The Dead Media Notebook (79 page)

“Do you mind?” be asked, pointing to a field ahead. I looked at a spot of land that must have been created out of an auto engineer’s nightmare.

There were cobblestones, potholes, washboard earth formations, trestles, and almost any other strange irregularity one could find. This was Chrysler’s testing ground, he told me, where new models were jolted up before they were sent to distributors.

My heart sank. I consoled myself with the thought that if the machine is properly balanced, nothing can throw it off. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but worry. Kent shot the car over the trestles, but there was not even a waver in the sound. He ran over cobbles, skidded past wash-boards, climbed up and down small, jutting mounds.

Still the music came forth, loud and undisturbed. Kent was impressed and immediately said he would demonstrate the set to the president of Chrysler. One thing I learned later was that each set of cobblestones had its own frequency of vibration when in contact with the moving car, so I later had to design a filter that worked for more possibilities of vibration than I had ever thought of.

Several days later we went down to the Chrysler garage, where several people joined us. We all piled into one of the executive cars, which had been outfitted with one of my sets. Lynn Townsend, who later became president of the auto company, sat in back with me while the then president of Chrysler drove.

The executives gave the tone arm the same test as before-over cobblestones, around curves, over washboard roads, slowing down, speeding up, even emergency stops. The jolts were incredible. But so was the record player. Nothing could stop it from carrying out its appointed mission.

I, on the other hand, was getting sick. With music filling the air, the president wheeled the car into the company garage. Townsend turned to me and said, “I must have it for the Chrysler.” Everybody else agreed and chanted, “Yes, we must have it.”

Actually I didn’t know until later that the timing for my innovation was right. Chrysler was then preparing for its annual face-lifting-a model change-and they wanted to focus their advertising on a new development. Our machine was glamorous, novel, and it wouldn’t add great expense to the cost of the car.

The Chrysler people named it ‘Highway Hi-Fi’ and designed it to fit under the dashboard with a two-way switch, one for radio and the other for records. We agreed that everything would be ready for the 1956 model. We made plans for a spectacular debut and a press showing.

“I thought that our new CBS Electronics Division (the Hytron-Air King addition) could manufacture the players and discussed it with Dave Cogan, head of the division.

“Sure, Pete,” said Cogan, waving a cigar at me. “Sure thing.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Columbia Records was interested in supplying records, but only if Chrysler placed an order for 20,000 machines, so they could sell that many records to start with. Chrysler seemed to be willing to oblige. So CBS Electronics went ahead.

“All went well until two weeks before the press showing. I was summoned to the phone: emergency call from Chrysler. Something about the installation. I immediately flew to Detroit.

As soon as I arrived, the engineer put me inside a car and started driving with the record player on. It was incredible. The machine wheezed, fluttered, groaned, jumped grooves, and made noises I had never heard before. It did everything it was designed not to do.

What had happened?” And then I glanced at the dashboard and almost jumped out of my skin. The engineers of the Chrysler Corporation had installed my machine in Dodges and Plymouths. The characteristics of those cars are quite different from those of the Chrysler line. They were lighter and harder riding, for one thing, with different kinds of suspension. Obviously a record player installed in these cars needed a different kind of damping.

Here was a major corporate goof on the part of Chrysler’s engineering department. I couldn’t call it anything else. There was no reason to believe that any device geared to one type of car had a universal spirit in it that made it happily adjust to all cars.

Back in the laboratory we simulated the vibrational behavior of the Dodge and Plymouth and discovered what we had to do to fit them with our machines. The night before the press affair we were still feverishly at work, but by morning we managed to install our last hi-fl system in the last of several cars to be used in the display.

I must say that the press conference was a success, and CBS Electronics soon went into preliminary production with 18,000 units.

Somehow this nice cultural addition to American autointoxication didn’t take off with the kind of sales we had expected. Chrysler carried on interminable meetings with CBS engineers. There were complaints from both sides about the way the record players worked. But the chief underlying reason for the middling response, I think, lay in the fact that Chrysler and Columbia Records failed to do proper marketing by not advising potential customers how to obtain additional records. Dealers failed to stock them, and little or no attempt was made to see that they did.

Without this stimulus to buying, the car buyer didn’t order the optional record player in the numbers that we envisioned. Columbia persuaded Chrysler to pay for the initial set of records and phonographs and then grew apathetic, leaving followup to Chrysler.

Seeing the slow sales, the auto company relaxed its promotion. Ironically, even though the business declined, the record-changer manufacturers were so enamored with the l6 2/3 that they included the new speed in their changers - “so you can take home your Highway Hi Fi” - even though there wasn’t a 16 2/3 rpm record in sight.

As a spinoff from the new record technology I developed for the Library of Congress a seven-inch record that plays four hours of spoken word and rotates at 831 rpm. This came into being because of my association with Recording for the Blind, an organization that has brought the beauties of the spoken word into the homes of thousands of blind students. We used the identical tone arm as we did in the automobile, so that it could be pummeled around a bit without distorting the sound.

My wistful hope is still to bring back the past glories of the radio days, so that one can listen to drama, comedy, and stories on one’s own portable talking machine, and by so doing remind people that their senses are not related only to the primitive visual ones utilized in TV viewing.

Source: Maverick Inventor by Dr. Peter Goldmark; 1973; published by Peter C. Goldmark and Lee Edson; chapter nine (page numbers unknown)

From David Galbraith

“Fifty years ago this past June, the Manchester Mark I prototype computer, also known as “Baby”, became operational. Baby was the first computer to store a program electronically, and was also the first computer to store instructions and data in the same memory. Because vacuum tube technology was too immature to store memory reliably, Baby was designed to test memory based on a cathode ray tube. Not much memory, mind you. Baby boasted a full 1K bits of memory, organized as 32 words (or lines) of 32 bits each.

“In celebration of the birth of the first stored program computer on June 21, 1948, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester recently reconstructed Baby and ran a programming contest to write the most imaginative program for Baby.” The background section to “The Baby” web page concludes with: “The first program to run successfully, on June 21
^st
1948, was to determine the highest factor of a number. The number chosen was quite small, but within days they had built up to trying the program on 218, and the correct answer was found in 52 minutes, involving about 2.1 million instructions with about 3= million store accesses.

“F.C. Williams later said of the first successful run: ‘A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer.

It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again.’ “With the Baby proving both the effectiveness of the Williams Tube and the basic stored-program concept, work was immediately started, with increased manpower, to design and build a more realistic, usable, computer based on the Baby. This was achieved between late 1948 and late 1949, in two or three incremental stages, with the Manchester Mark 1. This in turn was used as the basis of the design of the world’s first general-purpose commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark 1.”

Source: MacTech Magazine, September 1998

From Bruce Sterling

Around the time of Sargon (2334-2279 BCE) envelopes were invented; they were slips of clay formed around the [cuneiform] tablet. Envelopes protected the contents from damage and even fraud; that is, the envelopes safeguarded against someone moistening the clay and changing the numbers. Sometimes the text was repeated on the envelope and also sealed. In the case of a dispute, the envelope could be opened and the contents examined and compared. Sometimes envelopes opened in modern times have been found with information written on them different from that of the tablets inside.”

“From the second millennium BCE onwards, rulers frequently corresponded by mail. Major archives have been discovered at Mari on the middle Euphrates and at El- Amarna in Egypt. More than three hundred letters were found at El-Amarna from Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Mitannian kings and from Egyptian vassals in Syria and Palestine. The language commonly used was Akkadian, the language of diplomacy.”

“The Neo-Assyrian Empire (ninth-seventh centuries BCE) did little to improve the roads it inherited in conquered territories. A few roads were even abandoned. But the Assyrian empire made one major change: the central government took over the management of the roads. Government maintenance brought about speedy messenger service to and from the capital and the rapid movement of troops against enemies within and without. The roads were kept in good repair, and exact information as to the terrain and distances was essential.

The principal roads were called ‘royal roads.’ “Official letters and legal documents referred to stations built along the royal roads, used as resting places for troops and civilian travellers and as way stations in delivering royal mail. A royal correspondent wrote: ‘People at the road stations pass my letters to each other and bring them to the king, my lord.’

A regular postal service was provided by mounted couriers, with relays at each road station. The roads were measured with great precision, not only in ‘double hours’ but in smaller measures from 360 meters down to 6 meters. That is, the distances on the royal roads were based on actual measurements using surveyor’s cords of standard lengths.

“Highways were well defined and sufficiently permanent to be named as boundaries of fields in documents of land sales.
These were clearly recognized as permanent highways, maintained by the state
.
Kings Sargon II and Sennacherib had those segments of royal roads closest to their respective capitals, Dar-Shurukkin and Nineveh, paved with stone slabs and supplied with roadside stelae as milestones.

The roads were paved for a short distance outside the cities and then quickly degenerated into a track and finally disappeared completely. This practice was subsequently discontinued until the Romans applied it, on a far greater scale, to their own imperial road network.” “How the news reached Nebuchadrezzar has been a matter of some speculation. In Old Babylonian times fire and smoke signals were used on the Euphrates in the Mari district.”

Source: DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Greenwood Press, 1998, ISBN 0-313-29497-6 and D. J. Wiseman, NEBUCHADREZZAR AND BABYLON, Oxford University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-19-726040-3

From Geoffrey Shea

For three years during the early 80’s I was involved with an artists’ collective exploring the potential of Telidon, the Canadian version of videotex (Minitel is France’s version).

Graphical, on-line, “interactive,” just a decade ahead of its time, the whole thing didn’t go very far. Several artists did create tentative works and some of these were included in an exhibition I curated with Paul Petro at A Space, and another one I prepared with Tom Sherman for some Venice Biennale, but which never got shown due to the ever-present “technical difficulties.”

The whole medium was far too technology-dependent. Viewers had to use a dedicated decoder box and the hardware manufacturers were the only ones who really benefitted from these government-sponsored trials.

The artworks still exist on 8” floppies somewhere in a filing cabinet, but as far as I know there is not an existing operating decoder which can display them. (A friend of mine, Norman White, has an extensive computer museum of sorts with a couple of possibly salvagable ones).

Sure, some of the art is on slides, etc., but the actual works in their crude “interactivity” cannot be seen.

Dead as a doornail, that medium is.

From Philip Downey

“Scriabin considered ‘The Divine Poem’ the turning point in his career. “This was the first time I found light in music, the first time I knew intoxication, flight, the breathlessness of happiness.” His scores became peppered with such markings as “Luminously and more and more flashing.” It might be that Scriabin also suffered from a rare genetic peculiarity known as synesthesia, in which sound is translated directly into color. People with synesthesia cannot hear music without seeing colors.

“Faubion Bowers relates in his biography of the composer, ‘he overflowed with plans. He spoke of tactile symphonies. He called incense an art which joins earth and heaven. He described the ‘Mysterium’ [a work about which Scriabin had been thinking for many years). He explained this great final, cataclysmic opus as synthesizing all the arts, loading all senses into a hypnoidal, many-media extravaganza of sound, sight, smell, feel, dance, decor, orchestra, piano, singers, light, sculptures, colors, visions.’