The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “The pneumatic network is owned and operated by SPT Telecom, the Czech national phone company. That ownership ultimately may prove to be the tube network’s downfall: Telsource N.V., a Swiss-Dutch alliance that now owns about 27 percent of SPT Telecom, has said that all SPT operating divisions must turn a profit or face shutdown. Despite an increase in use in recent years, the potrubni posti now operates in the red.”

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: The pneumatic post is a Necronaut’s darling. Every time I distribute a post on this subject, it is met with replies protesting that pneumatic tubes are alive and well. Yes, they are, but this is something rarer: a pneumatic medium, a government- supported city-wide mail system, dating back to the days when tubes were not merely packet-shippers (as they are today) but state-of-the-art public communications networks. One might have known one would find a survivor in Prague, the City of Alchemists and home of many a living fossil. But now the potrubni posti is under cruel threat from mere commercial necessity, and who knows, it may already be dead.]

  Source: Right Down the Tubes by Mimi Fronczak Rogers

  Babbage’s Difference Engine

  From Nicholas Bodley

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: there’s a fine melancholy pleasure in reading mindblown pop-science reportage about incredible machinery, especially when that hype pre-dates the utter collapse and obscurity of the Babbage Difference Engine. This Brewster book has received most any number of dead media citations over the years.]

  “Of all the machines which have been constructed in modern times, the calculating machine is doubtless the most extraordinary. Pieces of mechanism for performing particular arithmetical operations have been long ago constructed, but these bear no comparison either in ingenuity or in magnitude to the grand design conceived and nearly executed by Mr. Babbage.”

  [There’s a lethal poetic pang in that little word “nearly.”]

  “Great as the power of mechanism is known to be, yet we venture to say that many of the most intelligent of our readers will scarcely admit it to be possible that astronomical and navigational tables can be accurately computed by machinery; that the machine can itself correct the errors which it may commit; and that the results of its calculations when absolutely free from error, can be printed off, without the aid of human hands, or the operation of human intelligence.”

  [The bold term “computed by machinery” was a stunning neologism at the time.]

  “In all this, I have had the advantage of seeing it actually calculate, and of studying its construction with Mr. Babbage himself. I am able to make the above statement on personal observation. The calculation machine now constructing under the superintendence of the inventor has been executed at the expense of the British government, and is of course their property.

  “It consists essentially of two parts, a calculating part and a printing part, both of which are necessary to the fulfilment of Mr. Babbage’s views, for the whole advantage would be lost if the computations made by the machine were copied by human hands and transferred to types by the common process.”

  [Many people overlook this highly mediated aspect of Babbage’s primeval computer: from the get-go, the device was designed to be half-printer, constructed on novel principles.]

  “The greater part of the calculation machinery is already constructed, and exhibits workmanship of such extraordinary skill and beauty that nothing approaching to it has been witnessed. It was permitted to call a computer “beautiful” in those pre-geek days.]

  “In order to execute it, particularly those parts of the apparatus which are dissimilar to any used in ordinary mechanical constructions, tools and machinery of great expense and complexity have been invented and constructed; and in many instances contrivances of singular ingenuity have been resorted to, which cannot fail to prove extensively useful in various branches of the mechanical arts.

  [Babbage was inventing not just a computer, but a new means of highly precise industrial production. His book Economy of Manufactures was a major influence on Karl Marx.]

  “The drawings of this machinery, which form a large part of the work, and on which all the contrivance has been bestowed, and all the alterations made, cover upwards of 400 square feet of surface, and are executed with extraordinary care and precision.

  “In so complex a piece of mechanism, in which interrupted motions are propagated simultaneously along a great variety of trains of mechanism, it might have been supposed that obstructions would arise, or even incompatibilities occur, from the impracticability of foreseeing all the possible combinations of the parts; but this doubt has been entirely removed, by the constant employment of a system of mechanical notation invented by Mr. Babbage, which places distinctly in view at every instant the progress of motion through all the parts of this or any other machine, and by writing down in tables the times required for all the movements, this method renders it easy to avoid all risk of two opposite actions arriving at the same instant at any part of the engine.

  [Inbuilt crash avoidance, one can’t have subparts of the program competing for resources, or overwriting one another.]

  “In the printing part of the machine less progress has been made in the actual execution than in the calculation part. The cause of this is the greater difficulty of this contrivance, not for transferring the computations from the calculating part to the copper or other plate destined to receive it, but for giving to the plate itself that number and variety of movements which the forms adopted in printed tables may call for in practice.

  “The practical object of the calculating engine is to compute and print a great variety and extent of astronomical and navigational tables, which could not be done without enormous intellectual and manual labour, and which, even if executed by such labour, could not be calculated with the requisite accuracy.

  “Mathematicians, astronomers, and navigators do not require to be informed of the real value of such tables; but it may be proper to state, for the information of others, that seventeen large folio volumes of logarithmic tables alone were calculated at an enormous expense by the French government; and that the British government regarded these tables to be of such national value that they proposed to the French Board of Longitude to print an abridgement of them at the joint expense of the two nations, and offered to advance 5000L. for that purpose.”

  [Navigational logarithms were to be the Difference Engine Killer App.]

  “Besides logarithmic tables, Mr. Babbage’ machine will calculate tables of the powers and products of numbers, and all astronomical tables for determining the positions of the sun, moon, and planets; and the same mechanical principles have enabled him to integrate innumerable equations of finite differences, that is, when the equation of differences is given, he can, by setting an engine, produce at the end of a given time any distant term which may be required, or any succession of terms commencing at a distant point.

  “Besides the cheapness and celerity with which this machine will perform its work, the absolute accuracy of the printed results deserves especial notice. By peculiar contrivances, any small error produced by accidental dust or by any slight inaccuracy in one of the wheels, is corrected as soon as it is transmitted to the next, and this is done in such a manner as effectually to prevent any accumulation of small errors from producing an erroneous figure in the result.

  “In order to convey some idea of this stupendous undertaking, we may mention the effects produced by a small trial engine constructed by the inventor, and by which e computed the following table from the formula X2 + X + 41. The figures as they were calculated by the machine were not exhibited to the eye as in sliding rules and similar instruments, but were actually presented to the eye on two opposite sides of the machine: the number 383, for example, appearing in figures before the person employed in copying. “While the machine was occupied in calculating this table, a friend of the inventor undertook to write down the numbers as they appeared. In consequence of the copyist writing quickly, he rather mor
e than kept pace with the engine, but as soon as five figures appeared, the machine was at least equal in speed to the writer.

  “At another trial thirty-two numbers of the same table were calculated in the space of two minutes and thirty seconds, and as these contained eighty-two figures, the engine produced thirty-three figures every minute, or more than one figure in every two seconds. [That would be 0.5 cps, but the thing is made of brass, for heaven’s sake.] “On another occasion it produced forty-four figures per minute. This rate of computation could be maintained for any length of time; and it is probable that few writers are able to copy with equal speed for many hours together.

  “Some of that class of individuals who envy all great men, and deny all great inventions, have ignorantly stated that Mr. Babbage’s invention is not new. The same persons, had it suited their purpose, would have maintained that the invention of spectacles was an anticipation of the telescope; but even this is more true than the allegation that the arithmetical machines are precursors of Mr. Babbage’s engine. The object of these machines was entirely different. Their highest functions were to perform the operations of common arithmetic. Mr. Babbage’s engine, it is true, can perform these operations also, and can extract the roots of numbers, and approximate the roots of equations, and even to their impossible roots.

  “But this is not its object. Its function, in contradistinction to that of all other contrivances for calculation, is to imbody in machinery the method of differences, which has never before been done: and the effects which it is capable of producing, and the works which in the course if a few years we expect to see it execute, will place it at an infinite distance from all other efforts of mechanical genius.

  “A popular account of this engine will be found in Mr. Baggage’s interesting volume ‘On the Economy of Manufactures,’ just published.

  Source: Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, New York, J&J Harper, 1832, pages 263-7

  The Pigeon Post

  “2,000 homing pigeons lose their bearings, disappear” “Homing pigeons, as the name suggests, are supposed to find their way home. But more than 2,000 of the creatures have disappeared this week and no one can explain it.

  “The birds lost their way during two separate homing pigeon races held Monday. Out of 1,800 birds competing in a 200-mile race from New Market, Va., to Allentown, Pa., about 1,500 have vanished. And in a 150-mile race from western Pennsylvania to suburban Philadelphia, 700 out of 900 pigeons are missing.

  “Most of the pigeons should have been back in their lofts within a few hours.”.

  “’There is something in the air,’ said Gary Moore, who was the ‘liberator’ for the 150 mile race, deciding when and where the birds were released. ‘To lose this many is just unbelievable.’ “Was it sunspots? A UFO? The currents of El Nino? “It’s hard to come up with an answer, pigeon-race enthusiasts say, because no one knows how homing pigeons do what they do.

  “Moore’s theory is that the disappearance may have something to do with cellular phone activity. It’s widely accepted that the pigeons use electromagnetic fields to help them navigate, and cellular phone calls might interfere with that process, he speculated.

  “Most long-distance races are held on weekends, when cellular phone activity is lower. But the two races in question were postponed from Sunday to Monday because of rain.

  “Sun-spots can also send the pigeons off course, but the sun activity that day was low, organizers say.”. [Bruce Sterling remarks: if cellphones interfere with bird navigation, we should logically have been seeing growing difficulties with all forms of bird migration, not just pigeons. And if sunspots can affect pigeons (surely a phenomenon difficult to quantify), then one wonders whether the recent cosmic magnetar blast, which detectably disturbed the earth’s magnetic field, may have had a role. Could it really be that the cellphones are disturbing pigeon brains and disrupting pigeon navigation? If so, what a rare and choice example of one medium directly killing another. It’s an interesting subject to ponder, next time you press a cellphone to the side of your skull.]

  Source: Washington Post; Austin American-Statesman, Thursday October 8, 1998, page A8

  Bertillonage

  From Damien Peter Sutton

  The “Signalectic Process of Criminal Classification,” or “Bertillonage,” was an early form of police classification, using photography, anthropometrics, and elaborate card catalogs.

  Bertillonage was developed by Alphonse Bertillon, the Director of the Identification Bureau of the Paris Prefecture of Police, in response to the problems of controlling and using the Bureau’s chaotic library of criminal photographs.

  The aim was twofold: to establish a usable system of unique identification for criminals, and to establish a statistical system for discovering the basic criminal ‘biotype.’

  Alphonse Bertillon was the son of the anthropometrist Adolphe Louis Bertillon. Anthropometrics was the science of taxonomy of the human race, which relied on a statistical approach, using abstract measurements. Anthropometrics had been used extensively in the colonies by most European powers with colonial interests.

  Bertillon surmised that if a record could be made of eleven special measurements of the human body,then that record, when accompanied with a photograph, would establish unique, recordable, processable ID characteristics for every member of the human race.

  The Bertillonage measurements were: Eventually Bertillon began taking measurements from specialized photographs. Collections also exist of his accumulated pictures of ears, facial profiles, etc.

  Bertillon’s project was part of a broad movement of taxonomic work based on the so-called “biotype,” which attempted to use statistical analysis of police records to scientifically identify the “criminal type.”

  Eugenics movements at the time promoted the segregation of these inferior types, so that they might not breed.

  Bertillon’s system lasted approximately 20 years. It was abandoned, not merely because of ethical problems, but because the archive itself became unwieldy.

  The Bertillonage apparatus included an overhead camera, under which the subject would recline in the two poses for the measurement of stretch and height; plus a camera set up in precisely measured distance from the subject, for measurement of the facial dimensions, ear, torso, and arm/hand.

  All these images were photographed against a gradated screen, so that the photographs could act as measurement records.

  Bertillon’s equipment was standard photographic equipment with minor modifications.

  But, as Sekula points out: “The central artifact of this system was not the camera but the filing cabinet.”

  The filing cabinets of the period lacked the swift capacity and power of modern ones.

  Source: Alan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’ in The Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton, MIT, 1989. Also Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection, by Henry Rhodes, London, Abelard-Schuman, 1956.

  Typesetters: a Dead Class of Media Workers

  From Bruce Sterling

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: the Graphion company still designs and sells fonts, but metal fonts, and the devices that used them, are gone. Even phototypesetting has been quietly annihilated. Typesetters were once as common on the techno-landscape as telegraph operators, and had a similar propensity to ride the rails, picking up a job wherever the impulse struck them. They were a powerful and well- paid trade, rather like programmers today. But every media revolution has its casualties.]

  “Typesetting as a skilled trade originated in the Renaissance. The Typesetter was solely responsible for the appearance of every page. The wonderful vagaries of hyphenation, particularly in the English language, were entirely in the Typesetter’s control (for example, the word ‘present’ as a noun hyphenates differently than the same word as a verb).

  “Every special feature: dropped capitals, hyphenation, accented characters, mathematical formulas and equations, rules, tables, indents,
footnotes, running heads, ligatures, etc. depended on the skill and esthetic judgment of the Typesetter.

  “Such was the attention to detail and pride in the appearance of a well composed page that Typesetters would occasionally rewrite bits of text to improve the appearance of the page. This greatly annoyed Mark Twain (who began his own career as a Typesetter) and encouraged him to invest heavily in an early, and unsuccessful, attempt to produce a keyboard-driven typesetting machine that wouldn’t edit his words.

  “There was a romantic tradition, in this country at least, of the drifter Typesetters, who were good enough at the craft to find work wherever they traveled. They’d work in one town until they wanted a change and then drift on. They had a reputation for being well read, occasionally hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an independence particularly rare in the 19th century.

  “Typesetting was a skilled and respected trade even after the keyboard-driven typesetting machines were introduced, around 1900. These machines typically produced lead strips for each line of type, which were stacked in a frame, proofed (the type was of course backward), and clamped into columns or pages. Extra space between lines was supplied with thin strips of lead, inserted between lines.

  “Pages such as price lists and directories would be kept in ‘standing type’ and edited by adding and removing individual lines of type. Large type in headings, etc., was likely to be set by hand and combined with the machine set lines.

  “The I.T.U. The International Typographical Union, was described as ‘the oldest union in America, and organized to prevent the use of labor saving improvements.’ The union fought hard for its members and when times were hard would send money and train fare to unemployed Typesetters, and direct them to places where prospects were better.