 reels available (subjects by Lumiere and others).

Around 1902, versions of the viewer were launched in Britain and it eventually became successful; over a dozen different models of the viewer were made, and something like 600 different reels were available. The apparatus was cheap, easy to use, and non-flammable. A studio was set up to take private motion portraits in London, and eventually home movie cameras (using unperforated paper negatives) were sold. The Kinora allowed the middle classes to see motion pictures at home, before it was socially acceptable to visit the cinema.

In 1914, the factory burnt down and the system died. The number of surviving machines and reels indicate the popularity of the Kinora in Europe for around 15 years before World War One, and yet there is no public consciousness of this medium at all. Viewing a reel in one of these machines is extraordinary, the mechanism is so simple it is almost non-existent, and yet the result is the same as watching an ordinary movie or miniature TV.

Source: The Kinora, motion pictures in the home 1896-1914 by Barry Anthony (The Projection Box, 1996).