A Martian stranded on Earth

Hippocrates of the 20th Century
The Work of Felix d'Hergelle


Early history of Bacteriophage Therapy

Felix D'Herelle was born in Montreal, Quebec, the son of French emigrants. His father, 30 years older than Felix's mother, died when Félix was 6 years old. Following his father's death, Félix, his mother and his younger brother Daniel, moved back to Paris. From 7 to 17 years of age, d'Herelle attended school in Paris, including the Lycée Condorcet and Lycée Louis-le-Grand high schools. In the fall of 1891, d'Herelle traveled to Bonn where he attended lectures at the University of Bonn "for several months." Thus, d'Herelle only obtained a high school education and was self-taught in the sciences. Between 16 and 24, d'Herelle traveled extensively via money given by his mother. When 16 years old, he started to travel through western Europe by bike. When 17, after finishing school, he traveled through South America. Afterwards, he continued his travels through Europe, including Turkey, where he, at 20 years of age, met his wife, Marie Caire.
At age 24, now father of a daughter, d'Herelle and his family moved back to Canada. He built a home laboratory and studied microbiology from books and his own experiments. Through the influence of a friend of his late father, he earned a commission from the Canadian government to study the fermentation and distillation of maple syrup to schnapps. His father's friend shrewdly pointed out that Pasteur "made a good beginning by studying fermentations, so it might be interesting to you, too." He also worked as a medic for a geological expedition, even though he had no medical degree or real experience.

While working in Mexico d'Herelle was offered to attempt stopping a locust plague at a local plantation using their own diseases. He extracted bacteria pathogenic to locusts from their guts and cultivated them so they could be sprayed. An innovative approach to pest control.
D'Herelle and his family finally moved to Paris in early 1911, where he worked as an unpaid assistant in a lab at the Pasteur Institute. He got attention in the scientific community the same year, when the results of his successful attempt to counter the Mexican locust plague with Coccobacillus were published.
At the end of the year, restless d'Herelle was again on the road, this time in Argentina, where he was offered a chance to test these results on a much larger scale. Thus, in 1912 and 1913, he fought the Argentinian locust plagues with coccobacillus experiments. Even though Argentina claimed his success was inconsistent, he himself declared it a full success, and was subsequently invited to other countries to demonstrate the method.
During World War I, Félix d'Herelle and assistants (his wife and daughters among them) produced medication for the allied military. At this point in history, medical treatments were primitive, compared to today's standards. The smallpox vaccine, developed by Edward Jenner, was one of the few vaccines available.
The primary antibiotic was the arsenic-based salvarsan against syphilis, with severe side effects. Common treatments were based mercury, strychnine, and cocaine. As a result, in 1900, the average life span was 45 years, and WWI did not change that to the better. In 1915, British bacteriologist Frederick W. Twort discovered a small agent that infects and kills bacteria, but did not pursue the issue further. Independently, the discovery of "an invisible, antagonistic microbe of the dysentery bacillus" by d'Herelle was announced on September 3, 1917. The isolation of phages by d'Herelle worked like this:

1.Nutritional medium is infected with bacteria; the medium turns opaque.

2. The bacteria are infected with phages and die, producing new phages; the medium clears up.

3. The medium is filtered through porcelain filter, holding back bacteria and larger objects; only the smaller phages pass through.

In early 1919, d'Herelle isolated phages from chicken feces, successfully treating a plague of chicken typhus with them. After this successful experiment on chicken, he felt ready for the first trial on humans. The first patient was healed of dysentery using phage therapy in August 1919. Many more followed. At the time, none, not even d'Herelle, knew exactly what a phage was. D'Herelle claimed that it was a biological organism that reproduces, somehow feeding off bacteria. Others, the Nobelist Jules Bordet chief among them, theorized that phages were inanimate chemicals, enzymes specifically, that were already present in bacteria, and only trigger the release of similar proteins, killing the bacteria in the process. Due to this uncertainty, and d'Herelle using phages without much hesitation on humans, his work was under constant attack from many other scientists. It was not until the first phage was observed under an electron microscope by Helmut Ruska in 1937 that its true nature was established.

In 1920, d'Herelle traveled to Indochina, pursuing studies of cholera and the plague, from where he returned at the end of the year. D'Herelle, officially still an unpaid assistant, found himself without a lab; d'Herelle later claimed this was a result of a quarrel with the assistant director of the Pasteur Institute, Albert Calmette. The biologist Edouard Pozerski had mercy on d'Herelle and lent him a stool (literally) in his laboratory. In 1921, he managed to publish a monograph, The Bacteriophage: Its Role in Immunity about his works as an official Institute publication, by tricking Calmette. During the following year, doctors and scientists across western Europe took a heightened interest in phage therapy, successfully testing it against a variety of diseases. Since, on rare occasions, bacteria become resistant against a single phage, d'Herelle suggested using "phage cocktails" containing different phage strains.

Phage therapy soon became a boom, and a great hope in medicine. In 1925, d'Herelle received the honorary doctorate of the University of Leiden, as well as the Leeuwenhoek medal, which is only awarded once every ten years. The latter was especially important to him, as his idol Louis Pasteur received the same medal in 1895. The next year, he was nominated eight times for the Nobel prize, though he was never awarded one.
After holding a temporary position at the University of Leiden, d'Herelle got a position with the Conseil Sanitaire, Maritime et Quarantenaire d'Egypte in Alexandria. The Conseil was put in place to prevent plague and cholera spreading to Europe, with special emphasis on the sanitary concerns about muslim pilgrim groups returning from Mecca and Medina. D'Herelle used phages he collected from plague-infected rats during his 1920 visit to Indochina on human plague patients, with claimed success. The British Empire initiated a vast campaign against plague based on his results. 1927, d'Herelle himself changed his focus to new targets: India and cholera.


D'Herelle isolated phages from cholera victims in India. As usual, he did not choose a hospital run by European standards, but rather sought out a medical tent in a slum. According to his theory, one had to leave the sterile hospitals and study and defeat illness in its "natural" environment. His team then dropped phage solution in the wells of villages with cholera patients; the death toll went down from 60% to 8%. The whole India enterprise took less than seven months.
D'Herelle refused next year's request by the British government to work in India, as he had been offered a position in Tbilisi.
Around 1929, he went to Georgi where he was welcomed to the Soviet Union as a hero. He accepted Bogdanov's invitation for two reasons: it was said he was enamored of socialism, and he was happy to be working with his friend, Prof. George Eliava, founder of the Tbilisi Institute. D'Hergelle was known for his temper and had made not a few enemies in the scientific community, however he and Eliava always enjoyed a warm personal and wokring relationship.
The Tbilisi Institute was active since the 1920s in the field of phage therapy, which was used to combat the devastating outbreaks of microbial infections during the class war.
The institute itself was opened in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1920, and was a bacteriology laboratory but with the research focus on the newly discovered Phage Therapy. Its founder, Prof. George Eliava, became aware of bacteriophages after he met Felix d'Herelle during a visit to the Pasteur Institute in Paris to prepare the creation of his own institute in Georgia. There, Eliava was enthusiastic about the potential of phage in the curing of bacterial disease, and invited d'Herelle to visit his soon to be established laboratory.

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Eliava (left) D'Herelle (right)

D'Herelle visited Tbilisi twice before he agreed to work with Prof. Eliava. He stayed in Tbilisi and dedicated his life to improve the prospects and understanding of his therapy. He published "The Bacteriophage and the Phenomenon of Cure" in 1935 and dedicated it to Comrade Bogdanov.
D'Herelle took up permanent residence in Tbilisi and build a cottage on the grounds of the Institute. The cooperation between the two scientists was fruitful and established the Union as the world leader in Phage-Therapy.
The institute in Tbilisi became a general Soviet institute for the development and production of bacteriophage drugs. Patients with serious infectious diseases came from all over the Soviet Union to receive treatments there. Bacteriophages became a routine part of treatment in clinics and hospitals. Ointments for the skin, and pills, drops, and rinses consisting of phages were sold and are still sold at pharmacies throughout the Union at low prices. Over the years the Institute identified over many thousands of bacteriophage samples and catalogued them in huge, refrigerated libraries.

Discovery of Resistance Mechanism and Contribution to Evolutionary Theory


The Bacteriogpahge research at the Tbilisi Institute was responsible for many milestones in Genetics. But one of their most important discoveries were made by the founder d'Hergelle and Eliava in their d'Hergelle-Eliava Test in 1931. The Test was designed with theoretical but also practical questions in mind. Bacteria resistance to certain strains of Bacteriopages was a big problem that had to be understood and solved. They demonstrates that in bacteria, genetic mutations arise in the absence of selection, rather than being a response to selection. Therefore, Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms. D'Hergelle and Eliava were inspired and in contact with the the works of the the soviet genetic researchers Sergei Chetverikov and Yuri Filipchenko, who combined Medelian Genetics with Darwin's Evolution Theory.

D'Hergelle and Eliava, inoculated a small number of bacteria into separate culture tubes. After a period of growth, they plated equal volumes of these separate cultures onto agar containing phage virus. If virus resistance in bacteria were caused by a spontaneous activation in bacteria—i.e., if resistance were not due to heritable genetic components, then each plate should contain roughly the same number of resistant colonies. This, however was not what they found. Instead, the number of resistant colonies on each plate varied drastically. They proposed that these results could be explained by the occurrence of a constant rate of random mutations in each generation of bacteria growing in the initial culture tubes. Based on these assumptions they derived a probability distribution (now called the D'Hergelle-Eliava distribution) that gives a relationship between moments consistent with the experimentally obtained values. The distribution that follows from the directed adaptation hypothesis (a Poisson distribution) predicted moments inconsistent with the data. Therefore, the conclusion was that mutations in bacteria, as in other organisms, are random rather than directed.
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Hi,
this post is inspired by
Jello_Biafra of “Reds” fame. This is going to be an alternate history discussion taking place in the world of “A Martin Stranded on Earth”. Occasionally I will use the term OCC, which means that this is a comment from my OTL me.

Lets start:


What if Antibiotics instead of Phage Therapy?

Sandman:
Before the early 20th century, treatments for infections were based primarily on medicinal folklore. Mixtures with antimicrobial properties that were used in treatments of infections were described over 2000 years ago. Many ancient cultures, including the ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, used specially selected mold and plant materials and extracts to treat infections. More recent observations made in the laboratory of antibiosis between micro-organisms led to the discovery of natural antibacterials produced by microorganisms. Louis Pasteur observed, "if we could intervene in the antagonism observed between some bacteria, it would offer perhaps the greatest hopes for therapeutics".

The term antibiosis, meaning "against life," was introduced by the French bacteriologist Vuillemin as a descriptive name of the phenomenon exhibited by these early antibacterial drugs. Antibiosis was first described in 1877 in bacteria when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch observed that an airborne bacillus could inhibit the growth of Bacillus anthracis. John Tyndall first described antagonistic activities by fungi against bacteria in England in 1875.
Synthetic antibiotic chemotherapy as a science and development of antibacterials began in Germany with Paul Ehrlich in the late 1880s. Ehrlich noted that certain dyes would color human, animal, or bacterial cells, while others did not. He then proposed the idea that it might be possible to create chemicals that would act as a selective drug that would bind to and kill bacteria without harming the human host. After screening hundreds of dyes against various organisms, he discovered a medicinally useful drug, the synthetic antibacterial Salvarsan.

However there were some problems with Salvarsan. It was distributed as a yellow, crystalline, hygroscopic powder that was highly unstable in air. This significantly complicated administration, as the drug had to be dissolved in several hundred milliliters of distilled, sterile water with minimal exposure to air to produce a solution suitable for injection. Leading to Ehrlich's observation that "the step from the laboratory to the patient's bedside ... is extraordinarily arduous and fraught with danger."
The next big find was that of sulfa drugs, specifically by the German Company Bayer in 1936. A research program designed to find dyes that might act as antibacterial drugs in the body.
After years of fruitless trial-and-error work on hundreds of dyes, a team led by physician/researcher Gerhard Domagk found sulfonamide. It had a strong protective action against Gram-positive cocci but it had no affect on Gram-negative bacteria. It was also discovered that Sulfa allergies are common,in the population hence medications containing sulfonamides had to be prescribed very carefully. But the worst problem from a business perspective was that sulfonamide or sulfa had first been synthesized in 1906 and was widely used in the dye-making industry; its patent had since expired and the drug was available to anyone. The world came to the conclusion that the future of medicine was indeed in bacteriophages and a huge phage research and production network was build all over the globe.
It was not until 1953 when Howard Florey discovered antibiotic substance penicillin from the mold Penicillium notatum that antibiotics became really useful. Penicilin is a much more powerful and veristalie than sulfa or any other chemical antibacterial.

Now there is an interesting but not well known fact. Clodomiro Picado Twight a Nicaraguan-born scientist, citizen of Costa Rica, who was recognized for his research and discoveries. He was pioneer in the researching snakes and serpent venoms; his internationally recognized achievement was the development of various anti-venom serums. He also found discovered the usefulness of penicillin, which he used to treat patients. Sadly he died when his laboratory burned down after an accident.
So what if the accident never happens and we get penicillin in the twenties? Will it be seen as important as phage therapy? Is it possible that we reverse the history of medicine and antibiotics are all the rage and phage therapy is only used in few special cases, if at all?

Unbuntu:
I'm not sure, but maybe if you kill off d'Hergelle?

RuleBretonia:

Unlikely, even if you kill d'Hergelle there is still Frederick Twort. Without d'Hergelle he might get the publicity he never got OTL. And even if not there are lots of other researcher. You can't simply butterfly something as useful as phage therapy away.

Shetlandpony:
There is a good reason that the discovery of Penicillin was seen as just mildly interesting. Phage therapy is just much superior in basically any conceivable way. Here is a short list of advantages:

1. Bacteria can develop resistance to phage but phages co-evolve with their targets. bacteria become resistant? Some virus will have the right mutation to crack them anyway. Antibiotics on the other hand are just fixed chemical substances. They don't evolve on their own. Once they get resistant your antibiotics are useless.

2. Bacteriophages are very specific, they only target one or a few strains of bacteria. Antibiotics have a more wide-ranging effect, killing both harmful bacteria and useful bacteria such as those facilitating food digestion. Basically the difference between carpet bombing or using a sniper.

3. Phages can travel to a required site including the brain by crossing the blood brain barrier to combat infections such as meningitis, something most antibiotics can't.

4. Phages are also non-toxic while many antibiotics are.

5. Antibiotics can be patented, bacteriophage which are "living" organisms can't.

Sandman:
Thank you for your responses. I guess my idea was ASM (OCC: Alien Space Mole) then.

CEO_Orwell:
Not necessarily ASM in my opinion. Just very difficult and unlikely. But I'll try anyway. Here is my mini timeline:

Adam Smith hates your guts

The POD is that Fanya Kaplan is not toppled and successfully shoots Bogdanov instead of Stalin on 30 August 1918. There is a leadership crisis, and the Soviets do worse in the Class War. Feeling threatened after their leaders violent death, even more so than OTL, the new leadership reinstates the death penalty. The Cheka runs amok and the general atmosphere becomes grimmer and grimmer.
The NEP crisis is not solved peacefully the by a moderator respected by almost all sides (Bogdanov in OTL). Instead we get a bloody power struggles and purges of "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" elements in party. In the end the Soviet Union is ruled by a Leninist Troika of Zinoviev, Kruspkaya and Molotov.

Trofim Lysenko, born to a peasant family in 1927, at 29 years of age, works at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan, he embarks on the research that leads to his 1928 paper on vernalization, which draws wide attention due to its practical consequences for Soviet agriculture. Severe cold and lack of winter snow destroyed many early winter-wheat seedlings. By treating wheat seeds with moisture as well as cold, Lysenko induces them to bear a crop when planted in spring. Lysenko still makes his false claims that a vernalized state can be inherited - i.e., that the offspring of a vernalized plant will behave as if they themselves had also been vernalized and will not require vernalization in order to flower quickly.

Lysenko becomes enormously successful in the ATL Soviet Union because of his peasant background and his enthusiastic advocacy of the Soviet Union and Leninism During a period which sees a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he is extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announces plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko has immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed.

So quickly does he develop his prescriptions - from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes - that academic biologists do not have the time to demonstrate that one technique is valueless or harmful before a new one is adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers applaud Lysenko's "practical" efforts and question the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" has a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urge the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko takes his revenge on the scientific establishment once the becomes a People's Commissar. He throws his Mendelian opponents in Nazi style concentration and working camps and destroys the genetic scientific community of the Soviet Union for years to come.

At the same time in South America Picado Twight publishes his manuscripts, in which he explains his experiences with the inhibiting action of fungi of the "Penicillin sp" genre in the growth of staphylococci and streptococci (bacteria that cause a series of infections) between 1915 and 1927. Not merely satisfied with publishing his results Picado becomes more pro-active. He contacts the US company Pfizer.


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Picado Twight

World War I caused a shortage of calcium citrate that Pfizer imported from Italy for the manufacture of citric acid. The company began a search for an alternative supply and Pfizer chemists learned of a fungus that ferments sugar to citric acid and were able to commercialize production of citric acid from this source in 1919. As a result Pfizer developed expertise in fermentation technology. With their know how Picado's penicillin can be mass produced and revolutionizes medicine.
Meanwhile D'Herelle refuses accepts the request by the British government in 1927 to work in India since his friend Eliava who wanted him to participate in his new research laboratory met a tragic end. Eliava fell in love with a woman with whom the head of the Georgian secret police, Lavrenty Beria also fell in love. This sealed his fate. Eliava was executed and denounced as an enemy of the people during one of the Troika's purges (OCC: That is what really happened to Eliava.)
European and US pharmaceutical companies take up the production of their own phage medicine, and promise impossible effects. Without proper oversight and competition by D'Hergelle.

All of the companies suffer from production problems as results from commercial phage medicine are erratic. This is happens due to the attempt to mass-produce something that is barely understood, leading to damaged phages in the product, or to insufficient amounts thereof. There are also wrong diagnoses leading to the use of the wrong type of phages, which are specific in their choice of their "victims". Furthermore, many studies on the healing effects of phages are badly conducted. All this led to important parts of the scientific community turning against d'Herelle, who, known for his temper, has made not a few enemies.

Phage therapy encounters many obstacles that make it less useful than penicillin. The high bacterial strain specificity of phage therapy makes it necessary for clinics to make different cocktails for treatment of the same infection or disease because the bacterial components of such diseases may differ from region to region or even person to person. In addition, due to the specificity of individual phages, for a high chance of success, a mixture of phages is often applied. This means that 'banks' containing many different phages must be kept and regularly updated with new phages.
Further, bacteria can evolve different receptors either before or during treatment; this can prevent the phages from completely eradicating the bacteria. The need for banks of phages makes regulatory testing for safety harder and more expensive. Such a process makes it difficult for large-scale production of phage therapy. Additionally, patent issues (specifically on living organisms) complicate distribution for pharmaceutical companies wishing to have exclusive rights over their "invention", so no for-profit corporation invests capital in the widespread application of this technology especially not if they have penicillin and other similar antibiotics as an alternative.

Funding for phage therapy research and clinical trials is generally insufficient and difficult to obtain, since it is a lengthy and complex process to patent bacteriophage products if it is possible at all.
Scientists comment that 'the biggest hurdle is regulatory', whereas an official view is that individual phages would need proof individually because it would be too complicated to do as a combination, with many variables. Due to the specificity of phages, phage therapy would be most effective with a cocktail injection, which is generally rejected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
For phage therapy to be successful the FDA must change its regulatory stance on combination drug cocktails, which is most unlikely due to big pharmaceutic company lobbying against it. Public awareness and education about phage therapy is very limited. The negative public perception of viruses plays a role in the reluctance to embrace phage therapy as well.
In the end phage therapy remains a mostly forgotten niche in a world obsessed with antibiotics. Research is conducted by big Pharma Companies that control the nations of the word with their big budgets and lobbying. They prevent any regulation that would help the popularization of phage therapy. The Soviet Union collapses under the weight of corruption and the ethnic tensions stirred up by radical Russification.
Thus the last potential hope for a state sponsored phage therapy network dies. Capitalism rules supreme and the people in developing nations die from preventable disease.

Probably the most depressing timeline I've ever written :(.

(OCC: Sometimes OTL is most depressing indeed)
 
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A Soviet Polymath
(written in 1970)

Interviewer:
Very interesting. Now I want to ask you about another topic, Léon Theremin.

Kamo:
Ah, yes I wondered if you ask. You know most information concerning him and his work is classified?

Interviewer:
Oh, yes, but my reader would never forgive me if I didn't try to get something.

Kamo:
Fair enough. What do you want to know?

Interviewer:
When did you first met him?

Kamo:
That was when he gave a concert in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on the 7 January of 1931, great performance. Everybody was proud that he was the face of the Union in America. After the show was over there was an official after-party. Everybody important was there and wanted to congratulate him to his great work.
Things got a little crowded around him, and while he enjoys being in the spotlight, things got a little much even for him. So I decided to help him out a little. It only had been a week since I took over Dzerzhinsky's office people were reasonably careful around me. Nobody wanted to make a bad impression on the new director of the SS. I went to Leon and made clear that I wanted to have a little talk with him “under four eyes”.

Although I did my best to get rid of the questionable reputation the SS gained in the class war and the time of reconstruction afterwards, sometimes it had its advantages too. As soon as I made my intention known, everybody did his best to leave us alone. Politely but as fast as possible even the worst gossip vultures were abandoning the ship....
When I saw that Theremin became nervous and was looking over to his wife, I knew I might have gone a little too far. I assured him that I only wanted to help him get some breathing space. He relaxed and we began to talk about all kind of things. But there were two topics that might be the most interesting for you.
The first was, that he toyed with the idea of coming back to the Union. Guess he gotten a little homesick but the more important reason was his wife. You know, some people in the US don't look kindly at mixed race couples. Hell in some states it is still forbidden to have sex or getting married for them. I can understand too well why he wanted to come back. Raising your [colored] children in the US is, not a good prospect and now that his wife was pregnant....Well he didn't told me all of his concerns, not in our first meeting, but I got the picture anyway. Reading people is an important skill in my business.

But at this party, our little chat was nothing more than that. I didn't think much about it until I got a letter from him a year later. Apparently he was back, with his wife and their daughter. He wrote that he had a surprise for me. I was intrigued and phoned him. He told me to meet him in his new apartment and I did visit him there. Now things got interesting, he made hints that he solved the problem I mentioned back at the party.
I didn't remember what he meant but played along. He was very enthusiastically leading me to the kitchen were he put his “special invention” on the table.

It was hidden under a cloth. Leon had a mischievous smile, I should have been prepared, but honestly nobody would expect what happened next. He quickly grabbed under the cloth and pulled out a revolver.
I was shocked, him being a killer, that was so absurd. The next thing he did was to tell me to smile. He had to be a psychopath I thought.

Bang, Bang” I looked into right into the the revolver, heard the shots but nothing happened.

Leon laughed maniacally while I stood there confused. “Gotcha” he said after he calmed down. He gave me the revolver so that I could have a closer look. When I calmed down and examined it, I found that there was a small camera mounted under the shaft.
Back than it was a common complaint of everybody and their mother, that the police and SS were rather trigger happy. When we met after the concert, I happened to complain about it casually, told him that the only witness in such cases often were the gun and the corpse, both not were talkative. For whatever reason, Leon took this as a personal challenge and built built the first camera-revolver.


A masterpiece of out of the box thinking. I was sure that I found somebody who might bring a fresh air to our state security. When he than told that he would use the photos the camera made in his next concert as the background decoration, with the title “The Face of Justice”, I knew that this was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. (Interview with Kamo in 1949 for the Biography: Trust is good, Control is better, The Life of Comrade Kamo)

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Revolver camera: A Colt 38 carrying a small camera that automatically takes a picture when you pull the trigger. At the left: six pictures taken by the camera.

This story is only partially true. Theremin admitted that he never shot at Kamo and told him beforehand that his surprise was a modified gun. Although he didn't tell how exactly he modified it. But when Kamo made up the story and told his friend Theremin about it, the later found it fun and decided to keep the truth to himself. The only person he told that it was a hoax was his wife, because she got angry at him for recklessly endangering their family back then. While Williams loved her husband, she was as she put it raised to be “a honest girl” and when asked many years later told the real account of the events.
Born as Lev Sergeyevich Termen in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1896 into a family of French and German ancestry. He started to be interested in electricity at the age of 7, and by 13 he was experimenting with high frequency circuits. In the seventh class of his high school before an audience of students and parents he demonstrated various optical effects using electricity. By the age of 17 he was in his last year of high school and at home he had his own laboratory for experimenting with high frequency circuits, optics and magnetic fields. His cousin, Kirill Fedorovich Nesturkh, then a young physicist, and a singer named Wagz invited him to attend the defense of the dissertation of professor Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. Physics lecturer Vladimir Konstantinovich Lebedinskiy had explained to Theremin the then interesting dispute over Ioffe's work on the electron. On 1913 May 9 Theremin and his cousin attended Ioffe's dissertation defense.

Ioffe's subject was on the elementary photoelectric effect, the magnetic field of cathode rays and related investigations. In 1917 Theremin wrote that Ioffe talked of electrons, the photoelectric effect and magnetic fields as parts of an objective reality that surrounds us everyday, unlike others that talked more of somewhat abstract formula and symbols. Theremin wrote that he found this explanation revelatory and that it fit a scientific – not abstract – view of the world, different scales of magnitude, and matter. From then on Theremin endeavored to study the Microcosm, in the same way he had studied the Macrocosm with his hand-built telescope. Later, Kyrill introduced Theremin to Ioffe as a young experimenter and physicist, and future student of the university.

Theremin recalled that while still in his last year of school, he had built a million-volt Tesla coil and noticed a strong glow associated with his attempts to ionise the air. He then wished to further investigate the effects using university resources. A chance meeting with Abram Fedorovich Ioffe led to a recommendation to see Karl Karlovich Baumgart, who was in charge of the physics laboratory equipment. Karl then reserved a room and equipment for Theremin's experiments. Abram Fedorovich suggested Theremin also look at methods of creating gas fluorescence under different conditions and of examining the resulting light's spectra. However, during these investigations Theremin was called up for World War I military service.

Despite Theremin being only in his second academic year, the deanery of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy recommended him to go to the Nikolayevska Military Engineering School in Petrograd , which usually only accepted students in their fourth year. Theremin recalled Ioffe reassured him that the war would not last long and that military experience would be useful for scientific applications. Beginning his military service in 1916, Theremin finished the Military Engineering School in six months, progressed through the Graduate Electronic School for Officers, and attained the military radio-engineer diploma in the same year. In the course of the next three and a half years he oversaw the construction of a radio station in Saratov to connect the Volga area with Moscow, graduated from Petrograd University, became deputy leader of the new Military Radiotechnical Laboratory in Moscow, and finished as the broadcast supervisor of the radio transmitter at Detskoye Selo near Petrograd.

During the Russian civil war, in October 1919 White Army commander Nikolai Nikolayevich Yudenich advanced on Petrograd from the side of Detskoye Selo, apparently intending to capture the radio station to announce a victory over the Bolsheviks. Theremin and others evacuated the station, sending equipment east on rail cars. Theremin then detonated explosives to destroy the 120 meter-high antennae mast before traveling to Petrograd to set up an international listening station. There he also trained radio specialists but reported difficulties obtaining food and working with foreign experts who he described as narrow-minded pessimists. Theremin recalled that on an evening when his hopes of overcoming these obstructing experts reached a low ebb, Abram Fedorovich Ioffe telephoned him. Ioffe asked Theremin to come to his newly founded Physical Technical Institute in Petrograd, and the next day he invited him to start work at developing measuring methods for high frequency electrical oscillations.

The day after Ioffe's invitation, Theremin started at the institute. He worked in diverse fields: applying the Laue effect to the new field of X-ray analysis of crystals; using hypnosis to improve measurement-reading accuracy; working with Ivan Pavlov's laboratory; and using gas-filled lamps as measuring devices. He built a high frequency oscillator to measure the dielectric constant of gases with high precision; Ioffe then urged him to look for other applications using this method, and shortly made the first motion detector for use as a "radio watchman".

While adapting the dielectric device by adding circuitry to generate an audio tone, Theremin noticed the pitch changed when his hand moved around. In October 1920 he first demonstrated this to Ioffe who called in other professors and students to hear. Theremin recalled trying to find the notes for tunes he remembered from when he played the cello, such as the Swan by Saint-Saëns. By November 1920 Theremin had given his first public concert with the instrument, now modified with a horizontal volume antenna replacing the earlier foot-operated volume control. He named it the etherphone.

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Leo Theremin playing the etherphone

On May 24, 1924 Theremin married 20-year old Katia Pavlovna Konstantinova, and they lived together in his parents' apartment on Marat street.
During this time Theremin was also working on a wireless television with 16 scan lines in 1925, improving to 32 scan lines and then 64 using interlacing in 1926, and he demonstrated moving, if blurry, images on June 7, 1927.
After being sent on a lengthy tour of Europe starting 1927 – including London, Paris and towns in Germany – during which he demonstrated his invention to full audiences, Theremin found his way to the United States, arriving December 30, 1927 with his first wife Katia. He performed the etherphone with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. Theremin set up a laboratory in New York in the 1930s, where he developed the etherphone and experimented with other electronic musical instruments and other inventions. These included the Rhythmicon, commissioned by the American composer and theorist Henry Cowell.

In 1930, ten etherphonenist performed on stage at Carnegie Hall. Two years later, Theremin conducted the first-ever electronic orchestra, featuring the etherphone and other electronic instruments including a "fingerboard" etherphone which resembled a cello in use.
Theremin's mentors during this time were some of society's foremost scientists, composers, and musical theorists, including composer Joseph Schillinger and physicist (and amateur violinist) Albert Einstein. At this time, Theremin worked closely with fellow Russian émigré and etherphone virtuoso Clara Rockmore.

Theremin was interested in a role for the etherphone in dance music. He developed performance locations that could automatically react to dancer's movements with varied patterns of sound and light. After his wife Katia died in a car accident he started to work with the American Negro Ballet Company.
There he the inventor met and later married a young African-American prima ballerina, Lavinia Williams. His marriage to the dancer caused shock and disapproval in his social circles. But the ostracized couple remained together.

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Lavinia Williams

At a concert in Tchaikovsky Concert Hall the Soviet Union showcasing his new advances in the field of electronic music he met Kamo, Director of the SS. After the tour he and his wife decided to move to permanently move to the Soviet Union and taking job offers by the Moscow Conservatory and the Bolshoi Theater respectively. He explained his decision with the birth of their daughter. Theremin and Williams wanted her to grow up in nation were she was free to move, sit in the tram wherever she wanted and marry whomever she fell in love with, without fearing any kind of retaliation.
Both of them continued their respective artist careers. In 1936 they collaborated together on their magnum opus "Red Dawn" which was part of the opening ceremony of the Tatlin Tower. Besides his work in electronic music, Theremin also made contributions to the field of law enforcement, espionage and science. He invented the photocamera revolver, a technique for crowd control and some espionage equipment.
 
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Theremin's Inventions

The Anti Traction System

After the brilliant idea of the revolver camera Kamo approached Theremin with another pressing problem. How could he stop riots without resorting to harsh violence. Sometimes violent protesters, especially religiously motivated ones in the backwards peripheral regions couldn't be reasoned with. On the other hand using lethal force would just create martyr. A topic he and his revolutionary comrades had plenty of experience with. Letting them run amok wasn't a solution either, so what could he do?

Theremin got all the founding he wanted as long as he would find a solution. It took many years and some failures on the way but finally in 1938 he got the answer, Anti Traction Material.
Nicknamed the "Fizika komedio" (slapstick) units, special police units became a common sight wherever protests impended to become violent.
Those civilian law enforcement units could isolate facilities and stop confrontational crowds Anti-Traction Material is a nonhazardous chemical, highly slippery, viscous which inhibits the movement of individuals or vehicles on treated surfaces such as asphalt, concrete, grass and wood.
The obstacle it creates enables military or law enforcement personnel to stop or delay crowds and equipment, and isolate facilities such as embassies, loading docks, piers or other restricted areas.

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Picture of the first vehicle-mounted dispensing system in 1938. It provides wide-area coverage of the anti-traction material. The system fits in the cargo compartment of a all terrain vehicle and provides about 30,480 square meter of coverage.

The substance as explained in its name severely reduces surface friction and results in a loss of traction or control.The gel can be distributed over a wide area by a vehicle-mounted system or in and around buildings from a portable unit operated by an individual.
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Individual Dispenser System

Both systems are easy to use and quick to deploy. The portable system weighs about 25 kilograms when loaded and carries enough material to cover a 609.6-square-meter area. The vehicle-mounted system provides about 30,480 square meter of coverage about the size of two football fields. Theremin's team members selected the formulation based on its superior effectiveness in reducing friction, ability to sustain loads, safety, commercial availability and acceptable cost.
Water is used as the dispersing agent and as the catalyst that activates the material to achieve the desired characteristics. It works under a vehicle's tires at low to high speeds and under normal foot loads. In addition to horizontal surfaces, this substance can be sprayed on vertical surfaces such as walls, windows, doors and fences. The horizontal surfaces of buildings also can be sprayed to preclude the use of ladders or other scaling devices.
Once a foot or tire is coated with the substance, the anti-traction material is transferred to uncoated surfaces, making them slippery as well.
The anti-traction substance is effective at surface temperatures ranging from 255 to 324 Kelvin and lasts six to 12 hours. The material works equally well on smooth or rough surfaces.

Espionage Devices

Theremin also worked on classified technology for espionage and military purposes.

Buran device:
He created the Buran eavesdropping system. A precursor to the modern laser microphone. It worked by using a low power infrared beam from a distance to detect the sound vibrations in the glass windows.
The main type of laser microphone is a surveillance device that uses a laser beam to detect sound vibrations in a distant object. The object is typically inside a room where a conversation is taking place, and can be anything that can vibrate (for example, a picture on a wall) in response to the pressure waves created by noises present in the room. The object preferably has a smooth surface. The laser beam is directed into the room through a window, reflects off the object and returns to a receiver that converts the beam to an audio signal. The beam may also be bounced off the window itself. The minute differences in the distance traveled by the light as it reflects from the vibrating object are detected interferometrically. The interferometer converts the variations to intensity variations, and electronics are used to convert these variations to signals that can be converted back to sound.

seal bug:
The seal bug device was used by the Soviet Union to spy on the United States. The device was embedded in a carved wooden plaque of the Great Seal of the United States. On August 4, 1945, a delegation from the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union presented the bugged carving to U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman, as a "gesture of friendship" to the USS War ally. Against Japan. It hung in the ambassador's Moscow residential study until it was exposed in 1952 during the tenure of Ambassador George F. Kennan.

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The existence of the bug was accidentally discovered by a British radio operator who overheard American conversations on an open radio channel as the Soviets were beaming radio waves at the ambassador's office. The Department of State found the device in the Great Seal carving after an exhaustive search of the American Embassy, and Peter Wright, a British scientist and former MI5 counterintelligence officer, eventually discovered how it worked. Had the device never been discovered, it could easily have worked indefinitely. The membrane of the seal was extremely thin, and was damaged during handling by the Americans.
This incident was brought up in the McCarthy hearings as evidence of the Soviet hostility against the US.

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Blue Light of Peace

Comrade Theremin also recently started a campaign to convert standard lights to blue lights for their calming effect. Interestingly enough the new blue streetlights seem to work better than even he expected. They seem to be useful in preventing suicides and street crime, a finding that is encouraging an increasing number of state departments to install blue light-emitting apparatus at railway stations to prevent people from committing suicide by jumping in front of trains.
Although experts are split over the effectiveness of the blue lights, railway companies that already have installed the lighting say they have played a successful role in preventing suicides. But the positive effects seem to go even further. Blue streetlighting seem to improve the city's landscape as well. The number of crimes in areas illuminated in blue noticeably decreased. The Petrograd police department found the number of crimes decreased by about 9 percent in blue-illuminated neighborhoods. Many other areas nationwide are following suit.

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Prof. Seung Yi from the Gyeongseong University, who is tasked with researching the phenomenon remains rather skeptical: "There are a number of pieces of data to prove blue has a calming effect upon people. However, it's an unusual color for lighting, so people may just feel like avoiding standing out by committing crimes or suicide under such unusual illumination. It's a little risky to believe that the color of lighting can prevent anything."

Theremin's Etherphone

The etherphone was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist Léon Thereminin October 1920 after the outbreak of the Russian civil war. After positive reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Alexander Bogdanov.
Bogdanov was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned six hundred of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music.

The etherphone is almost unique among musical instruments in that it is played without physical contact. The musician stands in front of the instrument and moves his or her hands in the proximity of two metal antennas. The distance from one antenna determines frequency (pitch), and the distance from the other controls amplitude (volume). Most frequently, the right hand controls the pitch and the left controls the volume, although some performers reverse this arrangement. Some low-cost etherphones use a conventional, knob operated volume control and have only the pitch antenna. While commonly called antennas, they are not used for receiving or broadcasting radio frequency, but act as plates in a capacitor.

The etherphone uses the heterodyne principle to generate an audio signal. The instrument's pitch circuitry includes two radio frequency oscillators. One oscillator operates at a fixed frequency. The frequency of the other oscillator is controlled by the performer's distance from the pitch control antenna. The performer's hand acts as the grounded plate (the performer's body being the connection to ground) of a variable capacitor in an L-C (inductance-capacitance) circuit, which is part of the oscillator and determines its frequency. (Although the capacitance between the performer and the instrument is on the order of picofarads or even hundreds of femtofarads, the circuit design gives a useful frequency shift.) The difference between the frequencies of the two oscillators at each moment allows the creation of a difference tone in the audio frequency range, resulting in audio signals that are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.

To control volume, the performer's other hand acts as the grounded plate of another variable capacitor. In this case, the capacitor detunes another oscillator; that detuning is processed to change the attenuation in the amplifier circuit. The distance between the performer's hand and the volume control antenna determines the capacitance, which regulates the etherphone's volume. Modern circuit designs often simplify this circuit and avoid the complexity of two heterodyne oscillators by having a single pitch oscillator, akin to the original etherphone's volume circuit. This approach is usually less stable and cannot generate the low frequencies that a heterodyne oscillator can. Better designs may use two pairs of heterodyne oscillators, for both pitch and volume.

Easy to learn but difficult to master, etherphone performance presents two challenges: reliable control of the instrument's pitch with no guidance (no keys, valves, frets, or finger-board positions), and minimizing undesired portamento that is inherent in the instrument's continuously-variable-pitch design.
Pitch control is challenging because, like a violin or trombone, a etherphone can generate tones of any pitch throughout its entire range, including those that lie between the conventional notes. And, unlike most other instruments, the etherphone has no physical feedback (other than sound), like string tension or the tactile fingerboard for strings, or air column resistance in wind instruments.

The player has to rely solely on what is heard, and can only correct a pitch when its volume is not at zero. In the case of some string instruments, the range is divided along the strings by use of length divisions (e.g., frets on a guitar). By contrast, in the case of the etherphone, the entire range of pitches is controlled by the distance of the performer's hand or fingers from the pitch antenna in mid-air. Precise control of manual position coupled with an excellent sense of pitch is required, since the oscillator tuning tends to change slowly over time, resulting in changing positions for individual pitches.

Because some portamento is inevitable in etherphone performance and because only the most experienced performers can reduce it to an inconspicuous level, the etherphone repertoire of beginner/intermediate players is limited to compositions that were written to be performed legato, especially those for voice or continuously-variable-pitch instruments, and in which it is acceptable or even traditional to include some degree of portamento and glissando. Examples of works well suited for performance on the etherphone include Massenet's Thaïs-Méditation (originally for violin), Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, and Saint-Saëns' Le cygne (The Swan) (originally for violoncello).

Using rapid and exact hand movements, however, highly skilled players can reduce undesired portamento and glissando to a level enabling them to play individual notes and even achieve staccato effects. Small and rapid movements of the hands can create tremolo or vibrato effects. Although pitch is governed primarily by the distance of the performer's hand to the pitch antenna, most precision etherphonist augment their playing techniques with a system called "aerial fingering," largely devised by Clara Rockmore and subsequently adapted by Léon Theremin and his protege, Lydia Kavina. It employs specific hand and finger positions to alter slightly the amount of capacitance relative to the pitch antenna to produce small changes in tone quickly and in a manner that can be reliably and quickly reproduced.

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Lydia Kavina

An alternate and controversial "hands on" technique is called "angling." In this method the pitch control hand is actually set on the top of the etherphone, thus violating the "no touch" creed of traditionalists. The performer changes the angle of the hand and fingers to alter the pitch and repositions the hand if the pitch interval is too large for "angling." Touching the instrument damps the effect of extraneous movement on pitch. This permits the use of steady pitches without vibrato and without the performer's remaining perfectly still. An alternate to touching the instrument is to rest the elbow of the pitch arm on a tripod while standing, or the arm of a chair, or one's knees while seated in order to provide a steady reference point and pivot for the arm allowing for steady pitch play over the entire pitch range.

Equally important in etherphone articulation is the use of the volume control antenna. Unlike touched instruments, where simply halting play or damping a resonator silences the instrument, the etherphonist must "play the rests, as well as the notes," as Ms. Rockmore observed. Although volume technique is less developed than pitch technique, some etherphonist have worked to extend it, especially Pamelia Kurstin with her "walking bass" technique and Rupert Chappelle. Skilled players who overcome these challenges by a precisely controlled combination of movements can achieve complex and expressive performances, and thus realize a etherphone's potential. Some etherphonist in the avant-garde openly rebel against developing any formalized technique, viewing it as imposing traditional limitations on an instrument that is inherently free form. These players choose to develop their own highly personalized techniques. Other avant-garde players use strict form and techniques other than aerial fingering. The question of the relative value of formal technique versus free form performances were hotly debated among etherphonenist.
 
I'm sorry I've fallen so silent! These updates of yours have so much in them, the last time I started to reply it got long and I set it aside and never got back to it.

Here I'm just wondering, could the climax of the USS Red Dawn involve some rather joyous people with one articulating what the others come to realize in that moment, with overwhelming clarity...in the USS, "We live here!"

Vaguely thinking of something with elements of both Volga Volga (which I enjoyed watching) and Circus (my Soviet history teacher's favorite), particularly some fusion of their climaxes.

The latter seeming especially appropriate; I've included a hyperlink to the Wikipedia page on the OTL 1936 Soviet movie in case anyone following this thread has no idea what it's about. Wiki page contains spoilers of course; best to see the movie ASAP. It's a good movie.

Of course Volga Volga contains a half-second cameo of a Soviet-built airship and that won me over.:eek: Saying that doesn't spoil anything, revealing the context might. Let's just say the thing is extremely peripheral to the theme of the film, one of a series of examples building to a larger point. In a 10 or 15 second musical montage. (The dirigible was one that Umberto Nobile helped them design under contract for Aeroflot; I'm hoping ITTL there are more of more indigenous design; Tsiolovsky himself had a scheme for a metalclad OTL, maybe they get a refined version of that flying?)

Anyway back to TTL performances, I trust sooner or later we'll be told what Red Dawn ITTL was about? (Unless we have already and I've forgotten it...:eek:)

Presumably there are no allusions to small vicious mammals as role models worth emulating, no nihilistic declarations that war is in the nature of things because the two biggest guys on the block just naturally have to fight. Thought it could very plausibly be a Civil-War themed thing, I'm guessing it has a happy and optimistic, if perhaps bittersweet, ending.

And maybe there can be Cubans involved, though if there are in the 1930s era I suppose this play, opera, film, or whatever sort of performance it is was first presented, the American Red-haters will be around the bend livid.

I'm getting the impression that ITTL they are indeed shrill and turning purple, but they don't have entirely the traction they did OTL. There's going to be Americans who want to nuke Russia to purple glass, but others who really don't want it to come to that and rather appreciate the place, and the latter won't be as silenced and marginalized as OTL. Going to make the USA an especially schizophrenic place in the latter half of the 20th century, which I think is probably as it should be. Possibly no more violent than OTL, conceivably less so despite downright apocalyptic language from some quarters.
 
An alt-USA perspective on the different world of the USS

And just a bit of the reply to the older response to me I failed to complete, I guess the Depression War is much more of a fiasco for Hitler than OTL, if France never falls. Which explains how the USA and Britain (and France, unfallen) can win without it being far more crushing for them than OTL. OTL of course the Soviets accounted for roughly 2/3 of all the Nazi's losses, more in some sectors (tanks, for instance), about that in Wehrmacht casualties (and others, such as Waffen-SS and recruits from third nations, lost pretty much everyone on the Eastern Front) and about half the Luftwaffe's losses. So if Hitler did secure the European continent as OTL but never engaged USS forces, the Western Allies would have to sacrifice something like 3 times as much. But I guess if he doesn't even occupy France, then the odds are less overwhelming and the European war is shorter. Which raises the whole question of whether the Pacific war is even seen as the same war, except maybe by Soviets who see both as emanations of the contradictions of capitalism.

The Japanese would have to be lunatics to risk getting into a fight with the USS not in a fight for its life in Europe, but the consensus of other threads on the subject is that that's a fair description of the mentality of the militarist junta running the place in the 30s and early 40s.

So WWII from a British and American perspective would be about as epic as we perceive it OTL, but with more justification for the (American anyway) notion it was pretty much all our war; no Russians involved. Save to the extent they tie down German forces nervously wondering if they are going to finally move west, which you tell us they never actually do. Just east.

Considering how fleeting the appreciation of the OTL USSR as allies was in the USA, I guess not much is lost by their absence from the European war. I'm afraid any Soviet actions ITTL against Japan are going to be seen as opportunistic in the West, but again that's how they're seen OTL too. Maybe there will be some grudging appreciation in the West for whatever they do against Japan. On the whole, I'm cynical enough to expect that the more high-minded and judicious USS actions are in East Asia, the more nefarious it will seem in America.

But if the USS remains so much more peaceful than OTL, that has to have its positives in at least some circles in America too.

As I said above, I'm picturing a major cultural dissonant split in the 50s and 60s and later in the USA. But that's a lot like OTL too, except that OTL I don't think the Soviet Union had positive friends the way I expect the USS will; on the New Left/Beatnik/Hippie side of things, the actually existing USS rather than hopes for "take two and hope we don't screw it up" will be the focus of admiration. But still I think Americans will want to do things differently, just to be different.

After all as a Space Hippie raised as a rather conservative American, I see the left side of the split of the 60s as being a cumulation of American idealism rather than a repudiation of it. But then I also see Marxism as an evolution and advancement of Western liberalism in general rather than its antithesis--well, a "synthesis" to use a crude version of dialectics!:p
 

1. What is Red Dawn about?
It is a electro ballet about the "enemy" (Nazis essentially but they are never named), who invaded the Soviet Union and a group of young pioneers that escaped thanks to their survival skills. They have to witness the horrors of the occupation, and try more or less successfully to form a resistance movement.

2. Movie suggestions
Thank you, at some point I will make a post about the soviet cinema in the twenties and thirties in general.

3. Aircraft and Airship
I will write about them but it might take a while, I have quiet a mountain of other ideas to work trough.

4. Japans involvement in the war
Yeah, everything I read about the Japanese leadership post China invasion indicates that they were hell bent on conquest, abondoning all rationality so this won't change ITL

5. Perception of WWII
Indeed from a the British and American perspective this was a glourious black and white struggle, without the nasty gray from Stalin. The only bad aftertaste is the fact that China and Korea are deep red after the war. And yes, from an outside perspective, it looks as if the Soviets waited for everybody to get exhausted just to get the spoils of war, turning China into an red Allie and gobbeling up Korea. Not a totally unjustified view, but a very narrow one.

6. Cultural Split in the US
We will see less of a united front against socialism, than we had against cvommunism in OTL because the USS is indeed very much intrested in peaceful coexistance especially in the post war years. This is mainly due to a policy of Union First, a combination of "Socialism in One Country" and "American Isolationism".

This timeline is amazing and should be bumped.
Thank you, although the timing of the bump was rather unfortunate ;).
 
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Will Head-Transplantation become a new front in the cultural war? (I)
(1971)

Introduction

Our nation is divided by increasingly hostile partisanship, it is time for us to once again relearn how to agree to disagree in a civil manner. This column shall be my humble contribution for a united America. Every week I take a topic that is controversial and explain the reasoning behind the different positions the groups involved take. Hopefully people will see that their opponents have real concerns and can be as patriotic as themselves. There are many different vision for America, but they are our visions.

This week I want to talk about Robert Joseph White. He is leaving the US and has been granted the soviet citizenship. He publicly stated that the US “lacked academic freedom” and that scientific progress was hindered by “narrow minded people in Congress and other national offices”. White gained some notoriety in conservative circles, when he started to work with the (in-)famous soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov. The modern “Frankenstein” as he is called in the press, became the symbol of all that is perceived wrong with “science gone mad”. When people talk about White they mostly do so to rehash their argument for and against Gamper and the by our standards unusual medical practices of the Soviet Union like head transplantation or applied eugenics. Therefore I will explain the view of the pro-science side of the argument as well as the pro-life perspective.

The history of head transplantation technology

“[FONT=TimesNewRomanPSMT, serif]The chemical or physical inventor is always a [/FONT][FONT=TimesNewRomanPSMT, serif]Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural."[/FONT]
[FONT=TimesNewRomanPSMT, serif]J.B.S. Haldane [/FONT]Daedalus, or, Science and the Future[FONT=TimesNewRomanPSMT, serif] 1923[/FONT]

Often people misinterpret the motivation behind the cosmist philosophy and movement, that is besides Marxism, the ideological (and spiritual) foundation of the Soviet Union. Some people falsely claim that cosmists would do everything to reach a state immortality, even sacrificing ethics and humanity on the way. But the reason cosmists want everybody to life is because they regard human life as absolutely precious. For them it is self evident, that the one common cause of all humanity is to preserve human life. If one starts to sacrifice ones own humanity by sacrificing one's fellow human the whole effort would lose its meaning.

But how people asked can you then allow abortion happening, how can you justify Gamper? These are indeed complicated questions that in the end boil down to what one defines as human. To understand cosmist thinking I recommend reading about cryopreservation. I wrote an article about this topic in this column named “Cryopreservation: Waking up in a better tomorrow?”. The important thing to take from it for this discussion is that the Nikolai Fyodorov Institute of Immortality Research initiated a policy of cryonically preserving the heads of Soviet Citizen (by basically freezing them) so later generations with better medical technology can revive them.

There are obviously two major obstacles to overcome. The first is to revive them, but the second is finding a way of reattaching them to new bodies. Shortly after this new policy started two rival factions, both competing for the institute's money emerged promising to solve the second problem. The first and more important faction for this article are the senmorteco kirurgoj (immortality surgeons). They sought to find a solution via surgery as the name indicates. Since the American surgeon Charles Claude Gurthrie already grafted the head of a small mixed-breed dog onto the neck of a larger one whose own head remained intact in 1908, this was seen a viable option. The other faction are the senmorteco inĝeniero (immortality engineers). Their idea was and is to build a new artificial body from the scratch. Interestingly even if they were and are often fiercely debating both the surgeons as well as the engineer often work more together than not, combing their knowledge and research to achieve results. Nevertheless people insisted to frame the whole subject as some sort of grand competition.

At first the senmorteco kirurgoj had a head start. One small but crucial problem with transplantations, the fact that surgical stitches, or sutures, leaked was already solved. Before this breakthrough removing an organ from a body was easier than reattaching it to another, since severed blood vessels would need to be reattached in a leak proof manner. The problem of leaking sutures was solved by the French-American surgeon Alexis Carrel in early nineteen hundred. After observing the work of a lace maker, Carrel developed a new suturing procedure in which the everted ends of the blood vessels were sewn together on their outsides. This method created tight leak-proof connections with no thread in the interior of the vessel (reducing the possibility of clot formation). The technical means of transplantation now appeared possible. In 1905 Carell and Gurthie used the new suturing technique to transplant a heart from a small dog into the neck of a larger dog. Despite their initial success these experiments revealed yet another barrier to successful transplants. Carrel noticed that when kidneys were transplanted withing one-and-the same animal (an autograft) both the kidney and the animal had a better chance of survival then when the kidney was transplanted into another animal (an allograft). Carrel had rediscovered a phenomenon reported in tissue grafts by the Italian surgeon Guiseppe Baronio in 1800, the atrophy of the transplanted organ more commonly referred to as "rejection". This didn't stop their research. Carrel got a Noble Prize for their work in 1912. Guthrie was left out, allegedly because of his head transplantation experiment.

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Charles Gurthie

An exceptional case, the prevalent attitude until the nineteen fiftieths that saw the rise of modern bio-ethics and related government oversight commissions around the world, was that of a high minded paternalism, which is still dominant in the Soviet Union. Researcher as Professor and Harvard's Surgeon in Chief, Francis D. Moore put it believed in the "essentially ethical nature of the scientific process" itself. This meant that although subjects of research were "given a clear picture of the hazards involved and allowed to join in the discussion" nonetheless "the final decision would not be left in the hands of the patient who has not the education, the background nor dispassionate view necessary to make the decision in his own best self interest." In the end only the virtuous character of the researcher can act as a guarantor of the integrity of the research process. Moore has to accept that he has to submit his research to ethical review committee but much like Dr. White he feels restraint and comments on this quiet publicly. In his worldview "The ethical acceptability of therapeutic innovation documented in a research application is far better attested by the nature of the scientific consultants working on the project, than by the nature of hospital panels that review cases."

One of reasons for the rise of ethic commissions in the west was the soviet pioneer Dr. Yuri Voronoy. He became interested in transplantaion surgery in the 1920s, when he was a graduate student of Professor Chernyakhovsky and participated in his experiments on the kidney transplant. Under his guidance Voronoy mastered the modern methods of complex operations. On May 28, 1930 in Kharkov, the All-Union Congress of Physiologists he made the first demonstration of a kidney transplant in a dog's neck in the Soviet Union.
His next step was to perform the world's first transplantation of cadaveric kidney in humans in 1933. Unfortunately the kidney failed after a few hours of working and the patient died. This didn't discourage neither him nor his colleagues around the world. One advantage Voronoy had was that there were more than enough dead donor bodies ready. A law passed in 1924 made it a mandatory honor for every citizen of the Soviet Union to donate their dead bodies to the scientific pursuit and medical research. Since authographts were the only cases of successful organ transplantation to date, Voronoy was optimistic that kidney transplant between identical twins might work and demonstrate the practical viability of transplantation medicine. Indeed in 1935 he carried out exactly such an experiment.

The controversy that emerged outside the USS, which as Voronoy admitted he himself went through, was about the appropriateness of the removal of a healthy organ from one of the twins. So far cadavers had been the standard source for organs used in transplants. Since the norms of governing cadaver organ usage had been worked out over a hundred years earlier, the source of these organs was well established However no moral consensus existed for living donors. Dr. Voronoy's action was unprecedented and precipitated a controversy that, had nothing to do with the integrity of surgeons or of their science but with larger questions. The controversy was twofold. Was it permissible for medical professionals to remove organs from a healthy person and was it acceptable for society as a whole to allow people to give their organs away while they are alive. Both questions raised profound issues. The deepest tenets of Western medicine the Hippocratic Oath was touched, which states the goal of all doctors is to heal and not harm the their patients. In this case in order to heal one sick patient another healthy one had to be harmed. This event is often cited as a major milestone in the movement for National Ethical Oversight for any new medical procedures or researches in many countries around the world.

In the end it was obvious that that few patients reaching with endstage kidney failure were fortunate enough to have an identical twin able and willing to provide a kidney, even less likely was it to find twins to agree to a head transplant surgery. The question was - could rejection be prevented when the graft was taken from a less closely related individual? To find the answer for that question it was necessary to understand the cause behind “rejections”. Voronoy who was interested in antibodies since the 1929 began studying immunity in transplantation of organs and tissues in animal experiments.

After years of research he formulated his theory in 1939 that organ rejection was an immune system response. Voronoy suggested that recipient's immune systems produced antigens in an attempt
to fight off the new organs, treating them as if it were an invader, sending in defensive "troops" in the form of lymphocytes and antibodies. Lymphocytes circulate through the blood infiltrating the organ, and wreaking havoc. The antibodies serve as a second line of offense, targeting the blood vessels. Voronoy hypothesized that, if the invasion metaphor was apt, drugs that forestalled or overpowered the immune system could prevent or delay rejection. In 1940 he began experimenting with cortison an immunosupressive drug that had been independently discovered by several research groups in the 1935–1940 which gave the substance different names. One of these names was „compound F“ by Oskar Wintersteiner, but it was also known as „compound Fa“ by Tadeus Reichstein and as „compound E“ by Edward Calvin Kendall. This approach looked promising, but the real major breakthrough came with the discovery of cyclosporin.

The immunosuppressive effect of cyclosporin was discovered on 6 February 1942 by Albert Hofmann an employee of the Swiss company Sandoz. Initially cyclosporin was isolated from the fungus Tolypocladium inflatum from a soil sample obtained by Sandoz scientists at Hardangervidda, in Norway in 1939. Hoffman was part of a program to purify and synthesize active constituents of fungi and plants for use as pharmaceuticals. The new drug proved to be so effective as a immunosuppressive that it is still the most wildly used drug today, even trough other drugs with similar effects have been found and synthesized. Cyclosporin opened the doors to a new era of transplantation surgery, although the war in Europe and Asia prevented many nations from investing in the new field. The exception was the USS that was so far mostly undisturbed by the war, expect for a short border skirmish with the Japanese in Mongolia. Consequently soviet surgeons, especially the senmorteco kirurgoj made use of the new wonder drug.

Now the kirurgoj were getting way ahead of their inĝeniero counterparts. So far the inĝeniero hadn't done badly. Sergei Bryukhonenko and his colleagues made major advances in the nineteen thirties, but then stagnated relatively. Bryukhonenko build a primitive heart-lung machine, the autojektor in 1934. The autojektor composed of a pair of diaphragm linear pumps and an oxygen bubble chamber. It could supply a canine head with oxygenated blood. The isolated head was able to show responses to external stimuli. The device had a fascinating resemblance to the invention of the fictional Professor Douelya in the soviet novel “Professor Douelya's head” by Alexander Belyayev which was published already in 1926, several years before Bryukhonenko's first successful experiments. Finally he brought a dog to clinical death (depicted mostly via a graphical plot of lung and heart activity) by draining all blood from it, left for ten minutes, then connected to the heart-lung machine described earlier. After several minutes, the heart fibrillates, then restarts a normal rhythm. Respiration likewise resumes. Those early experiments weren't perfect of course, the head survived only for approximately ten minutes and the revived to showed signs of brain damage. But the first steps in the right direction were done.

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Sergei Bryukhonenko

Now however after the invention of cyclosporin Dr. Demikhov a member of the senmorteco kirurgoj became the center of attention again. He repeated Guthrie's experiments but this time with the assistance of cyclosporin. And indeed the drug worked as well on dogs as on humans. Cerberus the two headed dog became an instant star in the Soviet Union, a beloved mascot of scientific progress and a still available plush toy, much like the “Cosmonaut Dog” Laika. However there was an obvious problem, with head transplantations, that was not existent with any other transplant. A healthy, living complete donor body was needed, which meant at present the only possible donors were brain dead patients kept alive by machines.

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Dr. Demikhov with Cerberus

This was the case for the first human head transplantation in 1959. The founding father of the Soviet Union Alexander Bogdanov was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in its late stadium, a terminal and painful disease. Under other circumstances Bogdanov stated that he would simply request assisted suicide, a medical cause he championed long before he came to power. However instead of simply dieing, he proffered to be the first volunteer for a head transplantation surgery. This meant that not only was he able to be a positive example, he could break any possible taboo against such a procedure before it could arise and make sure that the project would be as well founded as humanly possible.

Demikhov pioneered many surgical techniques including extracorporeal hypothermic perfusion where brains are chilled to 10 degrees Celsius to allow blood flow to be interrupted for up to an hour. It took a team of thirty doctors, nurses and technicians, and chalk marks on the floor to choreograph the procedure beforehand. After a Bogdanov eventually survived the 18 hour operation, a cheer went up he smiled looking at the surgeons. Bogdanov was left paralyzed from the neck down. There was no chance of knitting together the sectioned spinal cords and so it was mostly a technical exercise in swapping over blood supplies and sewing muscles. The procedure involved cutting through the neck at the fourth vertebra, dissecting out blood vessels and exposing the spinal cord. Metal plates would be used to mate the two halves. First the carotids and jugulars would be connected, then if all went well, the vertebral arteries. As a fall back, Demikhov had his brain cooling equipment to buy extra time during the switching of blood supplies. His main concern was not the operation itself but handling possible tissue-rejection afterwards.

Bogdanov died three weeks later, but as he said in his last interview with a Pravda journalist, with the comforting knowledge that he would wake up one day. One very acute problem that remains is that the spina cord is severed, leaving the patient as a quadriplegic. This didn't sound to bad, especially not back than when people vividly remembered negative pressure ventilator, often referred to colloquially as iron lung. This is a form of medical ventilator that enables a person to breathe when normal muscle control has been lost or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. In 1959, there were still 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States. The choice was and is between certain death, or a few more years as a quadriplegic with the hope that new technology will improve ones life. Since assisted suicide is always a viable option in the USS, there are a small amount of people every year who decides to undergo the procedure and try their luck.

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Iron Lung

A disease such as cancer (non-brain) which afflicts an area of the body such as the lung or bladder, as well as other diseases such as diabetes which affects the pancreas and heart disease, can be cured through the transplantation of the head. People with genetic diseases such as muscle dystrophies whose bodies lose more and more functions over time, eventually leading to death, benefit greatly from this procedure. These diseases all affect the body but not the head.

Should the technology to repair the damage to the spinal cord be developed, the possibilities of what a head transplant could accomplish would become endless. Heads could be transplanted, on new healthier, younger bodies allowing potentially to double the human life spans. Of course, the issue of immune rejection would still need to be addressed. Ethical concerns might well persist even if function could be completely restored to the patient: a brain-dead person with a healthy body, suitable for head transplantation, would be in even greater demand as an organ donor. If this and the dream of mass reviving their frozen ancestors shall be realized, suitable donor bodies had to be found. Some members of the Fyodorov Institute were even swinging back into the direction of the senmorteco inĝeniero. The man who would find a solution for this conundrum came from a very different field neither an engineer nor a surgeon.

Notes:
One year later after the author written his column there will be a hilarious Blaxploitation film in ITL (and OTL): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWHNA_j7h5A
 
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Woaaah... What a ride! Just finished reading your TL so far and I feel you deserve the title of Soviet-wanker in chief! There have been many Soviet Unions in alt-history larger than yours but none of them was so thoughtfully justified as an actual pleasant place to live (even if a little "alien", but it's in the title).
Just a couple points worth exploring:

- we have here the Bolsheviks managing to integrate the Finns and the Baltics in the USS but what about the Polish border? Is it OTL one or were the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SS's luckier (or unluckier)? I don't remember you writing about Polish-Soviet conflicts so the line between the two nations could be radically different from OTL;

- in the first chapter about Theremin you mentioned him inventing the "revolver gun". Isn't he, like, a century late? Did you mean the videocamera-equipped pistols?;

- with Theremin bringing her wife to the Soviet Union, is Williams going to be assimilated in the proletkult landscape or is she going to influence it? Being the companion of a national icon could certainly help her career chances, up to the point of the Commissariat for Enlightenment being interested in her artistic opinions and projects;

- speaking of "coloured" people, is there going to be a relevant flux of immigration into the USS/socialist countries (well, except Maoist China)? The International Socialists may be interested in spreading Marxism-Bogdanovism to other continents, but do the people living there see the Soviet Union as a hope for a better future, worth of leaving their homelands?

Thanks in advance for your possible answers and congratulations again for your TL (which I hope to see updated soon)!
 
Woaaah... What a ride! Just finished reading your TL so far and I feel you deserve the title of Soviet-wanker in chief! There have been many Soviet Unions in alt-history larger than yours but none of them was so thoughtfully justified as an actual pleasant place to live (even if a little "alien", but it's in the title).
Thank you. Yes making a pleasant, yet alien Soviet Union is indeed the "mission statement” for this timeline. I wanted show that it is possible for the Soviet Union to win the Cold War, not by outspending the USA (won't happen) but by making the Soviet Union a much more "happier" place (at least by my own standards).
we have here the Bolsheviks managing to integrate the Finns and the Baltics in the USS but what about the Polish border? Is it OTL one or were the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SS's luckier (or unluckier)? I don't remember you writing about Polish-Soviet conflicts so the line between the two nations could be radically different from OTL;
The Soviet Polish War ended in more or less the OTL borders, I just need to figure out how this happened. Military stuff is not a strength of mine, so this will be delayed until I start research for WW2.
In the first chapter about Theremin you mentioned him inventing the "revolver gun". Isn't he, like, a century late? Did you mean the videocamera-equipped pistols?;
Hi, yes Theremin invented a photocamera revolver, which takes pictures every time the trigger is used. This revolver obviously really existed but nobody knows who build it, it was found in an American archive.
with Theremin bringing her wife to the Soviet Union, is Williams going to be assimilated in the proletkult landscape or is she going to influence it? Being the companion of a national icon could certainly help her career chances, up to the point of the Commissariat for Enlightenment being interested in her artistic opinions and projects;
Yes Williams will have a healthy career as hinted in the above posts.
speaking of "coloured" people, is there going to be a relevant flux of immigration into the USS/socialist countries (well, except Maoist China)? The International Socialists may be interested in spreading Marxism-Bogdanovism to other continents, but do the people living there see the Soviet Union as a hope for a better future, worth of leaving their homelands?
There will be an influx of colored people but mostly those that can afford it. Getting into the Soviet Union is not exactly easy especially before we enter our stage of modern globalization and mass transport infrastructure.
Oh, and Bogdanov is going to prevent the use of the term Marxism- Bogdanovism, at least by his allies, way to much personality cult. ITL his vision is called Tectological Socialism. Mao on the other hand has no such qualms.
 
The sound of Music
A brief history radio technology in America
(1954)

It was just a tiny portable music delivery system, but what an impact it had. This electronic device in the size of a lunch box that you could carry around wherever you wanted to go. When equipped with a nine-volt battery it would supply you with hours of music as long you were within range of any radio station and if you couldn't buy new battery there was always the hand crank variety. Especially the personal mobile receivers left a special impact on me. They meant I had control over the listening experience, unlike the car radio, or the one on the kitchen counter, my little radio played whatever I wanted to hear, it was my window into the word. Roughly 27 years have passed but we are still are in aw of the invention of the transistor radio. However time has not stood not completely still. Technology is moving at a breathtaking speed. Todays youth lives in a world were shirt radios are ubiquitous. Some people even use their radios while exercising, using earbuds to listen to their favorite music channels.


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Those who cry wolf about the evil lure of Negro music and “socialist” radio hosts however seem to be stuck in the red scarce of President Wilson and contemporaries. In fact since the beginnings of McCarthys witch hunts things are getting worse again. But this is the topic for another article. Here I want to explore the technological past, to see were all the new wondrous inventions might lead us. The first transistor radio was as revolutionary as today's shirt radio maybe even more so. The transistor or Losev radio, was invented in the USS in 1927 as a substitute for the bulky vacuum tube radios. Transistorized circuitry reduced the the size of the appliance in all kinds of machines, but for the average Joe like me and you, it was the transistor radio that changed everything. By the mid thirties, the electronics industry had flooded the market with a variety of models for comparatively ridiculously cheap prices since all Soviet inventions are patent and therefore license free.

From Vacuum Tubes to Transistors

The earliest radio stations were simply radiotelegraphy systems and did not carry audio. The first claimed audio transmission that could be termed a broadcast occurred on Christmas Eve in 1906, and was made by Reginald Fessenden. While many early experimenters attempted to create systems similar to radiotelephone devices by which only two parties were meant to communicate, there were others who intended to transmit to larger audiences. Charles Herrold started broadcasting in California in 1909 and was carrying audio by the next year. (Herrold's station eventually became KCBS). For the next decade, radio tinkerers had to build their own radio receivers. In 1916, Frank Conrad, an employee for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, began broadcasting from his garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Later, the station was moved to the top of the Westinghouse factory building in East Pittsburgh. Westinghouse relaunched the station as KDKA on November 2, 1920, claiming to be "the world's first commercially licensed radio station".
But it was the triode that made practical radio broadcasts a reality. Prior to the introduction of the Audion (an electronic amplifying vacuum tube invented by Lee de Forest), radio receivers had used a variety of detectors including coherers, hot wire barretter, and crystal detectors. The most popular crystal detector consisted of a small piece of galena crystal probed by a fine wire commonly referred to as a "cat's-whisker detector". They were very unreliable, requiring frequent adjustment of the cat's whisker and offered no amplification. Such systems usually required the user to listen to the signal though headphones, sometimes at very low volume, as the only energy available to operate the headphones was that picked up by the antenna. For long distance communication huge antennas were normally required, and enormous amounts of electrical power had to be fed into the transmitter.

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The Audion was a considerable improvement on this, but the original devices could not provide any subsequent amplification to what was produced in the signal detection process. The later version of vacuum tube, the so called triodes, developed by de Forest himself allowed the signal to be amplified to any desired level, typically by feeding the amplified output of from triode into the grid of the next, eventually providing more than enough power to drive a full-sized speaker. Apart from this, they were able to amplify the incoming radio signals prior to the detection process, making it work much more efficiently. The triode was albeit soon replaced by the afro-mentioned transistors. Transistors are a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. . They could fulfill the same function as de Forest's tubes but were much smaller, needed less energy to operate, didn't need time to warm up and were more robust. The fact that they could be made in simple condition and therefore cheaper helped a lot too, especially since the Great Depression destroyed much of the US consumers purchasing power.

Recording and Magnetic Tapes

Much of the following music history was a battle royal between Artists, Radio Stations and the Record Industry. During the 1920s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) began mass-producing commercial radios. KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pa. becomes the first commercial radio station to receive call letters and begins regular broadcasts by announcing the returns of the presidential election. Though sound quality and reception on the radio could not rival the quality of record discs at this time, the record companies rushed to draw up contracts to forbid major artists from working in the rival medium. These efforts to limit the output of radio were thwarted and as improvements in radio technology rapidly refined sound quality and reception record sales plummet as a result.

This forced the record industry to find another solution to combat decreasing record sales. They began to increase the sound fidelity of their recordings. In 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories introduces electrical amplification, and the first electrically recorded discs go on sale. The development of orthophonic sound added more than an octave to either side of the existing reproducible sound range. New machines that reproduce these high fidelity recordings and deliver a fully electronic playback were sold on the marked and record sales rebounded. The line between the competitors was somewhat blurred in 1928 when the RCA bought the Victor Talking Machine Company, forming RCA Victor. The record factories that were not converted into radio production houses began producing transcription vitrolac discs. Vitrolac was the precursor to vinyl. These disks that rotated at 33 1/3 rpm and were used to per-record radio. Vitrolac was largely ignored by commercial record companies as the Great Crash of 1929 transformed leisure items like many electronics into luxury goods. Record producers such like "Thomas Edison's cylinders and discs" ceased production entirely. Conglomerates bought up smaller failing independents. Mass production made possible it possible to reduced the price of LPs of all kinds and saved the industry from total collapse or at least a mere niche existence.

Pre-recorded music intended for broadcasting was handled the same way for radio stations as for standard consumer. Pressings were created from a master recording. This master was cut into a blank wax. This was electroplated to produce a metal stamper from which a number of identical discs were pressed in shellac or vinyl in a record press. Although the earliest transcription discs were pressed in shellac, in the mid-1930s quieter vinyl compounds were substituted. These discs were used to distribute syndicated programming to individual radio stations. Their use for this purpose persisted long after the advent of magnetic tape recording because it was cheaper to cut and plate a master disc and press 100 identical high-quality discs than to make 100 equally high-quality tape dubs.

Tape found its way into the American radio world due to the entertainer Bing Crospy, who helped the rise of tape recording in his time as host of the “Kraft Music Hall”. The then called “Kraft Program” debuted on June 26, 1933 as a musical-variety program featuring orchestra leader Paul Whiteman and served to supplement print advertising and in-store displays promoting Kraft products. During its first year the show went through a series of name changes, including Kraft Musical Revue, until it finally settled on Kraft Music Hall in 1934. Paul Whiteman remained the host until December 6, 1935. Billed as "The King of Jazz", Paul Whiteman was arguably America’s first popular music superstar. Whiteman’s foresight regarding the coming of the jazz age and his decisions to hire the best jazz musicians was a powerful boost for jazz, swing and blues. Though he was prohibited from hiring black performers, he hired arrangers and composers. Bing Crosby took over as master of ceremonies January 2, 1936 and stayed the shows host until May 9, 1946. Crosby was the longest-running “Kraft Music Hall” host with ten years. His casual style and humorous easy-going banter made the show tops with the young "country club" set. The average listener was 21 during this period, compared to the average age of 11 at the movie houses. Intelligent humor and delightful guests made these years some of the greatest. On the show, Bing rubbed elbows with the likes of Spike Jones, Lucille Ball, The Andrews Sisters, Nat “King” Cole and Peggy Lee. It was during these years on the Kraft Music Hall that Bob Burns popularized his famous “bazooka” instrument (made from a pipe and a funnel), coining the term which was later used by soldiers referring to the 2.75” recoilless rifle anti-tank weapon, the bazooka.

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Joe Sinnott's caricature of the Kraft Music Hall (l to r): Orchestra leader John Scott Trotter, Marilyn Maxwell, Bing Crosby and announcer Ken Carpenter.

Bing Crospy also possessed a remarkable foresight when it came to new technologies. When he learned about the Magnetophon from a radio technician who had recently visited relatives in Germany he was instantly interested. The Magnetophon was the brand name of the pioneering reel-to-reel tape recorder developed by engineers of the German electronics company AEG in cooperation with the chemical company BASF. In the 1930s, based on the magnetic tape invention by Fritz Pfleumer, AEG and BASF created the world's first practical tape recorder, the K1, first demonstrated in Germany in 1935 at the Berlin Radio Show. The Magnetophon tape recorder was one of the first recording machines to use magnetic tape in preserving voice and music. The tape used was iron oxide of the Fe2O3 type. The playtime of one tape was 20 minutes. The first four presentation models of K1 were burned in the exhibition hall caused by an unrelated accident.

The K1 still had some problems with some minor distortions and noise on the recording However AEG was able to solve the problem for the 1936 Olympic Games, so that they could market their new product, the now commercially available K2 Magnetophon for the international audience, showcasing the supremacy of German engineering. The basis for the drastic improvement was a patent for AC bias which was filed by W. L. Carlson and Glenn L. Carpenter in 1921. Until 1935 the value of AC bias was somewhat masked by the primitive state of other aspects of magnetic recording, once general technology caught up and Carlson and Carpenter's achievement allowed the breakthrough of tape recording. Live music was the standard for American radio at the time and the major radio networks didn't permit the use of disc recording in many programs because of their comparatively poor sound quality. Crosby disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts 39 weeks a year, preferring the recording studio's relaxed atmosphere and ability to retain the best parts of a performance. He had asked NBC to let him pre-record his 1937 series on tape.

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Magnetophon K2

The German tape recorder came along at precisely the right moment. Crosby realized that the new technology would enable him to pre-record his radio show with a sound quality that equaled live broadcasts, and that these tapes could be replayed many times with no appreciable loss of quality. AEG was asked to tape one show as a test and their servie was immediately contracted after a successful test. Crosby's season premier on 1 October 1937 was the first magnetic tape broadcast in America. He became the first major American music star to use tape to pre-record radio broadcasts, and the first to master commercial recordings on tape. The taped Crosby radio shows were painstakingly edited through tape-splicing to give them a pace and flow that was wholly unprecedented in radio. Crospy even claims to have been the first to use "canned laughter"; at the insistence of one of his head writer, Bill Morrow, who wanted to insert a segment of raucous laughter from an earlier show into a joke in a later show that hadn't worked well. Tape's high audio quality caused other radio performers to demand the ability to prerecord their broadcasts, forcing an end to the recording ban.

However another side intervened in the conflict. James Petrillo had long thought that recording companies should pay royalties. As head of the Chicago local chapter of the union in 1937 he had organized a strike there. He was elected president of the American Federation of Musicians in 1940. When he announced that the recording ban would start at midnight, July 31, 1942, most people thought it would not happen. America had just entered the war against the Axis on December 18, 1941 and most newspapers opposed the ban. By July it was clear that the ban would take place and record companies began to stockpile new recording of their big names. In the first two weeks of July, these performers recorded new material: Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, and Glenn Miller, who recorded his last records as a civilian bandleader. Recording during the last week was a long list of performers, including Count Basie, Woody Herman, Alvino Ray, Johnny Long, Claude Thornhill, Judy Garland, Glen Gray, Benny Goodman, Kay Kyser, Dinah Shore, Spike Jones, and Duke Ellington, among others.
The strike did not affect musicians performing on live radio shows, in concerts, or, after October 27, 1943, on special recordings made by the record companies for V-Discs for distribution to the armed forces fighting the Axis War, because V–Discs were not available to the general public. However, the union did frequently threaten to withdraw musicians from the radio networks to punish individual network affiliates who were deemed “unfair” for violating the union's policy on recording network shows for repeat broadcasts. Even Bing Crospy took part in the strike, while he liked many of the advantages taping brought with it, he saw radios and record companies paying royalties as a valid demand worth fighting for.

FM and AM

The mid thirties also saw the rise of FM radio which was once believed to be an impossibility. What made FM (frequency-modulated) radio so special?

FM as opposed to AM (amplitude-modulated) radio offers a significantly higher fidelity sound with less static. The reason for this is that both signals are susceptible to slight changes in amplitude. With an AM broadcast, these changes result in static. With an FM broadcast, slight changes in amplitude don't matter since the audio signal is conveyed through changes in frequency, the FM receiver can just ignore changes in amplitude. The result is no static at all. The inventor of FM radio, Edwin Armstrong, was working at RCA when he presents his technology at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers. However, Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's hold on the AM radio market, and the company fought back by launching a campaign to smother FM radio. RCA's attempts at persuading the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to limit FM radio capabilities thankfully failed. Armstrong who had invested a substantial amount of his wealth into the new technology and lost money in several patent lawsuits, as well to the fact that transistors made many of his older inventions and patents obsolete, fought very hard for his lifework and won. Still there are some disadvantages for FM radio that prevent it from replacing AM altogether.
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FM signals propagate as line-of-sight phenomenon, so if there is a large hill between transmitter and receiver, the receiver will not receive any signal. AM signals, on the other hand, are at low frequencies which are reflected back by ionospehere and thus, using sky-wave-propagation phenomenon, can travel farther distances. FM waves penetrate ionosphere and are not refracted back limiting its reach. But hearing President Roosevelt addressing the nation after the Pearl Harbor Attack as if the was standing right in front of us, thanks to FM radio made a powerful impact nevertheless.

But now coming back from the past and looking at the future. What can we expect? I am honestly not sure. Its hard to think of anything that could come close to the breakthrough of transistor radios. I would keep an eye out on the development of tape recorder. If the recent success of the “eight-track" car tape is any indicator they might be the future. Especially so if tapes can be made as small as shirt radios are now.

Note:
There will be another post that deals with the soviet radio culture. However I don't want people to get the impression that the soviets are the only ones who progress in this timeline although they are the focus. Technology spreads, butterflies fly and the world as a whole changes. Nevertheless I'll do my best to keep the rest of the world recognizable enough to serve as a good, familiar contrast to ATL's Soviet Union.
 
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Glen

Moderator
....

Notes:

This timeline will be about a radically transhumanist Soviet Union. Lenins death is not the POD but it is nevertheless the first major change from OTL.
All technologies and medical procedures are grounded in real OTL experiments but mostly happened on a much smaller scale.
The general idea behind this timeline is to explore what an unrestrained cultural and scientific Avant-garde could possibly accomplish.

Fun, fun, fun! BTW, did you ever see my Transhumanist Soviet Union thread?
 
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