The Dead Media Notebook (77 page)

“Most of the pigeons should have been back in their lofts within a few hours.”.

“’There is something in the air,’ said Gary Moore, who was the ‘liberator’ for the 150 mile race, deciding when and where the birds were released. ‘To lose this many is just unbelievable.’ “Was it sunspots? A UFO? The currents of El Nino? “It’s hard to come up with an answer, pigeon-race enthusiasts say, because no one knows how homing pigeons do what they do.

“Moore’s theory is that the disappearance may have something to do with cellular phone activity. It’s widely accepted that the pigeons use electromagnetic fields to help them navigate, and cellular phone calls might interfere with that process, he speculated.

“Most long-distance races are held on weekends, when cellular phone activity is lower. But the two races in question were postponed from Sunday to Monday because of rain.

“Sun-spots can also send the pigeons off course, but the sun activity that day was low, organizers say.”. [Bruce Sterling remarks: if cellphones interfere with bird navigation, we should logically have been seeing growing difficulties with all forms of bird migration, not just pigeons. And if sunspots can affect pigeons (surely a phenomenon difficult to quantify), then one wonders whether the recent cosmic magnetar blast, which detectably disturbed the earth’s magnetic field, may have had a role. Could it really be that the cellphones are disturbing pigeon brains and disrupting pigeon navigation? If so, what a rare and choice example of one medium directly killing another. It’s an interesting subject to ponder, next time you press a cellphone to the side of your skull.]

Source: Washington Post; Austin American-Statesman, Thursday October 8, 1998, page A8

From Damien Peter Sutton

The “Signalectic Process of Criminal Classification,” or “Bertillonage,” was an early form of police classification, using photography, anthropometrics, and elaborate card catalogs.

Bertillonage was developed by Alphonse Bertillon, the Director of the Identification Bureau of the Paris Prefecture of Police, in response to the problems of controlling and using the Bureau’s chaotic library of criminal photographs.

The aim was twofold: to establish a usable system of unique identification for criminals, and to establish a statistical system for discovering the basic criminal ‘biotype.’

Alphonse Bertillon was the son of the anthropometrist Adolphe Louis Bertillon. Anthropometrics was the science of taxonomy of the human race, which relied on a statistical approach, using abstract measurements. Anthropometrics had been used extensively in the colonies by most European powers with colonial interests.

Bertillon surmised that if a record could be made of eleven special measurements of the human body,then that record, when accompanied with a photograph, would establish unique, recordable, processable ID characteristics for every member of the human race.

The Bertillonage measurements were: Eventually Bertillon began taking measurements from specialized photographs. Collections also exist of his accumulated pictures of ears, facial profiles, etc.

Bertillon’s project was part of a broad movement of taxonomic work based on the so-called “biotype,” which attempted to use statistical analysis of police records to scientifically identify the “criminal type.”

Eugenics movements at the time promoted the segregation of these inferior types, so that they might not breed.

Bertillon’s system lasted approximately 20 years. It was abandoned, not merely because of ethical problems, but because the archive itself became unwieldy.

The Bertillonage apparatus included an overhead camera, under which the subject would recline in the two poses for the measurement of stretch and height; plus a camera set up in precisely measured distance from the subject, for measurement of the facial dimensions, ear, torso, and arm/hand.

All these images were photographed against a gradated screen, so that the photographs could act as measurement records.

Bertillon’s equipment was standard photographic equipment with minor modifications.

But, as Sekula points out: “The central artifact of this system was not the camera but the filing cabinet.”

The filing cabinets of the period lacked the swift capacity and power of modern ones.

Source: Alan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’ in The Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton, MIT, 1989. Also Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection, by Henry Rhodes, London, Abelard-Schuman, 1956.

From Bruce Sterling

[Bruce Sterling remarks: the Graphion company still designs and sells fonts, but metal fonts, and the devices that used them, are gone. Even phototypesetting has been quietly annihilated. Typesetters were once as common on the techno-landscape as telegraph operators, and had a similar propensity to ride the rails, picking up a job wherever the impulse struck them. They were a powerful and well- paid trade, rather like programmers today. But every media revolution has its casualties.]

“Typesetting as a skilled trade originated in the Renaissance. The Typesetter was solely responsible for the appearance of every page. The wonderful vagaries of hyphenation, particularly in the English language, were entirely in the Typesetter’s control (for example, the word ‘present’ as a noun hyphenates differently than the same word as a verb).

“Every special feature: dropped capitals, hyphenation, accented characters, mathematical formulas and equations, rules, tables, indents, footnotes, running heads, ligatures, etc. depended on the skill and esthetic judgment of the Typesetter.

“Such was the attention to detail and pride in the appearance of a well composed page that Typesetters would occasionally rewrite bits of text to improve the appearance of the page. This greatly annoyed Mark Twain (who began his own career as a Typesetter) and encouraged him to invest heavily in an early, and unsuccessful, attempt to produce a keyboard-driven typesetting machine that wouldn’t edit his words.

“There was a romantic tradition, in this country at least, of the drifter Typesetters, who were good enough at the craft to find work wherever they traveled. They’d work in one town until they wanted a change and then drift on. They had a reputation for being well read, occasionally hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an independence particularly rare in the 19
^th
century.

“Typesetting was a skilled and respected trade even after the keyboard-driven typesetting machines were introduced, around 1900. These machines typically produced lead strips for each line of type, which were stacked in a frame, proofed (the type was of course backward), and clamped into columns or pages. Extra space between lines was supplied with thin strips of lead, inserted between lines.

“Pages such as price lists and directories would be kept in ‘standing type’ and edited by adding and removing individual lines of type. Large type in headings, etc., was likely to be set by hand and combined with the machine set lines.

“The I.T.U. The International Typographical Union, was described as ‘the oldest union in America, and organized to prevent the use of labor saving improvements.’ The union fought hard for its members and when times were hard would send money and train fare to unemployed Typesetters, and direct them to places where prospects were better.

“When preset advertising copy began to be provided by advertisers, in the late nineteenth century, the union required that this type could be used as received only if a union Typesetter was employed to reset, print, proof, and throw away the same copy. The union leader who negotiated this requirement is reported to have been a Mr. Bogus, and this redundant make-work typesetting was called ‘bogus’ type and added a word to the language. (There are other explanations for the word, but none that we know of contradicts this one)

Even as late as the 1980s, most type was set on lead casting machines, and the production manager at the San Jose News complained that his reporters’ stories were being retyped by ‘400-dollar a month secretaries who type 80 words a minute and don’t make mistakes, and then retyped at 40 words a minute on Linotype machines by 800- dollar a month Typesetters who do make mistakes.’

“In the 1970s when the machines that set type began to use low cost mini, and later microcomputers that automated the old typesetting skills, the need for the ITU members began to decline. One after another, newspapers that were already losing advertising dollars to the new upstart television were hit by ITU strikes called to prevent the loss of jobs for Typesetters. One by one these papers closed their doors forever, and Typesetters were really put out of work.

“Finally the union had to settle for agreements that said basically, ‘you can’t fire our people, but you can give them any kind of honest work you have available.’ Since these Typesetters had an average age of over 50 years, the papers could use them for anything from driving trucks to managing the paper warehouse, and they’d all be gone, replaced by people with lower wages (if inflation didn’t make the wages equal) within 10 or 15 years.

“A sad 49 year old Typesetter told me in 1978, ‘My Daddy always told me ‘get a trade’, so I did my apprenticeship and became a Typesetter! Now I’m unemployable!’

“The ITU no longer exists as an independent union. It had a long proud history,protecting and getting good wages for its members through some very hard times for trade workers.

We’d be well advised to realize that most of the jobs we do so well now will probably go away or change completely in a single life time, and when you reach the age of the Typesetter quoted above, you probably won’t have a union working to protect your right to work. So stay up to date!

“Lewis Mumford tells us that the guild of scribes and copyists delayed the introduction of printing presses into Paris for as much as twenty years. In this century people and machines become obsolete almost overnight. Absit omen.”

From David Morton

The Difference between Mimeograph, Hectograph, and Spirit Duplication

The item being discussed here is that familiar, purple- inked, smelly technology we all knew in school way back when.

This is called a “spirit duplicator,” and not a mimeograph, although mimeograph was the generic term for several distinct devices. The word mimeograph was coined by the A B Dick Company, which in the 1887 began manufacturing a stencil-based print duplication system. As W B Proudfoot has shown, the mimeograph was the culmination of a number of inventions, some of which came from A B Dick and some from elsewhere. After purchasing the rights to a process of making stencils invented by Thomas A. Edison, the A B Dick company began selling mimeograph copying equipment under the trade name “Edison’s Mimeograph.”

The device made copies of hand-drawn stencils one at a time on a “flat bed” duplicator. By the time Dick began selling the device in 1887, the Gestetner company in England was already selling a similar machine called the cyclostyle, but mimeograph became the generic term. The mimeograph printing process used ordinary ink (either water soluble or oil soluble), and could even be used to make multi-color prints. The ink flowed through the perforations in the stencil and onto ordinary paper.

Stencils could be prepared by hand or, later, on a typewriter. (Proudfoot 1972, p. 76) Eventually, mimeograph machines used a crank mechanism or an electric motor to speed up the process (as did the hectograph and spirit duplicator devices discussed below).

They all look similar, but are quite distinct. The Hectographic or “gelatin” duplicator, according to one source, “originally applied to a process which involved transferring the material to be copied from a sheet upon which it had been written with a special ink to a pad made from a mixture of gelatin, glycerin, and sometimes glue.”(Doss, 1955, p. 15)

The technology probably appeared in the 1870s, shortly after aniline dyes were developed in Germany. (Proudfoot, 1972, 36).

Copies were made by pressing paper against the inked gelatin surface.” The special dye for making the master copy came in the form of ink or in pens, pencils, carbon paper, and typewriter ribbon. The gelatin process was useful for print runs of up to fifty copies. At least eight different colors were available, but purple was the most common “because of its density and contrast.”

THE SPIRIT DUPLICATOR
Finally we get to the spirit duplicator. It was invented in 1923 by one Wilhelm Ritzerfeld, founder of the Ormig Company in Germany (Proudfoot 1972, 36). The spirit duplicator master consisted of a smooth paper master sheet and a “carbon” paper sheet (coated with a waxy compound similar to that used in the hectograph) acting “backwards” so that the wax compound (we’ll call it the “ink”) was transferred to the back side of the master sheet itself. The master could be typed or written on, and when finished the “carbon paper” was discarded. The master was wrapped around a drum in the spirit duplicator machine. As the drum turned, the master was coated with a thin layer of highly volatile duplicating fluid via a wick soaked in the fluid. The fluid acted to slightly dissolve or soften the “ink.”

As paper (preferably very smooth or coated) pressed against the drum and master copy, some of the “ink” was transferred to make the final copy. A spirit duplicator master was capable of making up to about 500 copies before the print became too faint to recognize.

The spirit duplicator was widely used in educational institutions for making all sorts of documents in small runs. Many students believed that inhaling the distinctive vapors given off by fresh spirit duplicator copies could provide a “high,”
a myth that (in my recollection) teachers did nothing to dispel.

DEAD MEDIA SIGHTING/DEMONSTRATION
Having spent my entire adult life around universities, I know how these institutions are often the last to hang on to their dead media technologies.

Everyone I know has a story about using punched card readers as late as the 1980s, or knows somebody still using a manual typewriter.

Well, about a month ago one department finally cleared out the last of its pre-Xerox copying machines, plus some old printing equipment. In November, 1998, on a routine visit to the Rutgers University surplus store, I noticed a trove of dead print media—a small and very used offset lithograph printing press (way too big for my apartment, unfortunately) a pallet full of very filthy electric mimeograph machines, and a solitary Heyer spirit duplicator.