The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  Source: the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Agricultural Almanac for the Year 1879, printed by John Bater’s Sons.

  Cash carriers

  From Larry Schroeder

  “Cash Railway. A light aerial railway, erected in stores to carry money or light parcels to and from different parts of the establishment.” The 1956 5th Edition ARCHITECTURAL GRAPHIC STANDARDS references only pneumatic conveyor systems, so the cash carrier appears to have been unessential, if not dead, technology by 1956. I was also interested to note a paper- only form of the pneumatic carrier system that employed tubes of rectangular section and no carrier at all. The paper was folded to 5 ½”x2 3/8” with one end folded up to act as a sail. This could be used with either a vacuum or pressure system. Larry Schroeder

  Source: Audel’s Mechanical Dictionary, 1942 copyright, 1948 reprinting, page 108:

  graphic novels of 981AD

  From Stefan Jones

  Spotted this in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the wonderful “Glories of Byzantium” exhibit. The brief description on the label seemed to indicate that these were a class of items, rather than one sample. Sorry I don’t have any supporting material., Stefan Jones

  EXULTENT SCROLL

  Southern Italy, 981-987 A.D.

  A long, parchment scroll designed for use during the Easter Vigil. The scroll contained passages describing the events leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, interspersed with colorful, icon-like illustrations. The scroll was fed over the front of the priest’s lectern as it was read. The illustrations appeared “upside down” to someone reading the text, and the passages and illustrations were arranged so that the passage on the top of the lectern corresponded to the illustration currently visible to the audience.

  [Bruce Sterling remarks, what we seem to have here is a medieval, spoken-word accompaniment, lectern-mounted, mass-audience, sacred comic book. This Byzantine graphic narrative even pre-dates the Bayeux Tapestry!]

  Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Glories of Byzantium, June 1997

  Dead ASCII Variants

  From Patrick Lichty

  Dead Computer Alphabets Personal computers of the late 70’s and early 80’s commonly used extended character sets. These ASCII variants rose above the range of 0-127 used by standard ASCII symbols to address symbols in the numerical ranges of 128-255.

  These characters were usually inaccessible by conventional keystrokes, and in most cases provided graphic elements for use in screen layouts, or for the direct entry of machine-code subroutines in BASIC programs (Atari, Commodore C64). Although graphic characters were used in later personal computers, such as the IBM PC, certain factors make these early character sets unique, and dead.

  The console is no longer in mass production, the supporting software is obsolete, and the character set was specific to the computer.

  The Atari 400, 800, 800XL, and 1200 XL computers used an ASCII variant called ATASCII, or, ATari-ASCII. Specific ‘control characters’ were accessed through control key combinations or via the BASIC CHAR$() command.

  The basic symbol mapping schemes and symbol shapes were similar among different machines, but placement in the sequence varied. The Tandy Color Computer even introduced the element of color into these extended sets.

  Known personal computers featuring dead computer alphabets, extended character sets, or ASCII variants: Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 1200XL Commodore PET C64?, 128 VIC-20 Tandy Color Computer I, II, III The Timex Sinclair ZX-80 had control characters printed on the keyboard.

  Source: Appendix, ATASCII chart Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, CA Radio Shack Color Computer II User’s Manual Tandy Corporation, Fort Worth, TX Personal experience with the Commodore and Timex computers.

  Dead Money

  “At one time, cows were the medium of exchange in Italy, and the Latin word for cattle, pecus, was the root of another Latin word for money, pecunia, which, of course, survives in our own ‘pecuniary.’

  “On the Fiji Islands, whale teeth were used, tea bricks were used in many inner areas of Asia, camels in Arabia; American Indians traded wampum (strings of shells), early Canadian colonists used playing cards, and colonial Virginians made tobacco leaves their legal tender in 1642.

  “I’ve read of woodpecker scalps being used as money, though I don’t know where and can’t imagine how.

  “In Romania today, [1987] the underground economy for some reason runs on unopened packs of Kent cigarettes (ten pounds of lean beef going for one carton).”

  Woodpecker scalps?

  In Weschler’s book, a collection of essays centered around some eccentric figures in the art world, there is a chapter on J.S.G. Boggs, the artist who draws currency and then ‘spends’ it. He will, for example, draw a ten dollar bill, go to an arts supply store, and exchange it for a $9 rapidograph pen. He always demands the change in real money, as that is part of the process.

  On convincing some clerk or waiter to accept his bill, he will get a receipt and document the entire transaction. The money he receives in change is never spent, it is part of the piece.

  After waiting a day or two, he calls a collector from a list of patrons and offers them the receipt, the change, and the location of the original transaction. The collector has to buy the documentation from Boggs, then has to track down the original recipient of the bill and offer to buy it from them. Boggs has done this hundreds of time.

  This process, while having little to do with actual dead media, does set the mind to wondering about the origins of money, and the many ways humans have devised to get past the one-on-one barter systems that must have developed in the first agrarian communities.

  This is a dead medium, or rather hundreds of dead media, and the line from woodpecker scalps to Federal Reserve-backed notes is clear.

  Paper money, credit cards, on-line transactions, whatever agreed-upon method of buying and selling will be used in the future, is as fascinating as studying the development of photography from the salt paper process to the digitally enhanced covers of WIRED magazine.

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: Defining money as a “medium” might solve a lot of conceptual difficulties, while creating numerous practical ones for the dead media scholar. Money is certainly a so-called “medium of exchange,” but is money actually media per se? Certainly many dead media have been used to transfer money. Telegraphic mail orders were once vital to commerce. Postal money orders were flown into Paris by pigeons during the Franco-Prussian War. Pneumatic tubes got their start at stock exchanges.

  [The Incan quipu was a form of accounting as well as Incan society’s only means of symbolic communication. Literacy arose in the Middle East as an accounting process, long before people learned to adapt those financial symbols to express spoken language. Modern cash is the physical process of printing presses, which are certainly “media.” Basically, cash is paper covered with symbols and letters.

  The American one-dollar bill communicates bald declarations to the end user (THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE) and trumpets political manifestos (ANNUIT COEPTIS MDCCLXXVI NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM).

  Why, exactly, is giving someone a one-dollar bill really different from giving them a postcard or a campaign button? And when a currency is dead and loses its government-backed value—why do people still want to collect it?

  [Money may be the conceptual missing link that unites calculators, computers, and electronic funds transfer with more conventional “media.” “Money” might even be visualized as a very large, very slow, highly distributed computer that society uses to calculate the value of goods and services. Money might be a form of computation so omnipresent that we have been marinating in it for centuries without really noticing it. This conceptual approach would make dead currencies the dead operating systems for defunct economies.

  [And why are “cash carriers” dead media? Because they are computer media—distributed peripherals for a central calculating “mainframe,” later abolished b
y individual cash registers in the cash equivalent of the PC revolution.]

  Source: ShapinskyUs Karma, BoggsUs Bills, And Other True-Life Tales by Lawrence Weschler, 1987

  Wheatstone’s Telegraphic Meterometer

  From Stefan Jones

  TELEGRAPHIC METEROMETERS

  Prof. Wheatstone has devised a new class of instruments for taking observations in stations which for any cause are not accessible for very long periods. The telegraphic thermometer, a type of this class, consists of essentially two parts; the first is the magnetic motor, constructed on a plan similar to that used by the inventor in his alphabetical magnetic telegraph, and is so arranged that by turning a handle the lever at the other extremity of the line will describe by regular steps a complete circle. The second part consists of a metallic thermometer, in which the unequal expansion of two metals is made to move a lever or pin around a graduated circle which marks the degrees of temperature. The two parts are in such proximity that the telegraphic lever in passing around the circle must, at some point, come in contact with the pin, which is moved by means of the expanding or contracting metals. This contact breaks one circuit and completes another, and thus transmits to the other extremity of the telegraphic line information of the particular degree of heat at the instant indicated by the thermometer. This thermometer is not self-recording, but responds accurately whenever questioned.”

  Source: Scientific American, December 7, 1867

  The Amateur Radio Relay League Radiogram

  From Dan Howland

  “A.R.R.L. FORMS FOR THE AMATEUR

  “Official A.R.R.L. Message Blanks Most convenient form. Designed by the Communications Department of the A.R.R.L. Well printed on good bond paper. Size 8” x 7”. Put up in pads of 100 sheets. One pad postpaid for 35” or three pads for $1.00. “Message Delivery Cards Neatest, simplest way to deliver a message to a near-by town. On U.S. stamped postals, 2” each. On plain cards (for Canada, etc.) 1” each, postpaid.” [Printed at the the bottom of the Radiogram is the following:]

  “THIS MESSAGE WAS TRANSMITTED FREE OF CHARGE BY AMATEUR RADIO STATIONS OF THE AMERICAN RADIO LEAGUE.

  ANSWER WILL BE SENT FREE BY FILING AT THIS STATION.”

  [It appears that amateur radio enthusiasts received and relayed messages as a point of honor. Was this something people did rather than go to Western Union? Was it cheaper to ask a radio geek to send out your message and hope it would eventually get there? Or was it a service offered by amateurs for people trapped in the boondocks, off exploring forbidden temples or some such? (The Kon Tiki crew, for example, relayed their position to stateside amateur radio hams.)

  [Is this still done? Does anyone know anything more about these radio relay postcards? The articles in this magazine are so filled with radio jargon and 30s slang that it’s hard to understand anything but the ads. Sample from page 27: “A Squirt who used too much of what we used to call ‘Lake Erie Swing’ or sent with a slobbery fist or cluttered up the air with too many CQ’s. was called upon by a committee, the chairman of which. exhibited and explained the workings of an instrument known as an Uggerumph.”]

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: the crystal-set zealots of the Amateur Radio Relay League seem to have been spiritual ancestors of the Internet. How does one classify these ARRL networked postcards in the media spectrum? Are they “mail,” “radio,” or “person-to-person ham narrowcasting?” Perhaps Radio Relay postcards are best understood as a dead precursor of email.]

  Source: QST Magazine (Devoted Entirely to Amateur Radio), February, 1932, Advertisement

  The Teleplex Morse Code Recorder

  From Dan Howland

  [December 1930] [Drawing of an ear] “All You Need to Learn Telegraphy” [Drawing of a hand] “Morse or Continental “With Teleplex “Guaranteed to teach the world’s most fascinating profession, by hearing real messages, sending them “Interesting, simple, you learn quickly, at HOME “Teleplex is the Master Teacher.

  “Used by the U S Army, Navy and reading, radio and telegraph schools.

  “Write for folder Q-12 “Teleplex Company “76 Cortland Street, New York” [A small drawing shows the Teleplex. It is a box with an open hinged lid. Inside are two reels (paper, I believe, from thumbing through other copies of QST at the bookstore). On one side is a Victrola-type crank. Wires lead out to a set of ear phones and a telegraph key. If I have to venture a guess as to size, judging from the headset and the telegraph key I’d say about 8” high by 10” wide by 8” deep. The reels look to be about an inch or so wide, and maybe three inches in diameter. I assume that winding the crank must have both A) turned the reels and B) generated the electricity to record and play back the signal.] [February, 1932] “The HAND That Encircles The WORLD” [Drawing of hand on telegraph key] “There’s ROMANCE IN TELEGRAPHY “The man who knows the code is in touch with the world. Become an expert operator, make big money. LEARN IN YOUR OWN HOME, easily, quickly with the TELEPLEX, the Master Teacher.

  “Entirely new code course in 12 rolls of tape. During the last ten years, TELEPLEX has trained more operators than all other methods combined.

  “Write for folder Q-2 “Teleplex Co. “76 Cortland Street. New York” [Same drawing of Teleplex as above] [February, 1933] “New Way to Learn the Code At Home “Make Your Own Records “Easy to Make and Easy to Read with The NEW MASTER Teleplex [Photo shows innards of Teleplex; just a bunch of levers that don’t tell me much.] “The only instrument ever produced that will record your own sending in visible dots and dashes and then repeat it to you audibly on headphones. Revolutionizes the teaching of code, makes learning easy, fascinating and rapid. No experience required. Designed for U. S. Signal Corps. Marvelous say radio and electrical engineers. Loaned with Complete Code Course without additional cost. Write today for folder Q-14 giving full details.

  “Teleplex Co. “76 Cortland Street, New York City” [Notice how the ad copy calls it “New,” while the 1932 ad says it’s been in use for “the last ten years.” Also note that it is “loaned” rather than sold, probably because once you learned code, you wouldn’t need it anymore.]

  Source: QST Magazine (Devoted Entirely to Amateur Radio), 1930 to 1933, Advertisements

  Bi Sheng’s Clay Printing Press

  From Bruce Sterling

  “In the Song Dynasty, there lived in an area where block printing was in its prime a commoner by the name of Bi Sheng who for years engaged in block printing and introduced the world’s first block-letter printing. Dispensing with the traditional process of plate engraving and so reducing the time required to print a book, the new method was economical as well as convenient. Revolutionizing the printing press and having far-reaching impact, Bi Sheng’s invention is essentially the same as the contemporary block-letter printing with lead type as still widely used in today’s world.

  “Bi Sheng’s feat is described in Meng Xi Bi Tan (Dream Stream Essays) by Shen Kuo, an eminent scientist of the Song Dynasty. In the years 1041-48, according to Shen Kuo, Bi Sheng started making clay types, one for each character. These were fired for hardness.

  For typesetting a square sheet of iron was prepared with a layer of resin, wax and paper ashes mixed and spread on it. The mixture was circumscribed with an iron frame. A plate was complete when the frame was full. This was heated over a fire until the mixture melted. The types meanwhile were pressed down to the height of the frame with a wooden board and the plate was ready for printing.

  For higher efficiency two iron sheets were used, one for fresh typesetting and the other for printing, so that a new plate was ready before the specified number of copies had been made from the previous one. Several duplicate types were made for each character, the number depending on the frequency of its use. As for rarely used characters, they were carved and fired when necessary and used on the spot. Bi Sheng’s method had great merit, with its notable speed, when hundreds or thousands of copies were made.

  “In the reign of the Emperor Dao Guang (1821-1850) of the Qing
Dynasty there lived in Jingxian County, Anhuin Province a schoolmaster named Zhai Jinsheng who made over 100,000 clay types after reading Dream Stream Essays. The work took him many years. With these clay types he printed Ni Ban Shi Yin Chu Bian (Initial Notes on Printing with Clay Types) and other books. Additional books printed later by the same method have been located in Beijing Library in recent years, demonstrating the accuracy of the records in Dream Stream Essays concerning Bi Sheng’s clay-type printing.”

  Source: ANCIENT CHINA’S TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, Compiled by the Institute of the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. First Edition 1983. Published by the Foreign Languages Press, 24 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing, China. ISBN 0-8351-1001-X.

  the Astrolabe; Ctesibius’s Clepsydra Orrery

  From Richard Kadrey

  “Astrolabe History “Origins of Astrolabe Theory “The origins of the astrolabe were in classical Greece. Apollonius (ca. 225 BC), the great codifier of conic sections, probably studied the astrolabe projection.

  “The most influential individual on the theory of the astrolabe projection was Hipparchus who was born in Nicaea in Asia Minor (now Iznik in Turkey) about 180 BC, but studied and worked on the island of Rhodes. Hipparchus did not invent the astrolabe but he did refine the projection theory. :The earliest evidence of use of the stereographic projection in a machine is in the writing of the Roman author and architect, Vitruvius (ca. 88 - ca. 26 BC), who in De architectura describes a clock (probably a clepsydra or water clock) made by Ctesibius in Alexandria. Apparently, Ctesibius’ clock had a rotating field of stars behind a wire frame indicating the hours of the day.

  “The wire framework (the spider) was possibly constructed using the stereographic projection with the eye point at the north celestial pole. Similar constructions dated from the first to third century and have been found in Salzburg and northeastern France, so such mechanisms were apparently fairly widespread among Romans.