The Dead Media Notebook (76 page)

Caution: NEVER WIND a string or rubber band around a pigeon’s leg because it will stop the circulation and may cause the pigeon to lose its leg.”

36. Delivering Pigeons by Parachute

a. EQUIPMENT. Parachute equipment PG-100/CB consists of a collapsible, cylinder-type, 4-bird container and a 6- foot hemispherical baseball-type parachute with a quick release clip. Parachute equipment PG-101/CB is of similar design except that the container has an 8-bird capacity and is attached to a 9-foot parachute. This equipment is specifically designed to supply initially or to resupply pigeons to infantry parachute troops, infantry glider troops, or any isolated forces requiring delivery of pigeons by air.

b. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE. To insure safe delivery of the pigeons, caution must be observed when attaching containers to the parachutes. The instructions printed on each parachute pack should be strictly adhered to.

c. RESULTS. Best results will be obtained when pigeons are launched between the altitudes of 200 and 1,000 feet with air speed not exceeding 125 miles an hour. Pigeons launched within these general limits are less likely to become lost because of excessive drift. The possibility of injury to the birds from high speed air rushing through the container, or from shock when the parachute opens, will be reduced to a minimum.”

Source: War Department Technical Manual TM-11-410, The Homing Pigeon. War Department, U. S. Government Printing Office, January 1945

From Jim Thompson

“A Kentucky bookbinder and printer, Timothy Hawley Books, offers a line of what it calls bibliocadavers, handsomely bound volumes whose blank or printed pages are created from a pulp containing the ashes of a loved one.”

Source: Atlantic Monthly, September 1998, page 24 in Notes and Comment by Cullen Murphey

From Bruce Sterling

“About two dozen brass and black-steel tubes are lined up along one wall of a large, airy room. Indicator lights are mounted on the front of the tubes; at the end of each tube is a receptacle made of dark polished wood. Also below each tube is a separate hatch neatly labeled with an engraved and painted brass plaque.

“A red indicator light on one of the tubes turns on. A low-level hum gradually builds over several minutes to a high-pitched whir. It all ends with a dull plunk as a metal cylinder drops from the tube and into the basket. An operator retrieves the canister, reads the label that denotes its intended destination, then deposits it into one of the lower hatches.

“A green indicator light comes on, signifying that the canister is on its way to its final destination.

“For about 25 businesses in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, m-commerce (that’s ‘m’ as in ‘mechanical’) is still the quickest, safest,and cheapest way to get things done. In a matter of minutes, an important document can make its way from point A to point B on the potrubni posti, Prague’s underground pneumatic tube network, at a cost of about 11 U.S. cents per transmission.

“The network, comprised of some 60 kilometers of underground tubes, has been in operation since the 1920s, when it was considered the state of the art for high-speed document transfer. Other citywide pneumatic networks have long since been shut down or retooled for other purposes, but the Prague network continues to handle about 9,000 transmissions per month (in its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, the system carried more than a million messages per month).”

“The pneumatic network is owned and operated by SPT Telecom, the Czech national phone company. That ownership ultimately may prove to be the tube network’s downfall: Telsource N.V., a Swiss-Dutch alliance that now owns about 27 percent of SPT Telecom, has said that all SPT operating divisions must turn a profit or face shutdown. Despite an increase in use in recent years, the potrubni posti now operates in the red.”

[Bruce Sterling remarks: The pneumatic post is a Necronaut’s darling. Every time I distribute a post on this subject, it is met with replies protesting that pneumatic tubes are alive and well. Yes, they are, but this is something rarer: a pneumatic medium, a government- supported city-wide mail system, dating back to the days when tubes were not merely packet-shippers (as they are today) but state-of-the-art public communications networks. One might have known one would find a survivor in Prague, the City of Alchemists and home of many a living fossil. But now the potrubni posti is under cruel threat from mere commercial necessity, and who knows, it may already be dead.]

Source: Right Down the Tubes by Mimi Fronczak Rogers

From Nicholas Bodley

[Bruce Sterling remarks: there’s a fine melancholy pleasure in reading mindblown pop-science reportage about incredible machinery, especially when that hype pre-dates the utter collapse and obscurity of the Babbage Difference Engine. This Brewster book has received most any number of dead media citations over the years.]

“Of all the machines which have been constructed in modern times, the calculating machine is doubtless the most extraordinary. Pieces of mechanism for performing particular arithmetical operations have been long ago constructed, but these bear no comparison either in ingenuity or in magnitude to the grand design conceived and nearly executed by Mr. Babbage.”

[There’s a lethal poetic pang in that little word “nearly.”]

“Great as the power of mechanism is known to be, yet we venture to say that many of the most intelligent of our readers will scarcely admit it to be possible that astronomical and navigational tables can be accurately computed by machinery; that the machine can itself correct the errors which it may commit; and that the results of its calculations when absolutely free from error, can be printed off, without the aid of human hands, or the operation of human intelligence.”

[The bold term “computed by machinery” was a stunning neologism at the time.]

“In all this, I have had the advantage of seeing it actually calculate, and of studying its construction with Mr. Babbage himself. I am able to make the above statement on personal observation. The calculation machine now constructing under the superintendence of the inventor has been executed at the expense of the British government, and is of course their property.

“It consists essentially of two parts, a calculating part and a printing part, both of which are necessary to the fulfilment of Mr. Babbage’s views, for the whole advantage would be lost if the computations made by the machine were copied by human hands and transferred to types by the common process.”

[Many people overlook this highly mediated aspect of Babbage’s primeval computer: from the get-go, the device was designed to be half-printer, constructed on novel principles.]

“The greater part of the calculation machinery is already constructed, and exhibits workmanship of such extraordinary skill and beauty that nothing approaching to it has been witnessed. It was permitted to call a computer “beautiful” in those pre-geek days.]

“In order to execute it, particularly those parts of the apparatus which are dissimilar to any used in ordinary mechanical constructions, tools and machinery of great expense and complexity have been invented and constructed; and in many instances contrivances of singular ingenuity have been resorted to, which cannot fail to prove extensively useful in various branches of the mechanical arts.

[Babbage was inventing not just a computer, but a new means of highly precise industrial production. His book Economy of Manufactures was a major influence on Karl Marx.]

“The drawings of this machinery, which form a large part of the work, and on which all the contrivance has been bestowed, and all the alterations made, cover upwards of 400 square feet of surface, and are executed with extraordinary care and precision.

“In so complex a piece of mechanism, in which interrupted motions are propagated simultaneously along a great variety of trains of mechanism, it might have been supposed that obstructions would arise, or even incompatibilities occur, from the impracticability of foreseeing all the possible combinations of the parts; but this doubt has been entirely removed, by the constant employment of a system of mechanical notation invented by Mr. Babbage, which places distinctly in view at every instant the progress of motion through all the parts of this or any other machine, and by writing down in tables the times required for all the movements, this method renders it easy to avoid all risk of two opposite actions arriving at the same instant at any part of the engine.

[Inbuilt crash avoidance, one can’t have subparts of the program competing for resources, or overwriting one another.]

“In the printing part of the machine less progress has been made in the actual execution than in the calculation part. The cause of this is the greater difficulty of this contrivance, not for transferring the computations from the calculating part to the copper or other plate destined to receive it, but for giving to the plate itself that number and variety of movements which the forms adopted in printed tables may call for in practice.

“The practical object of the calculating engine is to compute and print a great variety and extent of astronomical and navigational tables, which could not be done without enormous intellectual and manual labour, and which, even if executed by such labour, could not be calculated with the requisite accuracy.

“Mathematicians, astronomers, and navigators do not require to be informed of the real value of such tables; but it may be proper to state, for the information of others, that seventeen large folio volumes of logarithmic tables alone were calculated at an enormous expense by the French government; and that the British government regarded these tables to be of such national value that they proposed to the French Board of Longitude to print an abridgement of them at the joint expense of the two nations, and offered to advance 5000L. for that purpose.”

[Navigational logarithms were to be the Difference Engine Killer App.]

“Besides logarithmic tables, Mr. Babbage’ machine will calculate tables of the powers and products of numbers, and all astronomical tables for determining the positions of the sun, moon, and planets; and the same mechanical principles have enabled him to integrate innumerable equations of finite differences, that is, when the equation of differences is given, he can, by setting an engine, produce at the end of a given time any distant term which may be required, or any succession of terms commencing at a distant point.

“Besides the cheapness and celerity with which this machine will perform its work, the absolute accuracy of the printed results deserves especial notice. By peculiar contrivances, any small error produced by accidental dust or by any slight inaccuracy in one of the wheels, is corrected as soon as it is transmitted to the next, and this is done in such a manner as effectually to prevent any accumulation of small errors from producing an erroneous figure in the result.

“
In order to convey some idea of this stupendous undertaking, we may mention the effects produced by a small trial engine constructed by the inventor, and by which e computed the following table from the formula X2 + X + 41. The figures as they were calculated by the machine were not exhibited to the eye as in sliding rules and similar instruments, but were actually presented to the eye on two opposite sides of the machine: the number 383, for example, appearing in figures before the person employed in copying.
“While the machine was occupied in calculating this table, a friend of the inventor undertook to write down the numbers as they appeared. In consequence of the copyist writing quickly, he rather more than kept pace with the engine, but as soon as five figures appeared, the machine was at least equal in speed to the writer.

“At another trial thirty-two numbers of the same table were calculated in the space of two minutes and thirty seconds, and as these contained eighty-two figures, the engine produced thirty-three figures every minute, or more than one figure in every two seconds. [That would be 0.5 cps, but the thing is made of brass, for heaven’s sake.] “On another occasion it produced forty-four figures per minute. This rate of computation could be maintained for any length of time; and it is probable that few writers are able to copy with equal speed for many hours together.

“Some of that class of individuals who envy all great men, and deny all great inventions, have ignorantly stated that Mr. Babbage’s invention is not new. The same persons, had it suited their purpose, would have maintained that the invention of spectacles was an anticipation of the telescope; but even this is more true than the allegation that the arithmetical machines are precursors of Mr. Babbage’s engine. The object of these machines was entirely different. Their highest functions were to perform the operations of common arithmetic. Mr. Babbage’s engine, it is true, can perform these operations also, and can extract the roots of numbers, and approximate the roots of equations, and even to their impossible roots.

“But this is not its object. Its function, in contradistinction to that of all other contrivances for calculation, is to imbody in machinery the method of differences, which has never before been done: and the effects which it is capable of producing, and the works which in the course if a few years we expect to see it execute, will place it at an infinite distance from all other efforts of mechanical genius.

“A popular account of this engine will be found in Mr. Baggage’s interesting volume ‘On the Economy of Manufactures,’ just published.

Source: Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, New York, J&J Harper, 1832, pages 263-7

“2,000 homing pigeons lose their bearings, disappear” “Homing pigeons, as the name suggests, are supposed to find their way home. But more than 2,000 of the creatures have disappeared this week and no one can explain it.

“The birds lost their way during two separate homing pigeon races held Monday. Out of 1,800 birds competing in a 200-mile race from New Market, Va., to Allentown, Pa., about 1,500 have vanished. And in a 150-mile race from western Pennsylvania to suburban Philadelphia, 700 out of 900 pigeons are missing.