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.

The times they are a-changin'....

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?

"...ain't no protest song."

"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.

Technology 'R" Us

Often we don’t have a really explicit idea of what we mean when we say “We’ve come a long way….”

For instance, 130 years ago doing the household laundry was a bona fide chore—it was hard work. Why? In 1886 a study estimated that “washing, boiling and rinsing a single load of laundry used about 50 gallons of water.”

So what? Think about it: in the days before indoor plumbing, somebody (think Mom and the kids) had to haul that water from some source outside the house, maybe a pump, maybe a well, maybe a nearby spring or waterway.

That’s 8-10 trips—or more—to haul enough water for the wash, almost enough water to fill an oil drum.

That’s just to do the white and light-colored stuff. Think about doing it again for the dark load.

Things did get better, but slowly. By 1940, roughly 40 percent of homes had heating (not from a fireplace or stove), about 60 percent had flush toilets indoors, 70 percent had water coming out of a tap inside the house and a whopping 80 percent had electricity.

What it doesn't say....

Donkey and elephant enter politics

Your pedestrian ancestors

Book review: Statue in Search of a Pedestal

Yeah, a blanket fort

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

First flight—unbelievable

For many people around the world, it was literally unbelievable.

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright cranked up the biplane that he and his brother had built in the back room of their Ohio bike shop, and did what no man had done before: he traveled through the air, perched on a machine.

That first flight wasn’t much to write home about: 120 feet, lasting 12 seconds. Orville and Wilbur flew four times that day, and Wilbur handled the last, spectacular feat: he traveled 852 feet in 59 seconds.

A lot of folks thought it was impossible, or at least impossible for two Dayton bicycle mechanics to pull off.

The Wright brothers were deliberate in their strategies to develop and patent their airplane, so they didn’t talk it up much. The world-wide press was not largely impressed in the early years. Five years after the first flight, Orville and Wilbur went to France and did the first highly publicized demonstrations of their heavier-than-air craft. The world went nuts.

da Vinci's flying machine

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519) had the idea for a flying machine back in the 16^th century, but he couldn’t get the thing to work.

                          

David McCullough's book on the Wright brothers

A good step

Can 13 words be a palace?

"We the People..."?....hold on

Book review: St. Ives

The other British colonies....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 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"

The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown

Keeping track of time

A Farewell to Arms

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

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Evolution “deniers”

Charles Darwin went to his printer 156 years ago with the book that stood science, philosophy, religion and mankind on their collective heads.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life  was a smash hit—in the bookshops, at least. The first press run of 1,250 copies sold out quickly, and the book went through six editions in 13 years.

A few years ago a first edition copy was sold by Christie’s for $194,500. Bibliophiles guess that perhaps 1,000 copies of the first edition are still tucked away in institutional and private libraries. Several of them are sold every year.

You probably know that, although the book enjoyed some degree of popularity among both scientists and late 19^th century popular science readers, Darwin’s startling conclusion--that human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors--was wildly debated and disputed immediately after he published the book. The debate, dispute and denial continues today.

It seems to me that the “evolution deniers” got a 100-year head start on the today’s global climate change deniers.

For some folks, it is an apparently enduring capacity of human nature to ignore facts and scientifically rigorous thinking when some combination of ignorance, myth, belief, greed and fear makes it comfortable to do so.

Read here about the other evolution theorist, Alfred Russel Wallace

The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown

Keeping track of time

Mr. Grumpy

Book review: Saint Martin's Summer

The art of Mahalia Jackson

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The exasperation of Tycho Brahe

O crassa ingenia.

O caecos coeli spectatores.         

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)

Danish astronomer

Brahe made a splash when he published De nova stella in 1573, challenging the Aristotelian doctrine of a perfected, unchanging celestial sphere.

Living before the advent of practical telescopes, the gentleman-scientist was the last of the principal "naked eye" astronomers who worked without telescopes.

He was in the van of astronomer-scientists who gradually debunked the Ptolemaic concept of the cosmos as an Earth-centric (geocentric) system. Brahe proposed a cosmos with the sun and the moon orbiting the Earth, and the other planets orbiting the sun, with stars in the classical "fixed spheres."

The Copernican cosmological system was at odds with Brahe's geo-heliocentric system, and Kepler later proposed a more correct orbital system based substantially on Brahe's astoundingly detailed and (for his time) spectacularly accurate astronomical observations.

Brahe wasn't in the mainstream, and he was not shy about promoting his own system.

Hence, his less-than-tactful characterization of others with divergent views:

O crassa ingenia.

O caecos coeli spectatores.         

O, thick wits.

O, blind watchers of the sky.

The card catalog, so many drawers....

Uncle Sam was born in 1813

You can call him Quake

Book review: The Snow Goose

Ford's assembly line, 1913 style

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Science ruins everything

The world and universe we live in is what it is, although some folks insist on their right to believe otherwise.

Let’s be straight here: for example, believing that the earth was made in six days doesn’t make it so.

The reference to 1543 calls to mind the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician and astronomer of the Renaissance who startled the Western world by publishing his evidence (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) of a heliocentric solar system—sun at the center, planets revolving around it. It took a while for that to sink in.

Full disclosure: Copernicus had nothing to say about Santa Claus.

"...the very best story of diablerie..."

Same old, same old

Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary

Masters of war, revisited

Beguiled by speed....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.