Part #256: Power from the Needle to the Pseulac
“White Gate to all stations. Barking Barking Six requesting Manifesto, authorisation, Orpington One Two...Repeat, this comes straight from Rose Eddie Rose, no arguments! ...Manifesto as follows. Greenwich Six, Jamaica Four, Queensbury Two One. ... No, the black and red one on page 14. ...Well Lewisham, Orpington, Orpington, Kensington it up in the Barking, Orpington, Orpington, Kensington, then!
(inaudible grumbling)”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
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From: Motext Pages MS070A;J [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
INVENTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD INDEX PAGE!
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These Motext pages will include recaps and supplementary information that we didn’t have time to cover in the Motoscope programmes. Just select the code option below for the programme you want!
MS070C The Ypologist
MS070D Asimcony
MS070E The Standard Crate
MS070F Photel
MS070G Gunpowder
MS070H The Aerodrome
MS070J The Grooveplayer
MS070J The Grooveplayer
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Since the dawn of civilisation, it had been considered an unspoken law of the universe that one couldn’t preserve a sound and listen to it again at a later time. This was more profound even than the case for visual images. Long before the invention of asimcony, artists could at least attempt to record a memory of an image, even if their record was subject to their own skill, idiosyncrasies of style and limitations of memory. But there was no analogous way to record sounds. One could write down a speech, or the musical notes of a song. But the next person to read out that speech, the next musician to play that song, could never do it in quite the same way as the original.
The closest that technology came to this dream of preservation was the invention of the music box (or “carillon a musique” in French) towards the end of the eighteenth century. The music box was then perfected in post-Jacobin Wars Swabia, with its inherited Old Swiss tradition of skilled watchmaking, needed for the small and delicate parts. A music box encoded a tune by means of specially-placed pins or holes on a rotating metal disc or cylinder; the pins or holes would pluck the tines of a carefully tuned metal comb, producing a twinkly sound of the correct note at the correct time as the medium rotated. The boxes became more advanced and sophisticated as the nineteenth century wore on, and in particular benefited from the “Automaton Craze” of fiction that began in the Watchful Peace era. Whereas before the makers of automata had mostly made sophisticated but hideously expensive clockwork animals or humans for the very rich aristocracy, the phenomenon started by Cuthbert Lucas’ “The New Eden” led to a mass market of middle-class people keen to buy cheaper clockwork amusements. These were frequently combined with music boxes, which grew smaller and more hard-wearing. Wealthier parents of the Democratic Experiment era frequently bought their young daughters ‘Singing Dolls’, consisting of a clockwork automaton baby which moved its limbs, mouth and eyes, but also included a music box which played suitable lullabies or nursery-rhyme tunes. By this point some boxes included the ability to swap out the disc or cylinder for different ones; the English wit Philip Bulkeley infamously experimented on a Singing Doll with an engineer friend, and managed to produce a ‘Crying Doll’ where the box instead ‘more realistically’ made a game attempt at imitating a cacophonous bout of crying. Ironically, what had begun as a society joke eventually became an actual product sold by the toy manufacturers, as the little girls loved it.
More sophisticated attempts at the same basic technology came later on, such as automata playing simple instruments, boxes with bird automata that ‘sang’ through manipulation of a steam-powered whistle, or auto-pianos which played themselves.[1] In an important distinction, however, none of these machines represented a means of RECORDING. No matter how sophisticated their instruments grew from the original simple twinkly metallic combs, they were not recording music that a human had played; they were producing music programmed into them from scratch. Because of this, even at its most sophisticated, automaton music lacked a certain sense of ‘spirit’ that real human music would. The Persian writer Zahed Taleghani considered this to be a manifestation of the same reason why his country’s famous rugs were traditionally woven with a deliberate mistake, so as not to attempt to usurp the perfection of God. Without the ‘mistakes’ that any human musician would introduce into a piece, different ones every time, an automaton would never sound truly authentic.
Taleghani’s monogramme was read in translation by the New Spanish engineer Arturo Galindo, who set out to try to find a way to introduce random ‘error’ variations in automaton music to improve the listening experience. Galindo’s work did not see commercial success, but is hugely important for the history of mathematics and science. He explored many ways to try to generate a truly random factor without human intervention—though at the start of his work he assumed this was impossible, and only tried combinations of many cogwheels whose pattern would repeat after ten or twenty plays of the music media. However, in the process of this he came across the fact that a double pendulum—a pendulum where a second weight is joined to the first by another pivot point—has behaviour which is thoroughly unpredictable, despite the apparent simplicity of the system. This was seemingly contrary to the assumed determinism of Newtonian mechanics, and came at a time when mathematicians were continuing to struggle with the three-body problem in predicting orbital mechanics. Galindo’s patents (1887) used the word ‘crisantemo’ (Spanish for ‘chrysanthemum) to describe an explosion of possibilities stemming from a single initial state of the pendulum, like a chrysanthemum’s blossoms spreading out from the centre. His wife, a Yapontsi who had escaped from the tyrannical possession of a Russian in California, likely came up with the idea. Cristantemo Theory remains a huge area of mathematical interest to this day and has resulted in practical applications.[2] There will be an episode of our sister series, “Theories That Changed the World”, devoted to it when that premieres in December!
In the end, the technology of the music boxes and the auto-pianos would be a dead end for the problem of sound recording, but would have great implications for the programming of solution engines and modern ypologists. Sound recording instead stems ultimately from the unrelated work of two Russians, Sergei Kabanov and Mikhail Deryabkin. Kabanov was a lawyer, while his friend Deryabkin was a doctor who had published work on diseases of the ear. Deryabkin explained to an interested Kabanov that the ear detected sound as vibrations in the air, which made the tympanum (or eardrum) vibrate, and these were then transmitted to the inner ear by the three small bones known as the ossicles. Deryabkin had been able to partially restore the hearing of some of his patients, veterans who had suffered damaged eardrums from explosions during the Euxine War, by facilitating the healing of the membrane—though he could see that there was much more to how hearing worked than this. He even managed to patch a patient’s eardrum, albeit with more limited success than the story usually implies, using flexible silk as a diaphragm.
Kabanov wondered if it would be possible to make a machine that would emulate the behaviour of the outer ear. With the help of the mechanic brother of a colleague, he and Deryabkin designed an artificial diaphragm connected to a needle by mechanical equivalents of the delicate ossicle bones. Vibrations from sound would be picked up by the diaphragm membrane and tranmitted to the needle, which would jerk up and down and scribe an ANALOGUE of the sound into a suitable material. The basic principle of the later grooveplayer was realised from the start, but the invention suffered from the problem of finding the right materials for both the diaphragm and the recording medium. Early experiments by the Russian pair used parchment for the latter and a piece of waxed paper for the latter. Initially, the waxed paper was simply dragged along beneath the needle by the operator so the different vibrations of a continuing sound would be recorded on a different part of the paper as a groove as time passed. This, of course, was not very precise, and it was later replaced with a rotating plaster cylinder with a wax coating, which could be hooked up to a motor for a regular speed.
Notably, Kabanov and Deryabkin did not plan to be able to play the sounds they recorded back. Deryabkin wanted to study these physical analogues of sound for what they said about the nature of sound and hearing, while Kabanov had a different idea about commercialisation. He envisaged the device as being an unimpeachable physical record of someone’s voice—if the sound of each person’s voice was different, so too would be the resulting groove. To a lawyer, the use of this as a means of witnessing legal documents would be of great value.[3] Signatures could be forged, wills could be contested on the basis of mistaken identity. We must remember that this was an era before widespread asimcony, when it was possible for a fraudster steal another person’s identity if he took his calling card and acted with bold confidence. An ‘audio signature’ might be possible to fake based on a voice impression, but it would be another level of security. It could also be combined with a personalised wax seal, the relevant part of the wax cylinder removed and implanted within one. Kabanov mayalso have been influenced by the use of seals (or ‘chops’) in lieu of signatures in Beiqing China, although those were ink stamps rather than wax based. Because of this, the device was patented in 1871 under the name PHONOSPHRAGE, from the Greek words for ‘sound’ and ‘seal’ or ‘stamp’.
Kabanov and Deryabkin’s Phonosphrage was officially sold as a product from 1875, but did not see commercial success. This was sometimes blamed on the product name, which was considered peculiar and hard-to-spell even by the standards of the late 19th century. The machine was mocked in both “The Ringleader” and the suppressed Russian equivalent, “Yashcheritsa” (“The Lizard”) with a joke based on this. A cartoon showed Kabanov and Deryabkin as snake-oil salesmen saying the machine could record any sound, and inviting a sceptical public to try it out by saying the name of the machine itself—only for no-one to be capable of pronouncing it, but buying the (implied to be nonfunctional) Phonosphrage anyway out of sheer embarrassment!
Despite this damp squib, some inventors did continue to experiment with the concept for the next two decades. The problem was, again, always with the materials, particularly that for the recording medium. There needed to be a balance between a substance soft enough for a stylus needle to inscribe its analogue groove upon it, but not so soft that the needle would not destroy the groove on attempting to play the sound back. For, unlike Kabanov and Deryabkin themselves, the later inventors did foresee that the technology would eventually lead to that path.[4] Illustrative of the fact that science and technology is the product of many minds working at once, the problem would eventually be solved by two people, in two different ways, almost simultaneously.
Preliminary breakthroughs included that of American Jabez Wilson, who invented the idea of creating a master recording on a tough material, which could then be copied onto an everyday recording on a softer material read by a gentler stylus needle. Variations on this theme also included the idea of making a recording on a soft material and then fixing it, analogous to the process in asimcony. The use of discs rather than cylinders as a recording medium (the basic principle of both had been used in music boxes) was partly driven by the fact that it was easier to ‘press’ a copy of a flat disc from a master copy than with a cylinder.[5] It would not be until 1892 that the Meridian inventor Alejandro Flores was able to perfect a workable recording mechanism for what he called the “Plato de Sonido” (Sound Platter) but which history knows as the Groovedisc player. Flores’ big breakthrough was the use of gum-lacquer[6] as a recording medium. Gum-lac was already a valuable product, used as a varnish, to produce small moulded goods, and as an early electrical insulator. However, its virtue as a recording medium would result in prices rising sharply, and would make the fortunes of many investors in the plantations of Siam and India from which the product originated. Gum-lac is extracted from the bark of trees in which the lac bug has dug tunnels, sealing them with the substance. Gum-lac was sold in the form of solid flakes, which could then be dissolved in alcohol to make the liquid lacquer with its miracle properties.
Despite inventing the gum-lac groovedisc player four years before the outbreak of the Pandoric War, Flores continued to work on it in secret, worried about the rapacious pseudopuissant corporations of the day potentially stealing his work, as was not uncommon. He supported Monterroso’s presidential bid and was at first an enthusiastic supporter, but fled the country during the Pandoric War and escaped the Societist revolution. Flores went into exile in Russia, where his machine was finally produced commercially in 1903 by the Flores-Fyodorov Company (modern FFC/SeongCorp). The marketing campaign explicitly called back to the pioneers of Kabanov and Deryabkin, emphasising a Russian pedigree for the technology, and early recordings had a heavy emphasis on patriotic songs recorded by orchestras and famous opera singers of the day. With Russia one of the few countries in the world whose people felt it had had an unambiguously victorious outcome to the war, this was a good marketing move and discs sold like hot cakes to the wealthy middle classes.
Meanwhile, a rival device was taking shape in France. Rene Bonnaire was a brilliant but eccentric and idiosyncratic engineer, who would never use an off-the-shelf method of doing anything if he could invent his own variation. It might have been clear for a few years that the disc would be the default sound recording medium, but that wasn’t good enough for Bonnaire. Bonnaire built upon the 1875 invention of Qeraxyl by Belgian Thomas Schollaert. This product, sometimes called God’s gift to Wordo players (since the rules were changed to allow trade names), consisted of combining the existing Belgian invention of Xylofortex with camphor to produce a manmade material similar to horn or ivory.[7] Qeraxyl had many useful properties that outweighed its high cost and flammability, and was produced in vast quantities in the chemical plants of the UPSA and elsewhere in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. At the time, there was no overarching term for such materials.
Bonnaire had seen a demonstration (in 1891) of how Qeraxyl could be used to make thin films (which would lead to the Film Revolution a few years later). He realised that if a stylus could carve a groove on a flexible substance, it would be possible to make a long loop of that substance, which could potentially result in a longer recording time than a disc. The Qeraxyl alone did not prove a suitable recording medium, but Bonnaire coated it with other substances, starting with gelatin. The result, tested in 1894, was not entirely satisfactory, but as a proof of principle was promising. Bonnaire saw the primary use of his machine as a means of recording dictated speech, which could then be sent through the post to a secretary to be soloprinted up.[8] At this point, the Pandoric War intervened. Neutral France continued to trade with both sides, but inevitably the activity of ironsharks, and countries keeping valuable resources for their own war efforts, resulted in shortages in France. Bonnaire was called on by the French Government, along with many other scientists and engineers, to help develop domestic production replacing these. He continued working on his machine in his spare time. The Leclerc Government was particularly keen to offset its dependence on the chemical industries of the UPSA and Germany, and many loss-leading chemical plants were set up in France at this time, particularly the north. As well as simply replacing the existing imports, chemists at these plants worked on fully synthetic alternatives for biological substances imported from far, war-torn countries such as Siam and China.
Etienne Roussel was one such chemist, who was one of the few friends of the abrasive Bonnaire. While experimenting with substitutes for some of the imported substances, he found references in an old Meridian paper to oinyl muriatide[9] changing to a white solid when exposed to sunlight for long periods. Able to replicate the process under more controlled conditions, he found the result was too brittle to be of much practical use, but he persisted, trying different additives. His first successful attempt used a derivative of phthalic acid, producing a form of the product which was far more flexible. He had discovered the first flexor, and the first practical form of polyoinyl muriatide (POM).[10]
POM would go on to revolutionise the world in countless industries, but Bonnaire was able to secure it as an alternative coating for his Qeraxyl ribbons (and, later, was able to make ribbons entirely out of POM). He designed a machine whose stylus needle would read a groove cut into a length of Qeraxyl-POM tape, coiled around itself in an elaborate manner and moved on via a motor. There would be many variations on this theme in the future, but in 1903—remarkably, at almost the same time as Flores in Russia—he launched his product commercially.
The Rubanphone, as Bonnaire’s machine was marketed as, was the first groovetape player.[11] From the very start, a format war raged between groovetapes and groovediscs. In the early years, neither technology was very mature, manufacturers who licensed the patent differed in quality, and it was easy for arguing camps to claim one device was superior to the other. With discs and tape cartridges both very expensive, and machines usually only capable of playing one or the other, consumers picked a loyalty and stuck to it. This is, of course, ignoring those applications to which the different technologies were specifically suited for. In a groovedisc it was easy to find a particular point in the recording and move the stylus to it by hand. This was not the case with a groovetape, which could not be moved backwards without unravelling the tape, but a tape could carry far more music (early ones carried 20 minutes, in comparison to the 4 minutes of an early gum-lac disc, and this was later extended to 3 hours). Discs would eventually become made of (a different form of) POM as well. By this point, companies were searching for a generic term for new wonder materials that replaced lacquers (and horn and wax). No-one is quite sure who first contracted the term ‘pseudo-lacquer’, perhaps originally a negative one, to produce the word PSEULAC. Even today, when we hear of the downsides of pseulac pollution affecting our natural world, it is hard to ignore how much it has changed our lives.[12]
Groovetapes were also, as Bonnaire had correctly predicted, particularly useful for dictation, although the recording version was forced to rely on inferior softer materials so a home stylus could cut into them. However, a dictation recording only had to be played back once, so longterm replayability was not a major issue. Groovetapes were also useful for those wishing music to play continuously, as their tape was an endless loop that would loop back to the beginning at the end. Eventually they would therefore become the default for background music systems.
Despite these important applications, popular culture renditions of the Disc vs. Tape format war tend to focus on the individual consumer looking for popular music. Some musicians at this time regarded any form of recording as a threat, either to their livelihoods or as an attack on their principles. Paralleling the earlier observations of Zahed Taleghani, the Maroon and Trance musicians of the West Indies, whose genres emphasised improvisation, saw a recording (which would always be the same) as having ‘killed music and nailed its skin to the wall’. The Nouvelle-Orleans Riots of 1908 are considered by some to have started with a protest by Trance musicians smashing up groovedisc shops, although there were likely other causes.
Others, however, saw sound recording as an opportunity. It was certainly true that the limitations of live music had not prevented singers and musicians from becoming international sensations in the past, when the only way to enjoy their music at home was to purchase sheet music and play it oneself.[13] The Flippant subculture of the postwar period included many amateur musicians who sought to bring new ideas to the sometimes stuffy musical culture of Europe, North America and China. Old strictures on what denoted a ‘band’ were cast aside, with Turkish drums and Spanish guitars married to Italian pianos and American singing styles. Genres multiplied with bewildering speed. Experiments that in other eras would have vanished overnight were now preserved forever. And the role of musician’s agent became transformed. Rather than simply finding venues for a singer or group, the agent was now tasked with working with the grooveplayer companies to sell recordings. In those early, unscrupulous days, much of the profits often stayed with the agent and company rather than going to the young and inexperienced musicians—which we still hear about occasionally today. But it did mean that musicians developed fanatics around the world who had never heard them play in person, but had nonetheless heard them play live. The old contradiction had vanished, and music would never be the same.
The final ingredient for a practical music player, one which could be played in a noisy grooveclub [discotheque], would have more sinister origins. Just as they had with the contemporaneous invention of Photel, the rulers of the early Combine were swift to realise the potential significance of groove media. Despite Flores having been a Meridian (or perhaps because of that) it was unauthorised variations on Bonnaire’s groovetape which would become more popular for use by the Combine. A longer recording time, and endless repetition, were very useful for propaganda purposes—though the Combine was also one of the pioneers of background music in the workplace. Societist ideological theorists constructed the idea of ‘Human Music’. By analogy to the idea that all languages could be traced back to a common ancestor, it was thought that by examining parallels in music traditions across the world, a core commonality could be extracted. Early experiments along these lines, many of them rather baffling (or so surviving records from refugees say) were tried at this time.
Regardless, whether it be a propaganda tower overlooking a town square or a background music system in a noisy factory, the Combine’s engineers realised that their grooveplayers needed to produce a much amplified sound over what the weak early diaphragms could produce alone. The players sold by Bonnaire’s and Flores’ companies relied only on a physical horn, extending above the player or concealed in a cabinet below, to amplify the sound. None can ever accuse the Societists of not thinking big. Unsatisfied with this, an engineer (possibly former Chilean Karlus Karrerus) hit upon the idea of going back to the old Meridian brilliance with the manipulation of lufts. He devised a means to amplify a grooveplayer using compressed air, producing a sound loud enough to be heard even in those environments the Combine leadership desired. The technology was so useful that it was soon copied by the nations. England’s Coventry Augmentophone Company, one of the earliest to reverse-engineer the compressed-air player, was successful enough that the name Augmentophone remains the best-known one in many languages.[14]
Even more so than asimcony, the invention of practical sound recording divided the world of history in two. The time before the end of the Pandoric War belongs to an era in which we can only guess how people sounded. The time after, for the first time, is truly RECORDED history!
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“I thought this section was meant to be about minor political parties in Autiaraux?”
“Be quiet, Sergeant Mumby.”
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[1] All of these also existed in OTL, but they saw a wider market and cheaper mass-produced forms in TTL due to the interest in automata sparked by the Automaton Craze in fiction.
[2] Cristantemo theory is known as chaos theory in OTL.
[3] This work is similar to that of the French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in OTL.
[4] An example of inventions from the equivalent era in OTL is Charles Cros’ ‘paleophone’, so called because he thought its primary use would be in preserving the voices of people long after their deaths, so that future descendants could hear the voices of their ancestors.
[5] In OTL, Edison’s first phonograph experiments used a disc, before he switched to wax cylinders as a recording medium, apparently because he considered the continuous rotation speed of a cylinder to be more ‘scientifically correct’. This proved to be a dead end due to the far more limited recording time on a cylinder, and discs became the norm. In TTL discs are selected more to facilitate a pressing method.
[6] Or gum-lac for short, from the French
gomme-lac. The OTL term used in English is shellac, an anglicisation of the German
Schellack. Note that in OTL shellac records were introduced by Emile Berliner in 1895 following disappointing experiments with hard rubber.
[7] Recall that Xylofortex is nitrocellulose or guncotton in OTL terminology; Qeraxyl (from
Kerato, ‘horn’ in Greek, plus –xyl for Xylofortex, with a probably patent-driven spelling) is what we would call celulloid. The description here makes its composition and production sound rather simpler than it is!
[8] Soloprinter is the TTL term for typewriter.
[9] Oinyl muriatide is the TTL term for vinyl chloride—muriatine (from muriatic acid) being the TTL term for chlorine, and ‘oinyl’ being a variation of ‘vinyl’ from Greek rather than Latin. (In both cases it means ‘wine’, as the family of chemicals was originally derived from alcohol).
[10] ‘Flexors’ in OTL are called ‘plasticisers’. MOM is, of course, PVC.
[11] The Rubanphone is similar to OTL’s Tefifon (or rather its 1930s precursor, the Tephiphon—note different spelling). Being invented earlier than OTL, it has more of a chance to get established rather than having to compete with longer-established records and the rise of magnetic tape.
[12] Pseulac is the TTL term for ‘plastic’.
[13] This was true of the nineteenth century in OTL, with Jenny Lind being a prime example of the sort of international stardom that one might imagine would be impossible until the advent of recorded music.
[14] Compressed-air gramophones existed in OTL, such as Britain’s Auxetophone and France’s Chronomégaphone. The former was said to be loud enough to broadcast from the top of the Blackpool Tower, and led to the front row in concert halls being abandoned by stunned audiences. The latter, meanwhile, was used to provide sound in early Gaumont cinemas. In OTL the technology soon died off due to the growth of amplification by electrical means, but the slower pace of electrical research in TTL means that this will not be happening for a while.
