The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  This information is reliable, from a person who has seen the dispatches, and has personal knowledge of the facts..

  Your Obedient Servant,

  R.J. Kimball

  “What Consular Kimball was reporting is in fact known today as microfilm! The technique had been developed by a Frenchman, Rene Prudent Dagron in 1860. The images were on a 2 X 2 mm. diameter glass plate, and could be viewed using a lens developed by Lord Stanhope around 1750.”

  [Dagron the microfilmist and war profiteer featured above, describing Dagron’s crucial activities with balloon, pigeon and microfilm during the Prussian siege of Paris. It is very gratifying to learn for the first time that his full name was Rene Prudent Dagron. Dagron may have invented his microfilm technique in 1860, as Merkle claims, but his “Traite de Photographie Microscopique” was first published in Paris in 1864, according to John Douglas Hayhurst. It is therefore astonishing to see Confederate/British spooks apparently employing Dagron’s microfilm technology as early as January 1865. Was this an independent invention, or an unpaid adaptation of Dagron’s work—or might it have been that Dagron himself sold his technology to the Confederates? If this were so, it would go far to explain why Dagron suddenly appeared in 1871 to boldly offer his microfilm services to the tottering French government.]

  [Concerning balloons.]

  “Professor Thaddeus Lowe believed strongly in the military value of hot air balloons. On June 18, 1861, he conducted a hot air balloon experiment for President Lincoln. He ascended about Washington, D.C., in a balloon with a telegraphic keying device on board and the telegraphic wire hanging out of the balloon to a ground station. He succeeded that day in transmitting the first air-to-ground telegraphic communication.

  “Professor Lowe is also credited with taking the first aerial photograph, again from one of his balloons.

  [It was my understanding that this distinction belongs to the French aeronaut and photographer ‘Nadar’]

  “These successes so impressed Lincoln as to the potential of the balloons that he made Professor Lowe the head of the Union Balloon Corps. [It would be gratifying to know if the Balloon Corps had its own uniform and official insignia.] The Union found that while the balloons did give the scouts a real advantage, not only were they regularly shot down (as they ascended or descended) but the balloons tended to spin in the air, making the scout on board very sick.

  The Union Balloon Corps was officially disbanded in May of 1863.

  “The Confederacy, while envious of the Union efforts in the area of ballooning, made only one balloon attempt in the entire war. That effort is best described in the words of General James Longstreet: ‘While we were longing for the balloons that poverty denied us, a genius arose. and suggested we gather silk dresses and make a balloon. It was done, and we soon had a great patchwork ship.

  One day it was on a steamer down on the James River, when the tide went out and left the vessel and balloon high and dry on a bar. The Federals gathered it in, and with it the last silk dresses in the Confederacy.’”

  Source: SPIES AND SPYMASTERS OF THE CIVIL WAR by Donald E. Markle, 1994. Barnes & Noble Books, ISBN 1-56619-976-X

  Chase’s Electric Cyclorama

  From Paul Di Filippo

  “In our illustration, we give a general view of the electric cyclorama, or panorama, as conceived by the inventor, Mr Chase of Chicago. The projection apparatus, suspended in the center of the panorama by a steel tube and guys of steel wire, is 8 feet in diameter.

  “The operator stands within the apparatus and is surrounded by an annular table supporting eight double projectors, lanterns and all the arrangements necessary for imparting life to a panorama 300 feet in circumference and over 30 feet in height. It is possible at will to animate such and such a part of the view by combining this apparatus with the Edison kinetoscope or the Lumiere kinematograph.”

  Source: Scientific American February 1896

  Dead computational platforms

  Abacus (circa 500BC Egypt)

  Saun-pan computing tray (200 AD China)

  Soroban computing tray (200 AD Japan)

  Napier’s bones (1617 Scotland),

  William Oughtred’s slide rule (1622 England)

  Blaise Pascal’s calculating machine (1642 France)

  Gottfried Liebniz’s calculating machine (1673)

  Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine (never built) (1822 England)

  Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) (1833 England)

  Scheutz mechanical calculator (1855 Sweden)

  Hollerith tabulating machine (1890)

  Vannevar Bush differential analyzer (1925 USA)

  Konrad Zuse’s Z1 computer (1931 Germany)

  Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1939 USA)

  Turing’s Colossus Mark 1 (1941 England)

  Zuse’s Z3 computer (1941 Germany)

  Colossus Mark II (1944 England)

  IBM ASCC Mark I (1944 USA)

  BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) (1946-1949 USA)

  ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) (1946 USA)

  Dead Mainframes

  Zuse Z4 (mechanical relays) 1939

  Atanasoff/ABC Oct 1939 ?

  Colossus Mark I (declassified 1970) 1943

  [2015 note: The mailing list included a huge list of dead mainframe computers, with dates, that is too long to include here]

  Source: Bruce P. Watson, Dr Kenneth E. Knight, assorted scrounging on World Wide Web computer history sites

  the Optigan

  From Candi Strecker

  [The Optigan was a musical instrument produced for the home-organ consumer market in the early 1970s, using a radically different optical technology to produce its sounds. The “Dead Medium” in this case would probably be the optically-readable disks from which the Optigan “read” and generated its sounds. The following information is extracted from a much longer (and very delightful) essay by musician/composer Pea Hicks of San Diego, describing his epic quest for Optigans and information about them.]

  (Pea Hicks:) About ten years ago I first became aware of the existence of the Optigan. It was in the tenth anniversary edition of Keyboard magazine. In an article on the past and future of keyboards and synthesizers, there was a brief reference to the Optigan, and it stuck in my mind for years as it was the first time I had ever seen the word ‘cheesy.’

  The Optigan was a kind of home organ made by the Optigan Corporation (a subsidiary of Mattel) in the early 70’s. It was set up like most home organs of the period = a small keyboard with buttons on the left for various chords, accompaniments and rhythms. At the time, all organs produced their sounds electrically or electronically with tubes or transistors.

  The Optigan was different in that its sounds were read off of LP-sized celluloid discs which contained the graphic waveforms of real instruments. These recordings were encoded in concentric looping rings using the same technology as film soundtracks. Remember that sequence in Fantasia where the Soundtrack makes a cameo? Those squiggly lines are actually pretty close to what the real thing looks like. As the film runs, a light is projected through the soundtrack and is picked up on the other side by a photoreceptor. The voltage is varied depending on how much light reaches the receptor, and after being amplified this voltage is converted into audible sound by the speakers. The word ‘Optigan’ stands for ‘Optical Organ.’ Optigan discs have 57 rings of soundtrack = these provide recordings of real musicians playing riffs, chord patterns and other effects. (37 of the tracks are reserved for the keyboard sound itself = a different recording for each note.) So when you want to play a bossa nova, you don’t get those wimpy little pop-pop-chink-chink electronic sounds = you actually hear a live combo backing you up!

  This was a pretty unique concept for the early 70’s. Technically speaking, the Optigan was a primitive sampler. Sort of. I tend to think of it more like an ultra-poor-man’s Mellotron or Chamberlin. These are two famous keyboards from t
he fifties and sixties which played back recordings of instruments on lengths of magnetic tape. These two became very popular despite some huge drawbacks. For one thing, the tapes only lasted a few seconds and could not loop. If you wanted your flute to keep playing, you would have to re-press the key after eight seconds. This also involved waiting for the tape to rewind, so fast playing was generally not possible. Also, the racks of tapes themselves were pretty huge and unwieldy = changing from a choir to an oboe was quite an undertaking compared to what today’s machines can do. Not surprisingly, these instruments were quite expensive to buy and maintain. But the sounds they made were worth it = at least at the time.

  Mattel marketed the Optigan as something of an adult toy = the sound quality was simply not good enough for professional use. They sold mostly through stores like Sears and JC Penney and were relatively inexpensive = about $150 to $300 depending on which model you chose. They came with a “Starter Set” of four discs, and extra discs were marketed like records. Official Optigan music books were also available to help you make the most out of the minimal talent you probably had if you had bought an Optigan in the first place. The first thing you notice about the Optigan (if you have any imagination at all, that is) is how malleable this technology was. You can do all sorts of things with the discs to sabotage the sound = put them in upside down, put several in at once, manually stop and start them with your hands for record scratch effects, press all the buttons at once, and so on. Most of the sounds that were recorded for the keyboard section are different kinds of sustained organs. Since the disc spins constantly, the sounds just keep looping around and around. So the keyboard sounds can’t have a beginning and end per se. [.] Some of the discs even have non- musical sound effects (such as applause) on them. You would think that, since the discs are not played by physical contact, there would be no pops or scratches such as on vinyl records. But this is not the case = tiny scratches on the discs cause irregular diffractions of light which in turn end up sounding exactly like record scratches! Most of the time, though, this actually improves the sound. You get the weird feeling that you’re listening to a cheesy old Enoch Light record, but you’re actually controlling where the music goes!

  Mattel only produced the machines (at a factory in Compton, nonetheless) for a couple of years. They didn’t sell very well because of several design flaws which made them amazingly unreliable and prone to breaking down. Eventually Mattel sold the whole works to the Miner Company of New York (an organ manufacturer). They continued production of the Optigan under the company name of Opsonar and also produced several new discs. But the design remained the same, and its inherent problems forced the Miner company to drop the machine as well.

  Later, the technology was bought by a company called Vako which made an instrument called the Orchestron. This was designed for professional use, but the sound quality still sucked. They made about 50 of these machines before they folded.

  Source: an essay by musician and collector Pea Hicks

  the Panorama

  From Bruce Sterling

  [The justly famed Mesdag Panorama in Den Haag is one of the best-preserved examples of this dead form of nineteenth-century virtuality. THE PANORAMA PHENOMENON is an illustrated English-language historiography associated with the exhibit, with extensive notes on Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s own panorama of Old Scheveningen, and on the panorama in general.]

  “An anecdote has it that in the year 1785 a young Irish painter in Edinburgh landed in prison because he could give no satisfaction to his creditors. He was the painter and draughtsman Robert Barker who, confined in his prison cell, perhaps through sheer boredom, accidentally invented the panorama.

  His extremely uncomfortable quarters were situated in a basement, and the sparse daylight entered through a narrow opening in the ceiling, very near the wall, and so lighted up the vertical wall just underneath.

  “Barker will not have had much contact with the world outside, but once he did receive a letter which gave him inspiration. He could only decipher the letter by holding it up against the dimly lit wall. The incidence of light from above on the letter, observed by Barker in the dark gaol, apparently presented such a peculiar effect, that it occurred to the civil debtor to illuminate paintings in a similar way.

  “The patent obtained by him in 1787 defined this conclusively. The fact that he applied for a patent is typical. It may well be the first manifestation of the systematic mixture of art and technology.

  “In 1787 he brought an unusual picture to Londin, unusual both for its size and form; a large oblong semi-circular canvas depicting a View of Edinburgh. Compared to his later work, it was only an initial effort to create what he described a little later in his patent application as a ‘View of Nature’ (La Nature a Coup d’Oeil). In the artistic community his first effort had no success whatsoever. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Society, advised Barker courteously but explicitly to stop his useless experimenting, an advice completely disregared by the modernist. His invention was patented on the 3rd of July 1787.

  “He defined his invention: ‘An entire new contrivance or apparatus, which I call La Nature a Coup d’Oeil, for the purpose of displaying views of Nature at large by Oil Painting, Fresco, Water Colours, Crayons, or any other mode of painting or drawing.

  The word panorama does not figure in the patent. It is reported that the term would have been introduced by a classical scholar among his friends. At any rate, Barker himself mentions the word panorama in 1792 in an advertisement in The Times. Henceforth it quickly became the definite style for a circular picture.”

  “Quite simply, the secret of the panorama lies in the elimination of the possibility to compare the work of art with the reality outside, by taking away all boundaries which remind the spectator that he is observing a separate object within his total visual field. Not without reason the panorama used to be called the ‘all-view’ or ‘the picture without boundaries.’

  Barker’s patent achieved this effect by incapsulating the spectator inside a total view. “The circular canvas envelops him like a cylinder. When he glances upward, the light source and the top edge of the picture remain hidden from view by an umbrella- like roof over the platform (the so-called velum), and at the bottom of the picture his view is blocked by a cloth or another kind of foreground, placed between the balustrade and the lower edge of the painting.

  By means of these provisions the spectator is deprived of the possibility of comparison. He can no longer correctly judge size and distance. He only sees the objects on the painting surrounding him in their relative proportions. and all this lead the spectator to experience his fictitious surroundings as a reality. This technique, invented by Barker, was a complete novelty at the time, and its amazing effect was the cause of the enormous success scored by the panorama during more than a hundred years.

  “It goes without saying that in the course of time the optical effects have been further doctored. The corridor leading from below to the platform was therefore darkened, so that the visitor, whose eye had been adapted to this darkness, gets caught unprepared by the fully lit panorama picture. A winding staircase was mostly chosen for entering the higher situated platform with the preconceived intention of making the visitor lose his bearings.

  “Numerous experiments were necessary to establish how the spectator should be fitted into the whole,. and the distance to be allowed between the platform and the canvas. The lighting of the canvas via the roof dome = an essential element of panorama technique = was no simple matter.

  Experiments were made with smoked glass, with ‘skirts’ of cloth encircling the light dome, with transversely screened sheets, all this with the aim of making the light from above shine from the picture by reflection.

  “It was a certain Colonely Langlois who broke new ground by using the horizontal space between the platform and canvas to perfect still further the optical illusion. He ‘filled’ this space with a setting of tri-dimensional objects wh
ich constituted integrating parts of the display. Without this ‘faux-terrain,’ the foreground- setting, including the objects, the so-called ‘attrapes’ (hoaxes), a panorama later on was no longer a real panorama. Gradually this technique was further refined to the extent that the tri-dimensional attrapes faded perfectly into the bi-dimensional canvas, thus creating a very realistic effect.”

  “In the initial period, panorama painters looked for existing large premises in which their work of art could be hung, but soon afterwards they began to construct special small round wooden buildings, primitive sheds, constructed = or so it appears = around the circular canvases. These kinds of contraptions could be found in many towns around 1800. The simple sheds in Hamburg, Leipzig and Amsterdam which housed the first panoramas were examples.”

  “Barker’s first rotunda was 11 m. high and had a diameter of 26 m. In the big capitals of the time, London, Paris and Vienna, where one could count on a steady number of visitors, there arose, in due course, more professional wooden or stone structures. The exteriors of these rotundas were simple, undecorated, cylindrical or polygonal in shape, like the twin panorama buildings at Montmartre (Paris) or Barker’s ingenious two- storied rotunda on Leicester Square.

  “Later again, a specific rotunda architecture developed, narrowly linked to the construction of circuses. By employing new materials (iron combined with glass) the rotundas became even more spectacular towards the middle of the 19th century. With the building on the Champs Elysees designed by Hittorf (the creator of the Place de la Concorde), Paris became the model for numerous later buildings.

  “Most rotundas bult later in the 19th century were monumental, pompous buildings, often abundantly decorated, on which the then fashionable neo-styles were appled with great zest..