The Dead Media Notebook (58 page)

Source: AT&T Labs Research site; http://akpublic.research.att.com/history/24fax.html
”>http://akpublic.research.att.com/history/24fax.html

From Ron Bean

A siren is a noisemaking device producing a piercing sound of definite pitch. Used as a warning signal, it was invented in the late 18
^th
century by the Scottish natural philosopher John Robinson. The name was given it by the French engineer Charles Cagniard de LaTour, who devised an acoustical instrument of the type in 1819.

“A disk with evenly spaced holes around its edge is rotated at high speed, interrupting at regular intervals a jet of air directed at the holes. The resulting regular pulsations cause a sound wave in the surrounding air. The siren is thus classified as a free aerophone.

“The sound-wave frequency of its pitch equals the number of air puffs (or holes times the number of revolutions) per second. The strident sound results from the high number of overtones (harmonics) present.”

“About the turn of the 20
^th
century, compressed-air fog signals, which sounded a series of blasts, were developed. The most widely used were the siren and the diaphone. The siren consisted of a slotted rotor revolving inside a slotted stator that was located at the throat of a horn. The diaphone worked on the same principle but used a slotted piston reciprocating in a cylinder with matching ports.

“The largest diaphones could be heard under good conditions up to eight nautical miles away. Operating pressures were at 2 to 3 bars (200 to 300 kilopascals), and a large diaphone could consume more than 50 cubic feet (approximately 1.5 cubic meters) of air per second. This required a large and powerful compressing plant, 50 horsepower or more, with associated air-storage tanks.

“A later compressed-air signal was the tyfon. Employing a metal diaphragm vibrated by differential air pressure, it was more compact and efficient than its predecessors.

“Electricity. Modern fog signals are almost invariably electric. Like the tyfon, they employ a metal diaphragm, but in the electric signal they vibrate between the poles of an electromagnet that is energized by alternating current from an electronic power unit. Powers range from 25 watts to 4 kilowatts, with ranges from half a nautical mile to five nautical miles. Note frequencies lie between 300 and 400 hertz. Emitters can be stacked vertically, half a wavelength apart, in order to enhance the sound horizontally and reduce wasteful vertical dispersion.”

Source: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15
^th
edition

From David Morton

Multi-channel audio systems were used experimentally as early as the 1930s. Early proposals for stereo tape systems in the late 1940s included several three-channel types, but two-channel stereo was more easily implemented on long playing disks and 45-rpm records. Early pre-recorded stereo tapes also followed the two-channel model. But multi-channel experiments continued with the aim of enhancing the realism of recorded music.

An abortive quad system appeared in the 1950s for use in conjunction with FM broadcasting, but the FCC declined to approve it for commercial use. Quadraphonic home systems began to look more economically feasible after transistors and integrated circuits began to be more widely used in consumer audio equipment in the 1960s, bringing costs down. In 1970, JVC pushed forward with a new 4-channel technology, demonstrating its CD-4 quadraphonic disk (not to be confused with the current Compact Disk).

Between 1970 and 1972, several other 4-channel systems appeared under various names and spellings, including Quadraphonic, Quadriphonic, Quadrophonic, Quadrisonic, Quadrasonic, and Tetrasonic.

Just plain Quad, though widely used to describe these devices, was actually trademarked in 1962 by an obscure British company (which in fact did not make 4-channel audio equipment!)

Besides the CD-4 system, the most popular quad formats were the Electro-Voice system (later called RM or Regular Matrix) the CBS SQ(Stereo-Quadraphonic) system and the Sansui QS system (apparently nearly indistinguishable from RM). Record and electronics companies had to decide for themselves which system to adopt, with some such as Sony choosing SQ and others, such as RCA, choosing CD-4.

By 1973, two more formats had been added, this time on tape. RCA in that year began to offer its first Mark 8 quad 8- track systems, and several record companies offered discrete four-channel recordings on reel-to-reel tape.
Additionally, the matrixed systems could be broadcast over existing FM stations, and by late 1974 there were over 200 U.S stations experimentally using the Sansui system.

The FCC launched a study to compare quad broadcasting standards, although it didn’t announce its findings until late 1977. As more and more companies became interested in quad, the catalog of available recordings expanded and the prices of equipment came down.
 

By 1974, there were approximately 400 titles available on quad disks or 8- track tapes, and 75 on open-reel tapes. Equipment prices began to drop significantly after Motorola Corporation introduced a single-chip decoder suitable for several of the matrixed disk formats.

However, the electronics press claimed that record manufacturers, record retailers, and electronics dealers never fully supported these products. Record companies and retailers complained about the dual inventory problem related to carrying the same titles in multiple formats, particularly since they were already compelled to stock LP, 8-track, and, increasingly, cassette versions of popular releases. More enthusiastic were the quad record clubs that began to spring up to cater to four channel fans.

By 1975, A&M and EMI records had stopped issuing new releases in multiple formats, with the former choosing to stick with CD-4 and the latter SQ. That year, High Fidelity’s editor complained that electronics dealers represented the least enthusiastic group in the country where quad is concerned, reflecting the declining sales of equipment.

By the end of 1975 most large electronics chains began discounting quad equipment by up to 50 per cent in order to clear it out. Harman Kardon, Sherwood and other companies declared that they would stop quad production, and Radio Shack closed out its brand of quad equipment to make way for the next big fad, the Citizen’s Band radio.

The fact that sales of quad reel-to-reel decks never quite fulfilled expectations was an unanticipated boon for musicians, the lines of high-end recorders designed by TEAC and other companies for quad fans were hastily repackaged as multi track home studio equipment, resulting in one of the first relatively affordable multi track recorders with separate inputs, preamplifiers, and level controls for four channels.

By August of 1977, quad had run its course. Apparently the only manufacturer to offer a new product that year was Sansui, which had two quad receiver models in its catalog. Ironically, the FCC completed its tests of matrixed FM broadcasting and submitted its findings to the public for comment.

In 1978, it issued standards for quad broadcasts, but by that time public interest had waned.

As late as 1979, the audiophile press was still hyping quad, with well-known audio journalist Len Feldman claiming that 4-channel broadcasting was still very much alive. In fact, four-channel audio was not to be heard from again until the current fad for surround sound television.

Precious Metal As a Network Protocol
From Julian Dibbell

James Buchan, on page 18 of his remarkable Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money writes this:

“From our vantage, we can see that money is of no particular substance and may be of no substance at all; that whatever money is, it may be embodied in coins or shells, knives, salt, axes, skins, iron, rice, mahogany, tobacco, cases of gin; in persons; in a word or gesture, paper, plastic, electronic impulses or the silver ingots raced through the streets on trays at sundown to make up accounts between the foreign banks in my mother’s father’s days in Hangkow.”

Two things about this passage interest me. The first is its suggestive implication that money has both a “hardware” component (i.e., the coins, paper, knives, mahogany, etc., that embody it) and a “software” component (i.e., among other things perhaps, the value thus embodied).

The second is the wonderfully nostalgic closing tidbit about the shuttling trays of silver in the streets of old Hangkow (this I assume is the former city Hankou, China, now a subdistrict of the megalopolis Wuhan), which provides a vivid, high-Cahill-number image of the essentially abstract dead medium I’m proposing for consideration here: metallic monetary standards, the antiquated practice of backing every piece of circulating currency with a fixed amount of precious metal. Some preliminary taxonomizing is in order.

Bruce Sterling suggested that money might be thought of as a distributed calculating system, and that seems about right. But there’s another suggestion built into that one: that we think of money as a network.

Strictly speaking, too, we’d want to think of it as an internetwork, globally distributed and capable of transmitting value from one end of the net to the other, so long as the proper network gateways are traversed. Money, we might even say, throwing precision to the wind, is the original Internet. But let’s just call it an analogy, and see where it leads us.

One implication, I think, is that if coins and banknotes and so on are to be thought of as the hardware of the network, then we must also look for some underlying technical system we could call the network protocols. I am not enough of a finance wonk to identify the “protocols” of the contemporary world money system, a frighteningly live medium, in any case, but I think it’s safe to say that in the terms of our analogy, “protocols” is exactly what we would have to call the metallic standards that governed monetary exchange during the first great age of global capitalism (i.e., from Waterloo till the First World War).

In particular, we would mean the gold standard, which died a slow death between 1931, when Great Britain abandoned it, and 1971, when Britain’s successor at the helm of world finance, the U.S., finally chucked it too.

If I understand the Hangkow ingot exchange Buchan alludes to, that system might properly be considered a kind of monetary intranet, operating locally on the same principles as the global network.

Globally, a physical transfer of precious metal was also used to settle accounts at the end of the day, though at that level the metal was gold rather than silver, and the transfers were between nations as well as banks, and the end of the day was really the end of the quarter or the year.

It was a very different regime than what we have now, with very different effects. The money supply was tighter, often painfully so, and the drift of economies was (according to Buchan) deflationary rather than inflationary.

In the U.S. at least, bitter and arcane controversy sometimes surrounded the subject of metallic standards, with the Populists of the late 1800s, for instance, supporting a move to a “bimetallist” gold-and- silver standard that would somehow loosen the money supply and make things easier for the little people.

According to Jack Weatherford’s The History of Money: The Struggle Over Money from Sandstone to Cyberspace, it was apparently well-understood at the time that L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was a Populist allegory inveighing against the gold standard (the seductive “yellow brick road” to the sham- world of Oz being merely one of the more obvious clues).

Metal-based money was strange stuff. It’s difficult, at this late stage in the world-financial game, to imagine what could possibly bring the metallic standards back. Profound inflationary trauma perhaps; or maybe a global dictatorship. For the time being, at any rate, they remain very much dead.

Source: Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money by James Buchan (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1977) The History of Money: The Struggle Over Money from Sandstone to Cyberspace by Jack Weatherford (Crown: New York, 1997)

From Matt Hall

The currency that defines an economic period in a society is most definitely a medium. Perhaps not a medium for expressing ideas or concepts, but a medium for expressing value and worth. Early economies are sometimes incorrectly thought of as limited to primitive, person-to-person, bartering of goods. However, the Chinese seem to have had systems of currency as early as 1122 B.C.

The cowry shell satisfied the dual criteria of portability and limited availability necessary for it to become a tool of trade. Later, cowry imitations were crafted in stone, and in different metals, so that the fragile shells themselves did not have to be used.

Other, later forms of Chinese currency included inscribed replicas of a farmer’s spade and a type of curved knife. Both “spades” and “knives” had a denomination and a place of minting inscribed on them. Finally, the more contemporary Chinese coinage appeared, with its circular form and a square piece removed from the center.

These knife and spade currencies became defunct for some pressing reason. Perhaps trends changed in what the populace perceived as a valuable shape or material. Maybe the common citizen somehow became comfortable with the idea of a unit of value no longer resembling the objects it could buy. What then is going to happen to our own society, with money replaced by digital representations?

The cowry shell was imitated in stone to improve its longevity and transportability. Likewise, we replace the paper dollar with digital information to improve durability and the speed of transaction. Does this mean that our economies are getting more efficient? If so, what are we getting more efficient at?

Source: Early Chinese Coinage, Wang Yu-Chuan, 1951, American Numismatic Society (HG 1223 W36)

From Bill Burns

“New TIMEX Magnetic Recorder “Less than 9 lbs. Complete, 9 ½” x 11 ½” x 4 7/8” high overall.