The Dead Media Notebook (86 page)

Source: stocktickercompany.com

From Dan Howland

[Dan Howland remarks: In a nutshell, this toy was capable of storing simple line drawings as replacable dual cams. The engraving shows a seated doll in a clown suit, with his right arm holding a pencil lead to an easel. Behind him, on the base, is a crank.]
The Artist still exists, along with the Scribe and the Musician. These are three mechanical figures built by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, around 1772. They’re in the Neuchatel Historical Museum in Switzerland, and they still work. They’re operated once a month.
I’
ve seen the Artist and the Musician working there; the Scribe was dismantled for maintenance. All are cam-driven. The Scribe has the most sophisticated mechanism, because it is programmable to write different texts.

There’
s a big stack of cams, with one stack level for each character, arranged to slide like an idler shaft in a gearbox. A wheel with slots for character plug-in blocks controls the shifting. The Scribe is thus programmed by putting in the right character blocks for the desired message.

They’re beautiful bits of clockwork. The works actually fit inside the doll figures, which are about 2’
high.

Source: Mark Rosheim’s “Robot Evolution”, ISBN 0-471-02622-0

From John Nagle

Built by A.D. Booth in post-WWII, mechanical memory “...consisted of a series of rotating disks, each of which contained a tiny pin which was allowed to slide back and forth through the hole, and as the disk rotated, a solenoid was used to push the pins so that they protruded from one side of the disk or the other.”
Mechanisms like that date back much further than post-WWII. They were a common storage mechanism in jukeboxes back to the 1920s. T

he oldest one I know of is a destination-sign controller in the London Transport Museum, London. This device consists of a 4-bit rotary encoder, a 4 bit x 10 shift register, and a 1 out of 16 decoder. But it’s all 19
^th
century technology. The shift register is a drum with pins, and it’s huge; the thing looks like a drive system for a tower clock, standing about three feet high and powered by a weight, cable, and crank, just like a big clock. As of 1985, it was still working.

Source: Personal observation

From John Spragens

The cold, cold ground may preserve historical data more effectively than computers, according to a BBC report. The Beeb cites a University of York study that looked at records of scores of archeological digs between 1991 and 1996 -- stored in computer databases.

It will come as no surprise to necronauts that the data had deteriorated much faster than the archeological artifacts had while they were underground. The list of problems ranged from corrupted floppies to obsolete physical media formats and database files that can’t be read by current programs.

“Kept on standalone computers or on disks in a shoe box, data from sites will be of less use to tomorrow’s archaeologists than if the site had not been excavated in the first place,” the BBC says.

For some reason, the reporter has greater faith in the Net: “Servers can go down or will need upgrading, but in theory, information on the internet will last forever.” Well, in theory...

From Didier Volckaert

The Elektrischer Schnellseher (also called Electrotachyscope) was build by Ottomar Anschtz (Germany) in 1887.

The machine powered (by electricity) a circle containing 24 photograps printed on glass. The images were made using the Muybridge technique. This is important because therefor the 24 images were truly a photographic mathematical fragmentation of a reality in motion. (Most pictures used by other devices at that time were just actors posing before the camera and ‘faking’ motion. A ‘filmcamera’ - a device that could take at least 16 images a second - did not excist till 1892 (Le Prince).

The unique matter of this device is that the image was not projected onto a screen but instead the viewer looked to the glass pictures itself. These were lit from behind for a fraction of a second by a Gleisser-bulb every time one of the glass plates passed the lamp. Using this technique Anschltz avoided the main problem of all other devices, the fact that the pictures were always moving and therefor could not provide a sharp image.

From Bruce Sterling

“The industrial rationalization that took place under the Third Reich embraced everyday objects, as well as architecture, art and armaments.

“The National Socialist regime used form in a very precise way and applied its aesthetic ideas to all areas of production, using them as instruments of political and cultural propaganda. The radio receiver, like other products, was closely studied to see how it could best fulfil its role at the heart of totalitarian government: namely to infiltrate every house in the Reich.

“Walter Maria Kersting was one of the pioneers of German industrial design. In The Living Form, published in 1932, he described how the task of the designer was to create ‘simple and cheap objects, which must not appear to be more than they are. and which can be bought anywhere.’ Their mechanisms must be obvious so that they can be understood by people ‘who do not have a technical mind,’ and should be designed such that they are ‘foolproof in the event of mistreatment.’

“Kersting didn’t realize how pertinent his comments were: in 1928 he designed a radio receiver several hundred thousand of which had been manufactured within five years. His original design only underwent one modification before mass production started: the addition of the swastika on the front.

“The radio was designed according to Kersting’s functionalist principles, which led to what was at the time an innovatory fusing of concept, form and materials. An ancestor of today’s ‘black box’ hi-fi designs, its cubic cabinet, moulded from plastic, incorporated the radio’s components. The buttons had been so well thought out in the initial design that the same configuration was adapted for the manufactured version.

The set was ‘foolproof’ to use and Hitler was careful to ensure that its range was limited to Nazi frequencies, fearing that English, French, and Bolshevik transmissions would be picked up and interfere with his political broadcasts.”

[Bruce Sterling remarks: This is the Volksempfanger’s “dead media” aspect: the Volksempfanger was a medium specifically designed to be “all-Nazi, all the time.”]

“What was, during 15 years of Nazi rule, a formidable Nazi propaganda device, was transformed, at the end of the war, into a terrible trap for the Germans, who were unaware of the advance of allied troops through their already devastated territory.

“After the Second World War, Walter Maria Kersing denied that he had designed his radio receiver for political ends, despite the fact that this standard and very cheap product (it was subsidized by the government) had been of enormous service to the Nazi regime for propaganda purposes.

“The idea of mass producing radio receivers in which all foreign transmissions were censored was subsequently taken up by East European countries. For 25 years in Czechoslovakia the Telsa company manufactured radios whose only frequency spread communist propaganda and whose form was reminiscent of the Volsempfanger.”

Source: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN, REFLECTIONS OF A CENTURY, edited by Jocelyn de Noblet, Director, Centre de Recherche sur la Culture Technique Flammarion/APCI, 1993 ISBN 2-08013-539-2 page 168, written by Eric Mezel

From Matt Norris

The aforementioned Professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat teaches art history at UT Austin. Her book details her theory regarding the origin of Cuneiform, the earliest known form of writing.

To summarize (very loosely: I was a poor student); about five or six thousand years ago people (in Mesopotamia) were begining to make the switch from nomadic hunter-gatherers to permanently settled settled cultivators.

The first manmade “permanent” structures were not human shelters, but rather storage units for things like grain and oil. In excavating these earliest settlements, archeologists continually found small, simple, clay artifacts called, for lack of any idea of there origin or use, tokens.

These artifacts came in numerous different shapes: balls, cones, rods, et al. They are roughly formed and bear the signs of being fired in an open fire rather then a kiln. Prof. DSB’s theory is that these items were used to signify business transactions; the comunal nature of the storage facility demanded an accounting system. In theoretical practice, one would show up at a storage facility, deposit one’s stuff, and recieve in exchange clay tokens which signified one’s stuff and could be used at a later time to redeem one’s stuff.

At some point a clever person in need of a means of insuring that a transaction conducted by proxy could not be tampered with came up with the idea of sealing clay tokens up in a clay ball, to be busted open upon delivery (these have been recovered from sites also).

The only drawback; you can’t tell what’s inside until it’s broke. In response to this some other clever person came up the idea of incising marks on the outside of the clay ball to signify what was within. Obviously, this rendered the original tokens inside redundant and they quickly fell to disuse.

Source: The Origin of Writing by Denise Schmandt-Besserat

From Richard Kadrey

Microsoft co-founder revives 1950s movie technology

Think of it as virtual reality, 1950s-style. Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, who helped found software giant Microsoft Corp., has put his riches to work reviving a nearly extinct technology—the Cinerama movie. Allen, through his Vulcan Northwest holding company, has enlisted a team of Cinerama buffs to help retrofit his Cinerama theater in downtown Seattle to once again accommodate the spectacular ultra-wide format it was originally meant to show.

“The hallmark of true Cinerama is a 96-foot-long curved screen that is 50 percent bigger than screens used today. Three giant projectors cast three images side-by-side. When the curtain goes up at the theater Friday, it will be the world’s only Cinerama theater capable of actually showing Cinerama movies, which have recently been seen only in a Bradford, England museum.

“People have not seen a Cinerama movie inside a Cinerama theater for some 35 years,” Jeff Graves, Cinerama project manager, told reporters Thursday.

“It’s just a great opportunity to show this fantastic format.” The Cinerama revival is short-lived, however. Working with the Seattle Film Festival, Allen’s theater is showing movies Friday only: “This is Cinerama”, the format’s debut flick, and the frontier epic “How the West Was Won”. The Cinerama idea was born in 1939 when inventor Fred Waller wowed the World’s Fair in New York with a rig that used 11 different projectors and a giant, domed screen.

“The U.S. military modified the technology during World War II, using a five-projector system to create combat simulators for aircraft turret gunners. Waller further streamlined the package to three cameras and added a dazzling seven-channel audio system, premiering the first Cinerama movie in 1952. The result set the stage for vast 70mm features, surround sound and the big-screen IMAX system, said Larry Smith, president of the Cinerama Preservation Society.

“When you’re going down a canal in Venice (in a Cinerama film), you feel like you can reach out and touch the walls. In ‘How the West Was Won’, with the horses galloping and kicking up dust, you want to cough,” Smith said.

“It’s a virtual reality system.” Only seven films were ever made because of the difficulty and cost of dealing with the cumbersome and tricky equipment.

“The camera weighed a thousand pounds and was very difficult to move around and get shots,” Graves said.

“The shots they did get were breathtaking, but it wasn’t easy.” Although the Seattle theater still boasts its original three projector rooms, Allen’s team had plenty of work to do to before the movies could be shown. Workers pieced a giant screen together from nearly 2,000 vertical strips. Laws of geometry and optics mean that a screen made out of a single giant sheet warps the image too much. The massive projectors with their 34-inch reels were painstakingly restored, with some replacement parts coming from such unlikely places as Lima, Peru.

“We took every screw out, every bolt out, repainted and did a fantastic job. So we basically have brand-new projectors, brand-new from 1952,” Graves said. Very few of the films survive, and the Seattle copies were pieced together from scraps by John Harvey, a 63-year-old enthusiast who kept Cinerama alive in the U.S. by screening the movies in his Dayton, Ohio, home for years. The project has stirred excitement in film circles. Daryl Macdonald, director of the Seattle Film Festival, said fans from as far away as Australia were flying in for Friday’s shows.

“This is probably the most exciting thing we’ve ever been able to be involved in in our 26 years,” Macdonald said. In the end, the project hope to persuade the powers-that-be in Hollywood to take up the Cinerama cause, Graves said, so latergenerations accustomed to tiny multiplex screens can experience the three-screen wonder of Cinerama.

Source: Reuters

From Jonathan S Farley

Runic Tally Sticks were sometimes plain, sometimes elaborately carved sticks of wood. On these sticks were engraved Runes. Generally, they are considered to be merchant’s labels which were then tied or stuck to goods at market in order to identify the seller, and subsequently the purchaser of the item.

Most historians dismiss these items at this point. It is likely however, that some of these sticks were in fact a great deal more than merely merchant’s labels. It is possible that some were simple messages or letters, and records of stored information covering anything from memorable events to tax receipts.