The Dead Media Notebook (91 page)

In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, one of the more poignant images of World War II is that of a GI laying in the middle of a street. He is alone, dying in the rain, holding out a letter to his dad and calling out to his buddies who are still under sniper fire. Later that night, the medic transcribes the GI’s letter onto a clean, unbloodied V-Mail form with detached, quiet emotion. V-Mail is an important part of postal history, and a remembrance of the 20
^th
Century’s pivotal years. V-Mail carried the thoughts and dreams of privates and generals to those back home, and brought comfort to those at the front. Books and movies can help bring the past to life, and mementos of that past help revive the memories of our history. This is especially true in the case of V-Mail. Today it helps us to preserve their memory.

From Philip Downey

The remote control, which turns 50 this year, has become one of the more indispensable pieces of gadgetry in the modern American home

“Today on ‘Oprah’” Click.

“the courts in Florida must decide whether a hanging chad” Click.

“Yo! Wazzzzup” Click.

“The clicker,” “the zapper, “the changer” - whatever we choose to call it, the television remote is the granddaddy of all gadgets, nearly as indispensable to the family room as the TV itself. It has been blamed for ballooning waistlines, shrinking attention spans and strained relationships. This year the remote control is 50 years old. We can hardly remember life without it - especially when television-watching is at its height, as during holidays. But as with other modern devices - from microwaves to cell phones - its origins and workings remain largely unknown to people who expect the apparatus to work without fail. The idea for the television remote began with Eugene McDonald, the founder of Zenith Radio Corp. The year was 1950, a time when you could count the number of channels in any city on one hand. McDonald, an eccentric former military man known as “the Commander” by his employees, was thinking not about convenience but about commercials. Specifically, McDonald was thinking how much he despised ads. He considered commercial-free, pay TV a better business model for the industry.

“He thought advertiser-supported television would never fly,” says John Taylor, Zenith’s corporate historian. Until events might prove him right, McDonald wanted to offer customers who bought Zenith TVs a way to avoid commercials.

The result was a device called Lazy Bones: “Prest-o! Change-o! Just Press a Button to Change A Station!” said an early ad. Lazy Bones was pricey - about $355 in today’s dollars - and primitive: Its two buttons could flick the TV on and off and change channels. It was tethered to the television by a thin cable, so the device could be dangerous: It’s tether often turned into a trip wire.

McDonald ordered his engineers to try again. A young Zenith engineer named Eugene Polley hit on the idea of using light to control the television. Tinkering with spare parts lying around his laboratory, he created a souped-up flashlight fashioned to look like a gun “so people could shoot out the commercial,” says Polley. The device was dubbed the Flash-Matic.

It came with a specially-equipped television that had light-sensitive areas embedded in each corner of the set. Zap one corner with the Flash-Matic and the television flickered on or off. Aim at another and the channel flipped. It was Polley who devised what might be the most beloved feature of all: the mute button.

“It makes me think maybe my life wasn’t wasted,” Polley says today.

“Maybe I did something for humanity - like the guy who invented the flush toilet.” Zenith sold nearly 30,000 gun-shaped Flash-Matics after the product’s launch in 1955, and gave Polley a $1,000 bonus for his efforts. An early ad promised, “Shoot off annoying commercials from across the room with flash of magic light.”

But, as some customers soon learned, the Flash-Matic left room for improvement. People couldn’t remember which corner of the screen controlled what.

But the big problems came from the light sensors, which turned out to be sensitive not only to the remote control but sunsets and ill-placed floor lamps. Zenith physicist Robert Adler, who helped run the company research department, was handed the task of improving Polley’s design. The Zenith marketing department gave Adler’s team an additional design requirement: The remote couldn’t use batteries, to prevent a customer from thinking his TV had broken if the remote’s batteries went dead. Adler and his team of engineers considered using radio waves but abandoned the idea because the waves could travel through windows and walls.

“Radio waves worked fine,” Adler once remarked. But they also worked fine for your neighbor.”

Then the engineers found a solution: ultrasonics, high-frequency sound waves inaudible to the human ear. The Zenith researchers built a remote-control device containing four aluminum rods, each slightly different in length. Pressing one of the remotes’ four buttons caused a small spring-loaded hammer to strike its corresponding rod like a tuning fork, emitting ultrasonic sound waves. Since each of the rods was a slightly different length, each vibrated at a different frequency, which a microphone and receiver in the TV could distinguish.

The device was named Space Command. The first one emerged from the assembly line in the fall of 1956. The technology added $100 to the price tag of the set, so sales were slow to take off.

But by 1959, ultrasonic remotes became the industry standard for top-of-the-line TVs. According to Zenith, more than 9 million ultrasonic remotes were sold during the next quarter-century. The noise made by these early mechanical remotes also lent the device its enduring nickname - “the clicker.”

Beginning in the 1980s, ultrasonic remotes were replaced by devices that relied on low-frequency pulses of infrared light invisible to the human eye. These devices are cheaper to make and can control a larger number of functions, giving rise to the 50-button remotes seen today. Just who should gets credit for the invention of the remote control has been a sensitive issue for Eugene Polley, who watched Robert Adler on the Jay Leno show a few years ago claim credit for the device.

“We’re feuding,” says Polley, a spry 85-year-old who rides around the golf course near his home outside Chicago wearing a cap that reads “King of the Remote Control.” In his attic, he has a few early Flash-Matic prototypes and Lazy Bones devices.

“I think the feud is way overblown,” says Zenith’s John Taylor.

“One invention lasted one year, the other 25 years. The industry generally considers Bob Adler the father of the remote control.” In 1997, Zenith won an Emmy for its work on the clicker; this year, Adler, who has said he prefers radio and watches only about an hour of TV a week, was inducted into the Consumer Electronic Association’s Hall of Fame for his work. The average household has at least four remotes, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Most are for TVs and stereos. But others control air conditioners, window blinds, ceiling fans, gas fireplaces, house lights and car doors. The Lazy Bones and its successors have “totally revolutionized” the medium of television, says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. It has not only changed the way we watch, but also the way TV and film writers work.

“Possession of the device means that you have a choice to make every second. Is this dull? Am I bored yet?” writes James Gleick in “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.” “Now every television programmer works in the shadow of the awareness that the audience is armed.” But while it gave rise to couch potatoes and channel surfing, the technology doesn’t always make life easier.

“Watching television isn’t as relaxing as it used to be,” says Thompson.

“There’s this pressure, this really irritating voice in the back of your head that keeps telling you, ‘You’re missing something on another channel.’ “It makes you wish you could go back to the old days.”

Source: Baltimore Sun, November 22, 2000. The Couch Potato’s Best Friend by Michael Stroh.

From DeVries

In the years from 1975 through 2000, architectural drafting and reproduction media changed profoundly.

As student, intern, and architect, I witnessed the revolution. The following comes from memory, various texts, and antiques in my bottom desk drawer.

1975 Vellum (paper, not calf hide) was standard with ink and pencil. Equipment consisted of: high drafting table and stool; adjustable lamp (fluorescent, incandescent, or both); T-square or parallel bar; scales; triangles; curves; lettering guides and templates; compass sets; tape; technical pens; lead holders; erasers; and such exotica as Pounce.

As a student (Syracuse University School of Architecture), studio standards were: high drafting boards of oak (old) or gray steel (new), unpadded, backless, drafting stools, and parallel bars. Perhaps a quarter of the students used T-squares.

For construction drawings, pencil on vellum was usual, sometimes ink because it printed better. Mylar sheets were newly available, with a “frosted” surface to take ink. These printed best - because of Mylar’s transparency - but were expensive. Colored pencils and pastels were used for renderings, though colored markers were most popular, and ink wash - in the Beaux Arts tradition - lingered. Reproduction was by Diazo process - using ammonia - so prints had a potent perfume. Blueprints were archaic - bluelines read better. Sepia prints were used for reproducibles (to spare original drawings from the print machine). Blacklines were for presentation, sometimes colored by marker or pencil.

1980 As an intern (Dallas, Texas), standards for a professional architect’s office were: low drafting board (metal-legged or classic, slab door on sawhorses); secretarial swivel chair (arms were a perk); drafting lamp; and parallel bar. (Old-fashioned firms were just switching from the T-square). Drafting was changing from pencil-on-vellum to ink-on-Mylar. Most firms had Diazo. The last professional draftsmen were nearing retirement. In the ‘80s most states changed licensing laws to require college degrees. (Until then, in New York State, for example, one could pass the licensing exam after working 13 years - an apprenticeship which produced incompetents like Frank Lloyd Wright.)

Mid ‘80s Rapid change. To improve drawings and reproduction, new techniques were tried. Drafting machines (existing in the ‘60s) were briefly popular. Pinbar drafting was introduced. Various drafting aids were adopted. Large format photocopies became available - though expensive - used to create reproducibles from fragile drawings, where sepia printing would be illegible or too damaging.

1990s Computer Aided Drafting - CAD - became more and more common. Early cumbersome network systems (the one at GM in 1968 is enormous), were replaced by the mid ‘90s with entirely PC based CAD. Diazo printing declined as CAD plots grew common.

2000 CAD is universal. Allied engineering fields (structural, mechanical, and electrical) now demand CAD base drawings. Few architects draw by hand, few even have drafting boards. T-squares have virtually disappeared. Commercial bluelines are used for bidding or construction sets; in-office sets and presentations are now normally CAD plots. Sepia and blackline prints are rare and blueprints nostalgic. Renderings may be any media, but markers are passe, while 3-D CAD virtual walk-throughs are progressive.

Source: Personal recollection

From Alan Wexelblat

Yes, you read that right. One mad scientist, a train car with a darkroom, a three-exposure process, and a permit from the Tsar.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii figured out an ingenious method of taking three pictures in rapid succession, one each with a red, green, and blue filter.

He’d then project all three images together back onto a screen and end up with full color images.

EXCERPT: The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia’s diverse population.

In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II.

Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, going first to Norway and England before settling in France. By then, the tsar and his family had been murdered and the empire that Prokudin-Gorskii so carefully documented had been destroyed. His unique images of Russia on the eve of revolution—recorded on glass plates—were purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948 from his heirs.

For this exhibition, the glass plates have been scanned and, through an innovative process known as digichromatography, brilliant color images have been produced. This exhibition features a sampling of Prokudin-Gorskii’s historic images produced through the new process; the digital technology that makes these superior color prints possible; and celebrates the fact that for the first time many of these wonderful images are available to the public.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1863 and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. He studied with renowned scientists in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris. His own original research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures.

Around 1907 Prokudin-Gorskii envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in color photography to systematically document the Russian Empire.

Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his “optical color projections” of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorskii documented the Russian Empire around 1907 through 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution, and eventually settled in Paris, where he died in 1944. [On the Karolitskhali River]