The Dead Media Notebook (67 page)

“But it is a more personal disaster for generations whose most cherished moments are proving far more fleeting than they ever imagined. The 21
^st
century may inherit a better record of Victorian ancestors posing sternly in black and white than of the present generation.

“Kodak invented the Instamatic camera in 1963, and began the mass marketing of colour film. Until then, virtually all photographs had been in black and white. In the early 1970s, sales of colour outstripped black and white and today it accounts for all but a tiny percentage of the 96 million films sold in Britain each year.

“There have been refinements since, but the principle of using layers of cyan, magenta and yellow dye to produce a colour image has remained the same. Ken Rogerson, technical manager for Fuji, said: ‘Organic dyes are inherently liable to fade, and they all fade at different rates. I don’t want it to sound like a Doomsday scenario, but ultimately they will break down into a colourless compound. Whites in a print may also turn yellow with time. Black and white is a metal image and has far greater stability.’” “The fading may be only gradual, but, as each dye breaks down, the colour of the image distorts. Skin tones can turn a deathly blue. The conditions in which the print is kept determine which dyes go first. Light, heat and humidity are the death of a colour photograph.”. “Works of art are also affected. Many of the most recent works in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s vast collection are unlikely to outlast original prints made by the great Victorian photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill.”. “The artist David Hockney keeps his work in a cold store in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that much of it has a limited life span. In the introduction to a recent exhibition of his work in Bradford, he wrote: ‘Colour is fugitive in life, like it is in pictures. Colour is the most fugitive element in all pictures, a great deal more than line. The piece of paper is beautiful, it will slowly change like everything else.’ “Sadly, the change is not always for the better. Lydia Cresswell-Jones, photograph specialist at Sotheby’s, said: ‘We see prints from Hockney’s Sonnabend Portfolio, taken in New York in 1976, and they are almost always brown and therefore quite hard to sell.

“’It is difficult to value them when they have degraded like that. I think the last one we sold made L260. This is one reason why, for many collectors, black and white is still the colour of photography.’”. “With collectors prepared to pay as much as L55,000 for a single print by a contemporary photographer such as Cindy Sherman, the lifespan of the work becomes a matter of economic as well as artistic importance. How much would a Rembrandt etching now be worth if it had begun to fade after 30 years? “Some manufacturers such as Fuji have begun producing ‘archival’ photographic papers, but they are unlikely to be used by high-street film processors and are not guaranteed to be fade free for more than 50 years.
“Film is now giving way to the digital image, according to Doug Nishimura, a research scientist at the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, New York. “However, he advises thinking twice before rushing out to transfer all your photographs on to CD-Rom. Mr Nishimura said: ‘You have to be prepared to refresh the images every five to ten years as the hardware evolves. Otherwise, all you will have in the attic for your grandchildren is a rather nice frisbee.’”

Source article by Simon de Bruxelles in The Times of London, in Britain Newsfeatures, July 11, 1998

From Brett Shand

[Brett Shand remarks: Well this ain’t dead, but it sure the hell is interesting!]

[Bruce Sterling remarks: Tube freight is not dead, and not a medium either, but it is clearly a technology with apparently great promise that has conspicuously failed to deliver. This four-year-old government report by a pair of US federal engineers casts an interesting sidelight on a long-time Dead Media darling, pneumatic mail. Tube freight is the (mostly conjectural) big brother of the pneumatic post. The appeal is obvious: why settle for rapidly puffing mere “petit bleu” mailnotes beneath Paris, when the Russians and Japanese can ship entire trainloads at high speed through closed tubes? Furthermore, I confess myself thrilled to discover a credible reference to the long-abandoned underground railway of Chicago. If memory serves, Chicago suffered a catastrophe in the 1980s when this abandoned system broke open and was extensively flooded by the river. New York’s abandoned pneumatic subway is notorious, but Chicago’s dead subterranean railway still lacks its Dead Media chronicler.]

“Under a research program on advanced freight movement, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) with the support of the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center is examining the technical and economic feasibility of tube transportation systems to address future freight transportation requirements.

“Tube freight transportation is a class of unmanned transportation systems in which close-fitting capsules or trains of capsules carry freight through tubes between terminals. All historic systems were pneumatically powered and often referred to as pneumatic capsule pipelines.

“One modern proposed system called SUBTRANS uses capsules that are electrically powered with linear induction motors and run on steel rails in a tube about two meters (6 feet) in diameter. The system can be thought of as a small unmanned train in a tube carrying containerized cargo.”.

“Potential Advantages of Tube Freight Transportation Systems “Tube transportation systems have a number of attractive features that make them worthy of evaluation as alternatives for future freight transportation systems. Because such systems are unmanned and fully automatic, they are safer than truck or railroad systems. When traveling down grades, the capsules may be able to regenerate energy for improved energy efficiency. Because they are enclosed, they are unaffected by weather and are not subject to most common rail and highway accidents. Hazardous cargo can be more safely transported than on surface systems. The tubes could also be used as conduits for communication cables for the future information highway.”

“The tubes can be placed above, on, or below ground. Underground locations are useful in environmentally sensitive areas and are important where surface congestion makes surface right-of-way difficult or expensive to obtain. Much right-of-way potentially exists below our present highway system.”

“Tube transportation has a history that extends back at least 200 years. During this period, systems for both passengers and freight have been built and operated. Some are in operation today. In addition, there have been many more proposals that were never built. All of the historical tube transportation systems were pneumatically powered.

“George Medhurst, a London businessman, is considered the earliest proponent of pneumatic-powered railways although there were a few earlier, brief suggestions from others. He first published a freight proposal in 1810, a passenger proposal in 1812, and a more comprehensive set of proposals in 1827.

“Despite four demonstration systems, including a 95-m (312-ft), underground system built in New York City in 1869-70, no large-size tube transportation system has been introduced into common carrier service. The primary result of this activity was to lend support to the development of underground electric railway systems for urban passenger transportation. However, small diameter pneumatic pipelines have been providing reliable freight transportation around the world for more than 150 years.

“Common applications of pneumatic pipelines before World War II were the high-priority movement of documents and parts in industrial environments and movement of letters and telegrams under city streets to bypass congestion. These systems were built with tubes ranging from 5 to 20 centimeters (2 to 8 inches) in diameter. Such systems are still being built today to expedite small shipments.”

“After World War II, larger pneumatic systems were developed and built in Japan and Russia to move bulk materials such as limestone and garbage. These systems had considerably greater throughput as a result of both their increased diameters of 0.9 to 1.2 m (3 to 4 ft) and their mode of operation, which allowed more capsules to move through the tube at one time. By the early 1970s, several groups began to give consideration to the use of these pipeline designs for common carrier, general merchandise freight applications using tubes 1.2 to 1.8 m (4 to 6 ft) in diameter.

“Nippon Steel Corporation and Daifuku Machinery Works Ltd., using an early license from TRANSCO of Houston, Texas, have built a 0.6 m (2ft) diameter, 1.5 km (0.9 mi), double line to move burnt lime in Nippon Steel’s Muroran Number 2 steel plant. This elevated line was built in the mid-1980s and uses capsule trains (two cars per train) to move 22,000 metric tons (24,266 short tons) per month. This system is called AIRAPID.

“Sumitomo Cement Co. built a similar system in 1983 to move limestone 3.2 km (2 mi) between a mine and their cement plant. The 1 m (3.2ft) diameter pipe carries three car capsule trains delivering 2.2 million metric tons (2.43 million short tons) per year. This system was originally based on a Russian license but was considerably redesigned by the company.

“A number of tube systems, called TRANSPROGRESS systems, for moving crushed rock are being used in the former Soviet Union. An 11 km (6.8 mi) line for garbage was built in 1983 from St. Petersburg to an outlying processing facility using TRANSPROGRESS technology. This technology has also been applied to intraplant systems.

“Historically, there is a precedent for underground freight operations. The most notable underground freight system was the 80 km (50 mi) electric railway system built under the city of Chicago for the collection and distribution of general cargo and coal.

“The Chicago system operated from 1904 to 1958, interfacing with the main-line railroads.”

Source: Tube Freight Transportation by Lawrence Vance and Milton K. Mills

William Vandersteel. The Future of Our Transportation Infrastructure, Ampower Corporation, North Bergen, N.J., 1993. Masaki Koshi. “An Automated Underground Tube Network for Urban Goods Transport,” Journal of International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1992. R. Livesey. “Blown Freight Is a Lovely Change From Road and Rail,” The Engineer, London, England, Oct. 28, 1971. “Im N chsten Jahrtausend in 57 Minuten von Genf nach Zurich,” Der Bund, Sonderbeilage, Bern, Switzerland, Sep. 8, 1992. “Vacuum Technology Weighed for Swiss Maglev Proposal,” MAGLEV News, Vol. 1, No. 15, May 17, 1993. “AIRAPID Capsule-Tube Transport System,” promotional brochure of Nippon Steel Corp., Daifuku Machinery Works Ltd., Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo, Japan, undated. “The Capsule Liner,” promotional brochure of Plant Engineer Division of Sumitomo Metal Ind. Ltd., Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo, Japan. “TRANSPROGRESS Systems for Pipeline Pneumatic Container Freight Transportation,” promotional brochure of Licinsintorg, Moscow, Russia, 1986. I. Zandi, W.B. Allen, E.K. Morlok, K. Gimm, T. Plaut, and J. Warner. Transport of Solid Commodities via Freight Pipeline, Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., published in five volumes for the Department of Transportation, Publication No. DOT-TST-76T-35 through DOT-TST-76T-39, July 1976. Eric Rath. Container Systems, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1973.

[Bruce Sterling remarks: the pneumatic tube conveyor is very much alive, and evolving into new technological niches year by year. Its technical history however is surprisingly rich, full, and littered with the dead, as this corporate document shows.]

“The first documented, genuine pneumatic tube in the United States is officially listed in a patent issued to Samuel Clegg and Jacob Selvan in 1840. This was a vehicle with wheels, on a track, positioned within a tube. Inventing and patenting went on for years in North America but there just didn’t seem to be much of an effort to locate markets for this new invention.

“In Civil War times, a phenomenon called ‘five-and- dimes’ were thriving all over the Eastern Seaboard. These stores were rapidly taking on the appearance of something larger, the department store. Cash required rapid movement from areas on the trading floor to the safer reaches of the store. Some of the stores were building up, not out, and this slowed the change making process even more.

“William Stickney Lamson, and his wife, took charge of a family enterprise called the Rachet Store. This retail business would soon shape up to become one of the first American ‘five-and-dimes’. The need in this business to move change lead to several innovations including wrapping change in handkerchiefs and tossing it to the sales clerks in the front of the store.

“Innovations soon gave way to invention. Bill Lamson cut a croquet ball in half, hollowed out both sides and placed change inside. Then, after rubber-banding the halves together, would toss the ball from clerk to clerk. This lead to the ‘carriers’ on a wire and using multiple- spring gadgets to move the balls at higher speeds.

“The wire conveyors or ‘cash carriers’ suited the smaller stores fine, but the ever-expanding department stores in America required additional speed and more efficiency. Soon Bill Lamson was to jump on the pneumatic tube train in America.

“At about this same time, Mr. William Grover and brother Mr. Clarence Grover founded a company in Woodburn, Michigan. Included in the official company mission, which appears in the Record of Articles dated 1917, is the following: (the company was to be involved in), ‘the manufacture, sales and distribution of Pneumatic Tubes; Cash and Parcel Carriers; Store, Office and Factory Fixtures; Wood and Metal Novelties; Tools and Machinery.”

“Some years later the Grover Company was purchased by the Powers Regulator Company of Skokie, Illinois. This move in the marketplace would result in two new companies that dominate the marketplace today.

“The first company was formed after the new Powers Regulator made a major shift in the way its products were to be distributed. In the Grover Company, products were sold and installed by a group of distributors around the country. Powers Regulator decided to market and sell all products from ‘in-house’ and because of that move, had no need for a distributor network. This left several pneumatic tube distributors with no source of supply.