The women who pioneered electronic music

Electronic music doesn’t talk to me in a real loud voice, but this piece from OpenCulture.com rings a few bells.

It’s intriguing because it mentions the not too surprising fact that women were involved in the earliest incarnations of electronic music, back in the 1950s and even earlier.

Didja ever hear of Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue or Pauline Oliveros?

I think it’s a good bet I can say “Of course you didn’t.”

OpenCulture explains that these women “represent a small sampling of too-often-overlooked electronic composers, musicians, engineers, and theorists whose work deserves wider appreciation, not because it’s made by women, but because it’s innovative, technically brilliant, and beautiful music made by people who happen to be women.”

Laurie Spiegel

Read a little bit about them and hear their ethereal music here.

Amen, sister.

I’m sticking with Odetta and Joan Baez (her early work), but this was a tantalizing interlude.

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Blame the men!

Kids will be kids -- update

Speed!

That tolerance thing

The cod in "Cape Cod"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“Mama!”

Alexander Graham Bell patented his “electrical speech machine” 140 years ago. A few months later he tried unsuccessfully to sell the patent to Western Union. Apparently the company didn’t think the invention had much promise. 

I think Bell would have bet the ranch that it was plain crazy to imagine that people would someday be able to walk down the street while they were talking to a friend on the other side of the world. One story has it that Bell thought folks would use the telephone primarily to listen to distant musical performances.

In his youth Bell was a dedicated tinkerer, with a steady penchant for inventing gadgets and stuff. Before the telephone became a reality, he and his brothers “built a working model of a mouth, throat, nose, and movable tongue, and attached a set of bellows for lungs. They were so successful in getting the model to wail ‘MaMa’ that the neighbors began to search for a child in distress.”

What are your kids inventing these days?

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"A Man of Feeling..."

The boob tube....

Your great-grandmother didn't have a teddy bear

"A majority of life's errors..."

"...surely it will"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The boob tube….

My parents were early adopters in the early 1950s: they bought a television set. How they rationalized that expenditure I do not know. I think it was a portable, maybe with a 7-inch screen.

They were among millions who were putting down the cash to acquire technology with rabbit ears.

TV in its infancy was the fastest blooming technology in the history of humankind.

At the end of World War II there were only a few tens of thousands of privately owned television sets. Within 10 years, two-thirds of American households had one. By the early 1960s more than 90 percent of homes had a boob tube.

In the early years, when few households had a set, the neighborhood tended to gather at the house with a TV for a social evening, watching whatever was on one of the (maximum 3) available channels. I was a kid when the family drove into Philadelphia to watch The Wizard of Oz on my uncle’s brand-new color TV.

I don’t watch TV now—stopped channel checking almost seven years ago. OK, I make exceptions for the Super Bowl and the State of the Union address and election returns in early November.

I’m bound to say I don’t think I’m missing much.

The news media industry, particularly TV, has become a beast with no scruples. I think it is deranging our society.

At least, in the old days, we had the Milton Berle Show.

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When safety standards were more interesting....

"...led by donkeys..."

Fahrenheit 451, anyone?

Maybe your kid shouldn't go to college

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“Music in my own house? Wow!”

OK, turn off the iPod and just listen to this for a minute.

1920s crystal radio

Scientific American went out on a limb 95 years ago and told its readers:

"It has been well known for some years that by placing a form of telephone transmitter in a concert hall or at any point where music is being played the sound may be carried over telephone wires to an ordinary telephone receiver at a distant point, but it is only recently that a method of transmitting music by radio has been found possible."

Crikey, mate. Music through the air!?

Soon after World War I ended, scientists in the United States, Britain and elsewhere were actively experimenting with ways to improve radio technology that would enable its practical transformation into a full-blown communications and entertainment medium.

1920s radio station

A laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington— it owned station WWV—relied on help from amateur radio operators to explore the technical details of radio transmissions. It had some successes as early as 1919.

Scientific American was ponderously enthusiastic:

"Music can be performed at any place, radiated into the air through an ordinary radio transmitting set and received at any other place, even though hundreds of miles away…the music received can be made as loud as desired by suitable operation of the receiving apparatus…The possibilities of such centralized radio concerts are great and extremely interesting."

Until the 1920s, the only way to hear live music was to go to the concert hall. The only way to hear whatever music you chose, any time you chose, was to own the record and a phonograph machine.

Let’s not even get started on television.

The yin and yang of productivity

Evolution "deniers"

The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown

Book review: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"...there are only endings."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The yin and yang of productivity

Productivity is a late-blooming concept in human society.

Before the invention of at least conceptually accurate clocks (mid-13^th century in Europe) and the subsequent advent of modern timekeeping, the notion of productivity in terms of work per unit of time was mostly unknown.

Medieval clock tower

David Landes, in Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, points out that in the late medieval period, “the great virtue was busyness—unremitting diligence in one’s tasks.”

In today’s workplace, “keeping busy” is most definitely not the acceptable definition of doing good work and being productive. As anyone who’s read “Dilbert” recently knows, it’s possible to stay busy without actually doing anything.

When workers and bosses could accurately keep track of time, they created an inescapable transformation of workplace culture. If Hans made six shoes while Jakob made five shoes and Gretel (with six hungry kids) made four shoes, and Hans could do this repeatedly during measured time periods that everyone acknowledged, then it was obvious who was doing more work and thus who was more productive.

That is to say, it was obvious if each of them had the same training, and each of them had the same access to raw materials and similar tools, and each of them had the same working conditions, and if….

Source:

David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 25 and passim.

Evolution "deniers"

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Keeping track of time

A Farewell to Arms

"You can't dance in a long dress."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

“Mr. Jeppers, send a telegram to San Francisco.”

“Mr. Jeppers, send a telegram to San Francisco.”

Before October 1861, it would have been possible for a banker in Salt Lake City to say that, but anybody farther east would have been out of luck.

Just before the start of the Civil War,  telegraph lines connected the East Coast to as far west as western Missouri, and the West Coast could send messages by wire as far east as Salt Lake City. The central plains, essentially what is now Kansas and Colorado, had no poles (no trees!) and no wire.

Congress in 1860 offered a bounty of $40,000 a year to the first company that could connect the East Coast and West Coast telegraph networks. Wire, glass insulators and poles would have to be shipped by horse-drawn wagon from San Francisco to the construction zone.

The Western Union Telegraph Co. took up the challenge and completed the line to create a coast-to-coast communications channel which we have largely taken for granted for the last 154 years. The transcontinental railroad wouldn’t be complete until 1869.

Imagine the reality of 1860. Imagine that your text message to your sweetie on the other side of the country had to be copied out and carried by stagecoach or a horseman through Kansas and Colorado, weather permitting.

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"Shhhhh!"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

75 miles at a gallop....

Of course you’ve heard about the Pony Express riders, those guys were tough caballeros.

The Pony Express mail service—from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California—was inaugurated on April 3, 1860, just as the Civil War was starting to get hot.

Those hardy riders, including 14-year-old William Cody (he became “Buffalo Bill”), accomplished almost unbelievable feats in the saddle to keep the almost unbelievably expensive mail service in operation for about 18 months.

You may not have heard that the first transcontinental telegraph line put the Pony Express out of service more or less instantly in October 1861. Talk about disruptive technology!

The Pony Express was a good idea waiting to happen. The state of California was admitted to the Union in 1850, but it was essentially out of touch with the eastern states. Regular mail carried on boats took about a month to travel from the East Coast to the West Coast. The Butterfield Express overland stagecoach could carry mail and packages across the western plains in about three weeks at best, and sometimes the stage didn’t make it through.

The Pony Express riders could take a mail packet (about 20 pounds) from Missouri to California in 8-10 days. Unbelievable!

The riders made $25 a week (about $722 in current collars) to cover 75-100 miles per shift, jumping on a fresh mount every 10-15 miles. The Pony Express had about 80 riders on the payroll, and stabled 400-500 horses in more than 100 relay stations along the route.

Here’s another unbelievable factoid: it cost $5 in 1860 to drop a half-ounce of mail into the Pony Express packet. That’s about $145 in current dollars—a 20-pound mail packet was worth about $93,000.

Of course, there were substantial operating costs, but William Russell, William Waddell and Alexander Majors thought they were going to make a killing when they put the Pony Express into operation. However, they never nailed down the juicy government contract they hoped for, and then those pesky pre-Silicon Valley guys rolled out the telegraph….

There was a time....

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Direct line to the president....

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America's first history prof, Jared Sparks

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There's no place like home....

"...long, slow, thoughtful reading."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015

When were the good old days, exactly?

President Herbert Hoover didn’t have his own email server. Obviously.

Also, he didn’t have a telephone at his desk when he took office on March 4, 1929.

Hoover was the first president to install a telephone in the Oval Office. Otherwise, he would have had to use the phone in the lobby just outside it.

A few weeks after Hoover began his term, an initially pesky instrument was wired up on his desk. At first, it wouldn’t work properly, but the White House crew put it right.

Let’s be fair: a telephone system and switchboard was installed in the White House in 1878, only two years after Alexander Graham Bell received his patent. However, the telegraph system was the dominant communications channel at that time.

The telegraph stayed in the No. 1 spot in the U. S. through the end of the 19^th century—in 1900, almost all of the telephone traffic in America was confined to strictly local calls. The long-distance telephone network became a 20^th century phenomenon.

The "poorhouse" was a place....

America's first history prof, Jared Sparks

Have you "seen the elephant"?

There's no place like home....

"...long, slow, thoughtful reading."

"Aimons toujours!"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015