Feb 10, 2015
Ten Treasures from the Dead Media Museum
From wired mobile phones to leaflet grenades, the history of media technology is full of strange and wonderful stories.
In 1995, Bruce Sterling issued a challenge: “I’ll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK.” He wanted to read the definitive history of “media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media…”
Bruce appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media, and over the next five years, notes and suggestions accumulated, a stockpile of personal recollections, lists and book extracts, collected by the early inhabitants of the Internet.
But the book never happened. The website (deadmedia.org) survived, gradually succumbing to link-rot as the Internet evolved and grew around it.
Twenty years on, here are some of the highlights.
1. The balloon-riding, pigeon-wrangling, microfilm-smuggling profiteer of the Siege of Paris
The Siege of Paris in 1870–71, with its bizarre deployment of pigeons, dogs, floating copper balls, hot-air balloons, microfilm, postcards, money orders, and telegraphy, is the most dramatic and unlikely Dead Media tale of all time.
The Notebook has many stories about Rene Dagron, who was paid 25,000 franks to be smuggled out of Paris in a balloon and create a microfilm-powered pigeon post system for the citizens of the city.
“When the pigeon reached its particular loft in Paris, its arrival was announced by a bell in the trap in the loft. Immediately, a watchman relieved it of its tube which was taken to the Central Telegraph Office where the content was carefully unpacked and placed between two thin sheets of glass. The photographs are said to have been projected by magic lantern on to a screen where the enlargement could be easily read and written down by a team of clerks.”
2. The Auto Magic Picture Gun
“This device was a hand-held, miniature filmstrip projector made to resemble a small automatic pistol. It was used to project still pictures from an internal 16mm film loop onto a screen. Each film loop contained 28 frames, and was advanced using a ratchet film advance mechanism, operated by the trigger. The Picture Gun used a small bulb and two AA batteries to provide the projection light. The company’s literature promotes the Picture Gun for general entertainment and education, but it was also used for business purposes. The one film loop I have was produced for Shell Oil Company. Titled “The Return of Jimmy Whitaker,” it concerned a gas station attendant who gives instructions on pump-side selling and merchandising.” [Via Charlie Crouch]
3. Mobile phones for the cavalry. Range: 5 miles. Wired.
“In 1907, the cavalry announced plans to equip its scouts with a new type of mobile telephone. Like earlier horse-phones, it had a cord. Wire stored on a 5-mile reel played out as a scout rode. The improved model let a rider make calls without having to first dismount and then drive a spike into the ground to complete the electrical connection. Instead, the grounding wire was attached to the horse’s skin. The mild electrical current would pass through its body to its hoofs, one of which was almost always touching the ground.” [Bruce Sterling remarks: How many “earlier horse-phones” could there have been? It’s not hard to see why this bizarre telephony experiment failed to prosper; how can a surreptitious, fast-moving cavalry scout deploy a five- mile long telephone reel? Still, this medium may have been developed for some time. The fact that the horse itself became an integral part of the network: this cumulative improvement conveys a real sense of design elegance.]
4. Personalised talking dolls of the 1890s
The remarkable thing about talking dolls — Thomas Edison’s 1878 killer app for audio recording — was that each doll’s voice was recorded individually:
“At the Paris Exhibition 1900, a special room was devoted to the Phonograph doll with girls actually recording at benches.
‘Each one sits before a large apparatus, singing, reading, crying, reciting, talking with all the appearance of a lunatic! She dictates to a cylinder of wax the lesson that the little doll must obediently repeat to the day of her death with guaranteed fidelity.’”
5. A mechanical speech recognition system, thirty years before the first computer
The Phonoscribe was a pre-electronic device that could (perhaps) transcribe spoken text from a primitive microphone through a Byzantine array of mirrors, lenses and photographic film to a pen writing on a revolving drum. Unfortunately, the text was written in inventor John D. Flowers’ ‘phonetic alphabet’; a system of squiggles formed by the sound waves of speech that would then need to be translated back into English by a specially trained transcriber.
6. Vinyl video disks of the 1970s
“CED disks resemble giant floppy discs, approx 12” square (but a wee bit longer than wide). Like 8-track tapes, another clunky dead medium, the CED discs have a label glued to the plastic shell. Inside the shell is a grooved vinyl disc” (More on CED at Wikipedia)
7. The US Army’s tent and pneumatic tube multimedia slideshow system
ARTOC, was a hare-brained late-1950's Army tactical field communications coordination system, a breathtaking mixture of Rube Goldberg technologies whose purpose was to coordinate information from many different and incompatible sources (messengers on foot; radio; centrally-gathered intelligence, etc) and to present it in a coordinated manner. The system was never completed, but would include two computers mounted in 2.5 tonne trucks and a system that produced photographic slides from computer data (via pneumatic tubes, naturally).
8. Bootleg Concert Recordings in the Nineteenth Century
“In order to get popular songs recorded by artists who possessed recording voices, it was necessary to carry out a fair amount of pirate tactics. Songs had to be taken down in some way or other as they were being sung, either at a music hall or theatre. A miniature recording phonograph was taken into the theatre or hall to record the melody. A stenographer took down the words verbatim. It was sometimes necessary to make three or four visits before a satisfactory result was obtained. From these records and the stenographer’s notes an orchestration was made, and an artist selected to make the record.” [Bruce Sterling notes: This “miniature recording phonograph” must have been small enough to be hidden on the pirate’s person. How small were the cylinders and the horn? Did they fit, say, in a top hat? Note that these live bootleg recordings were not released, but were used to re-create the performance by someone other than the original artist. It was difficult enough to make a decent recording under the ideal conditions of a recording studio, let alone on remote.]
9. Leaflet Grenades of World War 2
“Captain James Monroe of the USAAF invented a bomb for the spreading of leaflets. The so-called Monroe bomb was taken into service. This bomb consisted of a paperboard cylinder in which up to 80,000 leaflets could fit. These bombs were dropped like normal bombs. A small detonator caused the cylinder to open at any given height. The leaflets were spread over a large area.
“For short range combat propaganda, another technique was used: the shooting of leaflets with artillery grenades. Smoke grenades were used. The smoke-cartridge was removed and replaced by small rolls of up to 400 leaflets. The British used a lot of 25 pounder grenades. A time fuse caused the grenade’s explosive charge to expel the leaflets in air over enemy trenches. The firing of the gun often pushed together the leaflets in the grenade which causes a very characteristic folding pattern on the leaflets.”
10. Software innovation in the magic lantern era
“To the modern eye a magic lantern most resembles a kerosene-fired slide projector. This preconception overlooks the slides themselves, however. Lantern slides were large, bulky, complex objects of glass, paint, wood and metal. Many had built-in mechanical features. So the lantern’s projected images were not necessarily static, but could be graced with limited animation. Some slides could even create complex, constantly moving screen displays. The Cycloidotrope was a truly remarkable variant, a kind of lantern spirograph. A black disk of smoked glass rotated within the slide frame, and a stylus on a pivoted arm traced a pattern in the soot against the moving glass. This appeared on the screen as a brilliant white line tracing a regular geometric design, an increasingly complex animated display. Images very similar to those generated by the Cycloidotrope are now quite popular in computer screen-savers.”
To celebrate 20 years of the Dead Media project, I’ve collected the best of the notes and research into an ebook:
.mobi file (Free)
Apple iBook (Free)
PDF (Free)
Kindle US (Free)
Kindle UK (Free)
NB: You can use the .mobi file on any Kindle — Just email it to firstname.lastname@free.kindle.com and sync over wifi.
*It not easy to offer books for free on the Kindle platform. “Hang on,” you say. “The Kindle store is full of free books!” It turns out that the minimum price for a book on Kindle is 99¢, but Amazon have various price-match and free sample programs. Kindle self-publishing forums are full of threads discussing the best way to persuade Amazon to give books away for free. Either way, once Amazon have taken 70% commission, the revenue from a 99¢ eBook is tiny, but any unwitting profits from Kindle sales will be donated to the Bletchley Park Trust.
