Weekend Stubble

Another Victim of the Recession: Player Piano Rolls

2009-11-08T13:17:00.002-08:00

After last week's post, I belatedly came across this extraordinary story: player piano rolls were still being manufactured in Buffalo, NY for the old instruments, right up until last year. (!)

Until Thursday, QRS was the only continuously operating mass producer of piano rolls in the world. The only other company, in Australia, stopped earlier this decade. Sales dropped about 80 percent from 15 years ago to around 50,000 annually, Berkman estimated...
Berkman said reassembling the piano roll factory elsewhere will be difficult.
One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano. There are also aging machines to perforate and punch the holes, to cut the stencils to print the lyrics, to spool the rolls and to glue the roll boxes together.
“There are so many facets of it. The perforating machines are old and cantankerous, and they’re one star in a constellation of machines that all have to be functioning,” Berkman said.

Sinclair Lewis's Other Racket

2009-11-07T13:57:00.004-08:00

For Halloween, Abebooks had up a "Top Ten Ghostwritten Books" list. My favorite: a tennis guide ghosted by Sinclair Lewis.

Playing, Sir!

2009-11-01T23:38:00.003-08:00

Lately my son Morgan has become fixated on Youtube videos of old player pianos in use. He loves the whole thing, from feeding the cylinder into the machine to final flap-flap-click-click of the rewinding piano roll: he's particularly fond of this 1927 foxtrot "Changes."

This is sometimes the first thing I hear in the morning, which makes me feel like I'm waking up in the middle of a Wodehouse story.

So I'm Guessing There's No Second Edition...

2009-10-31T14:07:00.008-07:00

A charming find on eBay: a 1927 guide on How to Play the Cinema Organ published at the exact moment that talkies were about to rub out the profession. The Jazz Singer came out in October of that very year.

Making Out in the Back of Horseless Carriages!

2009-10-24T11:21:00.003-07:00

Teen hysteria, courtesy of the February 14, 1925 issue of the New York Evening Journal:

Whatever Entrepreneurs Can Dream Up...

2009-10-18T12:45:00.012-07:00

...con-men have thought of first.

Wandering through Old Bailey records, I found an 1889 investor scam worthy of a dot-com:

BONIFACE KNAPP:
I live at 3, Maidment Road, Burdett Road, Bow—four years ago Krantz called on my father, a schoolmaster, and stayed to tea—that was the first introduction—he was not a man of means then—on 7th September this year I went with my father to an office in Leaden hall Buildings, where I saw him—he took us into a private office, and explained a scheme he had for buying a building near the Mansion House for the purpose of displaying advertisements, which were to continually revolve on a sheet inside the building; as I understood—by the side of it was to be a free correspondence company, where anybody could write a letter free—there were also to be tables for eating purposes, with an invention by Krantz by which you touched a knob, and a dinner would appear under a desk—you touched different knobs for different dishes—this was all under Bogaerts Free Correspondence Company—I went to Leadenhall Buildings every morning—I saw Bogaerts there—he and Krantz had meetings and conferences there, sometimes for many hours, in another room—he mentioned to me the Bogaerts Reunited Developing Company, to assist other people in bringing forward their patents—he said the capital was £3,000, which was subscribed abroad, and that the company was very vast in its extent...

For anticipating ad-supported e-mail by over a century, Mssrs. Henri Boegaerts and Bruno Krantz were made guests of Her Majesty and awarded twelve months hard labor.

"Two A.M. in the Subway"

2009-10-10T11:25:00.004-07:00

An 1905 Edison short I stumbled across on Youtube:

Also, via Daily Dish, an amazing hand-tinted 1899 Lumiere film of a Serpentine dance:

In Tomorrow's NYTBR...

2009-10-03T10:04:00.004-07:00

...The Book of William gets some love!

And next Sunday, I'll be reading at the Wordstock festival here in Portland -- 5pm at the Powell's Books Stage....

Stop Making Sense

2009-09-19T12:51:00.002-07:00

An odd 'un in the Guardian about a new study in this month's Psychological Science:

Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale... A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial grammar learning task which saw them exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings, and then asked to copy the strings and mark those which followed a similar pattern.
"People who read the nonsensical story... were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did. Proulx said that the thinking behind the research was that when we are exposed to something which "fundamentally does not make sense", our brains will respond by "looking for some other kind of structure" within our environment.

Wiley's got the article behind a subscription wall, but happily, one of the study's researchers put up a pdf download of the article. So brace yourself for a chart:

Skinner's Quiz Box

2009-09-05T10:10:00.008-07:00

With Labor Day coming up, I've had to think about how to keep the kids occupied on some long trips -- which why I'm on NPR Weekend Edition today to talk about Yes & Know invisible ink books...

They still look and work the same today as when I was a kid, and I became intrigued: where did these books come from, anyway? I tracked them down to a 1974 patent by Leon Lenkoff of Louisville, Kentucky. (His company, Lee Publications, continues making Yes & Know to this day.) But what struck me was that he cited a 1968 patent by a "Burrhus Frederic Skinner."

B... F... Skinner?

Yep!

Skinner's invention was part of his interest in automating learning; a handwriting worksheet that turned red when drew outside the dotted lines would save teacher labor for more personalized tasks. It was Lenkoff's bright idea to take this idea of defined areas of invisible ink and apply them to tic-tac-toe, 20 Questions, and a Battleship knockoff called "Fleet."

Skinner himself notes an older patent by an Antioch College chemistry instructor for a self-correcting quiz (e.g. fill in the wrong bubble and it turns red, while the correct answer bubble turns green). Skinner was so fond of that idea that he patented an anti-cheating version.

It's a charmingly retro technology. But it turns out that cheatproof decoder pen idea is making a comeback in polling booths this year with a vote confirmation system called Scantegrity.

So all those games of Decoder Pen Baseball on the airplane and in the car? Training for secure voting...

The Blooburds uv my Hart

2009-08-31T00:12:00.003-07:00

The Times carries an obituary to spelling reformer Ed Rondthaler, who passed away at age 104. He's the man I described in a Believer piece last year as the last living link to the movement's Edwardian zenith.

From his obituary:

Such [orthographic] anarchy, Mr. Rondthaler came to believe, helped cause illiteracy and with it, a web of social ills. Among them, as he wrote in the 1977 profile in The Times, were “jooveniel delinquensy, criem-in-th-streets, hard cor unemploiment and poverty.”

...He wrote a song honoring the 100th anniversary of the Croton Dam. He invented things, including a slide rule that calculated currency-exchange rates and another slide rule that computed cooking times of foods based on weight...
In 1920, at 15, young Mr. Rondthaler bought a 2-cent card and addressed it to a classmate. Inside, he wrote, “The bluebirds are flying from my heart to you.” His message was written in standard orthography.
Reader, she married him.

(Hat tip to Ed!)

In Search of the World's Most Boring Book Title

2009-08-23T12:07:00.005-07:00

Round 2

VS.

(Round 1)

Big in Dubai

2009-08-15T12:24:00.004-07:00

(From Time Out Dubai)

The first Arabic manga, The Gold Ring, is a tale involving falconry -- and a quote by author Qais Sedkis in the UAE National notes that it's not as odd a fit as one might think:

“I grew up watching a lot of Arabic-dubbed Japanese animation,” Sedki says. “At the time I just assumed they were all Arabic cartoons. I think it was actually a Jordanian company that did a lot of the dubbing and made [the programmes] available to other TV stations.

“When I learnt the truth, it sparked an interest in all things Japanese for me,” he says.... Certain practicalities have also helped. “As far as the literature goes,” Sedki says. “We both turn pages in the same direction, right to left.” This has meant that Gold Ring could be presented in the traditional tankobon format.

The Wooden Serpent

2009-08-08T11:54:00.009-07:00

1900 postcard of Paris's moving sidewalk

I'm in the latest New Scientist (full text!) with the Victorian equivalent of the jetpack: the trottoir roulant of the 1900 Paris Exposition, a 3 km moving sidewalk for crosstown mass-transit, which one enraptured reporter described as "gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth."

Here's a haunting silent film taken from atop it:

It was such a success that one was proposed to run across the Brooklyn Bridge...

The first moving walkway had been unveiled eight years earlier at the Chicago World's Fair and had proved a huge success at subsequent expositions in Berlin and Paris. Chicago's walkway, the brainchild of engineer Max Schmidt, consisted of three rings, the first stationary, the second moving at 4 kilometres per hour and the third at 8 km/h, an arrangement that allowed walkers to adjust to each speed before moving to the next. With the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, Schmidt upped the ante. This time he envisaged a loop system at each end of the bridge, with a series of four ever-faster walkways. Passengers moved from one to another until finally taking a seat on the benches aboard the fastest, which whisked them across the bridge at 16 km/h...

One newspaper suggested that getting trapped with interminable bores would be a thing of the past: one "has only to suddenly step on the passing sidewalk to be carried rapidly beyond sight or hearing of his tormentor"... The New York Tribune called for "a moving sidewalk from Texas to New York to bring up cotton and those cheap winter strawberries", while another newspaper jokingly suggested that city buildings be placed on moving walkways so that people could simply stand around and wait for the right one to arrive.

There was an even earlier proposal for a 17 km-long system in Paris, and more calls right up through the 1930s for installing huge systems everywhere from LA to Detroit-- as well as along Wall Street, Grand Central Station, and Times Square.

Check out this amazing 1924 proposal for a "ring" system underneath downtown Atlanta:

One detail that wound up on the cutting-room floor: on November 7 1925 -- a year later, and well after the initial hubbub over this idea had died down -- the Atlanta Constitution reported the arrival of curious letter at City Hall:

City Clerk Walter C. Taylor received a letter Friday, written in French, and after vainly endeavoring to find some person at city hall to translate it, at last found a high school girl in the department of education who translated it. The letter offered to submit a bid on the construction of "moving sidewalks" in Atlanta.

The city, alas, never got its own trottoir roulant.

Best blog idea ever

2009-08-01T23:54:00.008-07:00

"Awful Library Books."

To wit:

And finally: Awful, or just awesome?...

"One Hundred Years Hence"

2009-07-27T00:03:00.007-07:00

A neat find: some trade cards cerca 1900 of what the world will look like today -- though, charmingly, clothing does not appear to be subject to change:

The prospect of futuristic weather control seems to have particularly cheered our ancestors:

And, of course, alien invasions:

Oops -- sorry, that last one's from a gallery of Aliens Invading Vintage Postcards....

Good night, Seattle!

2009-07-19T22:01:00.002-07:00

I'll be reading and signing The Book of William tomorrow, Monday July 20th, at the University Bookstore at 7 pm....

Bring Me The Bill

2009-07-12T14:41:00.002-07:00

I'm reading and signing The Book of William this Wednesday at...

Powell's Books
10th & Burnside
Portland, OR
7:30 p.m.

Sobbing Children and Singing Shillings

2009-07-12T13:37:00.005-07:00

I'm in the new music issue of The Believer with a piece on William Gardiner's obscure 1832 treatise The Music of Nature. The book was a great favorite of Emerson and Margaret Fuller, not least because Gardiner attempt to render ordinary sounds in musical notation:

Gardiner was fascinated with the sound of ordinary objects, like ringing true and counterfeit coins against a tabletop: "Half crowns having the sound of--

--bankers quickly discover the least deviation from the proper tone, by which they readily detect the counterfeits," he wrote....

The Music of Nature is about music in the way that Anatomy of Melancholy or Religio Medici are about medicine: it is an extraordinary digressive meditation. His music scholarship is no more reliable today than Burton's medical advice is, and yet how can one not be charmed by a text that observes that a glass of flat champagne rings with a purer tone than a bubbly glass does? What parent has not suspected that "Providence has bestowed upon children a power of voice, in proportion to their size, ten times greater than that of an adult"? Who would not want to believe his wonderful claim that "In a watchmaker's shop the timepieces or clocks, connected with same wall or shelf, have such a sympathetic effect... that they stop those which beat in irregular time"?

Gentlemen, My Work Here Is Done

2009-07-11T11:39:00.002-07:00

My latest Slate piece features a robot, a serial killer, and Cecil B. DeMille.

Everybody Loves Slush!

2009-07-05T22:27:00.002-07:00

On a weekend like this, you need...

(More) Fun with Library Microforms

2009-07-05T11:35:00.003-07:00

A headline I found this week in a 1907 New York Evening Mail:

Happy July 4th from Fry & Laurie

2009-07-04T09:48:00.002-07:00

(Hat tip: The Stranger)

Borrowing a Cup of Sugar

2009-07-04T08:33:00.010-07:00

Found in an 1897 New York Herald:

How Ralph Lost His Groove

2009-06-14T12:35:00.003-07:00

I'm in New Scientist this week with a piece on Ralph Guldahl, who in 1939 was the world's top golfer. But then something happened:

Along with the usual product endorsements and talk of film cameos, a more unusual offer came Guldahl's way: a book contract for a guide to golfing. He took two months out from his game to write the extensive accompanying text to Groove Your Golf, an innovative "Ciné-Sports" book that used high-speed photography of Guldahl in action on each page to create flip-book "movies". After explaining the use of each club, Guldahl left readers with the admission that even experts had to think carefully about their game; that nobody "is so good he never has to consciously be aware of a number of things to keep his swing in the groove". He then put down his pen and returned to the PGA Tour. He never won another championship.

After a few losing seasons, Guldahl left the circuit. What had happened to golf's greatest star? It was the book that did it, said some, and over the years that suggestion hardened into received wisdom. "When he sat down to write that book," Guldahl's wife Laverne asserted in 1972, "that's when he lost his game."

The real story, I found, turns out to be a little more complicated...