My Chinese Character

Not Even Wrong just ran in Hong Kong in a Cantonese stage version -- ! -- here's actor KC Li as "Paul Collins."

Madmen Across the Water

(Hildebrand chocolate card, c. 1900)

I'm in this week's New Scientist with a brief history of aquatic pedestrianism:

The first well-documented walk on water came in 1844, when Robert Kjellberg and Tonnes Balcken glided through Hanover on pontoon shoes made of thinly beaten metal. They showed that it was possible to carry a heavy knapsack and fire a rifle without sinking and taught the local army garrison how to use their invention. While no water-walking army materialised, Kjellberg was soon touring England as the "Water King". His exhibitions captured the Victorian imagination, and imitators around the world followed in his sloshing footsteps.

"Anybody can do it. It may be, that before long... the shining path marked out upon the waters by the silvery beams of the moon will become a fashionable promenade," declared the Toronto Globe after witnessing a local water-walker striding the Don River in 1854. "No stones will be there to vex those troubled with tender feet, no bruises can result from a fall, no danger is to be apprehended from carelessly driven cabs, or viciously given dogs."

Yet the idea of waterborne warfare was never far away. The same account foresaw "the crossing of armies over rivers", and in 1910 inventor Luigi Rissi taught an Italian soldier to fire a rifle from "hydro skis". Oldrieve's contribution was perhaps more fanciful than practical: during his [1898] walk in New York harbour he calmly lit sticks of dynamite with his cigar and tossed them into the East river, where they sent spectacular fountains shooting 20 metres into the air.

"Professor" Charles W. Oldreive was one of the most popular water-walkers, and eventually capped off his exploits by winning a $5000 bet in 1907 to walk down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, from Cincinatti to New Orleans.

From the New York Journal of 16 January 1898, here's Oldrieve engaged in the highly professorial act of blowing shit up in New York Harbor:

The Road to Cell

I wrote a New Scientist piece earlier this year on the nearly criminal foot-dragging by Detroit over safety advances made by pioneering engineers in the 1950s and 60s, and that sad pattern seems to have been repeated... with cell phone companies.

An excellent piece of historical digging by Matt Richtel in today's Times:

Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving. Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones. “There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”

It was the early 1960s.

(On a rather happier automotive note, the Times also has a fascinating article on Invacars -- the cleverly designed pale blue cars distributed in postwar Britain to the disabled...)

Into the Vault!

I'm on a NPR Weekend Edition segment about Shakespeare's First Folio this weekend; Scott Simon and I ventured into the vault of the Folger with library director Gail Paster. It's very rare that they let anyone into the underground vault -- it literally has a giant time-lock door -- so we were lucky indeed to have a look at such treasures as this Folio cheerily defaced by a girl in the 1720s.



This was still before critics like Theobald and Johnson had made it clear why perhaps you might not want to use old Folios as scratch-pads for your kids.

One neat detail that didn't make it into the finished piece: Scott asking Gail if it wasn't perilous to have all these valuable books in one place, because what if there was a fire?

"Well," Gail smiled, "in a fire the oxygen is evacuated from the room and replaced with halocarbon gas. We'd have about five minutes to get out."

Which, I suppose, is why you don't want to fall asleep in the vault. Oh, and also because you could end up like this guy:

Paper Castles

I love that a book like this needed to exist in the first place -- an 1859 guide to creating architect's models out of paper:






There's a full text at Google Books...

Bear vs. Thief

Last year I noted the UK publication of Madeleine Goold's Mr Langshaw's Square Piano, which follows the social history of a single Broadwood square piano -- and I lamented at the time that there was no sign of a US publisher. Well, now it has one!

Friday's Wall Street Journal lauds the book:

The author has a gift for gathering charming and peculiar historical details, from the niceties of producing ornate copperplate handwriting to the trained bear who guarded Broadwood's premises... Ms. Goold's researches take her from graveyards in Lancashire to archives at Emory University in Atlanta, and her narrative touches on the American and French revolutions, the British diaspora in India and Australia, and the Victorian-era Age of Mahogany. But no matter how far afield the author's interests take her, she maintains her focus on one culture-changing development that has only in recent decades lost is force: the piano in the parlor.

Here's an 1822 Bradshaw square piano at work:

DC Reading

I'll be reading this Monday night at the Folger!

1927 London in Color... (Colour?)

Via Boing Boing, footage taken with the early color process of Claude Friese-Greene...

Another Victim of the Recession: Player Piano Rolls

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

Until Thursday, QRS was the only continuously operating mass producer of piano rolls in the world. The only other company, in Australia, stopped earlier this decade. Sales dropped about 80 percent from 15 years ago to around 50,000 annually, Berkman estimated...

Berkman said reassembling the piano roll factory elsewhere will be difficult.

One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano. There are also aging machines to perforate and punch the holes, to cut the stencils to print the lyrics, to spool the rolls and to glue the roll boxes together.

“There are so many facets of it. The perforating machines are old and cantankerous, and they’re one star in a constellation of machines that all have to be functioning,” Berkman said.

Sinclair Lewis's Other Racket

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

Playing, Sir!

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



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

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

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

Making Out in the Back of Horseless Carriages!

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

Whatever Entrepreneurs Can Dream Up...

...con-men have thought of first.

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

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

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

"Two A.M. in the Subway"

An 1905 Edison short I stumbled across on Youtube:



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

In Tomorrow's NYTBR...

...The Book of William gets some love!

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

Stop Making Sense

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

Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale... A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial grammar learning task which saw them exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings, and then asked to copy the strings and mark those which followed a similar pattern.

"People who read the nonsensical story... were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did. Proulx said that the thinking behind the research was that when we are exposed to something which "fundamentally does not make sense", our brains will respond by "looking for some other kind of structure" within our environment.

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

Skinner's Quiz Box

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


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

B... F... Skinner?


Yep!

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

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

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


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

The Blooburds uv my Hart

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

From his obituary:

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

...He wrote a song honoring the 100th anniversary of the Croton Dam. He invented things, including a slide rule that calculated currency-exchange rates and another slide rule that computed cooking times of foods based on weight...

In 1920, at 15, young Mr. Rondthaler bought a 2-cent card and addressed it to a classmate. Inside, he wrote, “The bluebirds are flying from my heart to you.” His message was written in standard orthography.

Reader, she married him.

(Hat tip to Ed!)

In Search of the World's Most Boring Book Title

Round 2

VS.

(Round 1)

Big in Dubai

(From Time Out Dubai)

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

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

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

The Wooden Serpent

1900 postcard of Paris's moving sidewalk

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Best blog idea ever

"Awful Library Books."

To wit:







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

"One Hundred Years Hence"

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



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





And, of course, alien invasions:



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

Good night, Seattle!

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

Bring Me The Bill

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

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

Sobbing Children and Singing Shillings

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

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



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

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

Gentlemen, My Work Here Is Done

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

Everybody Loves Slush!

On a weekend like this, you need...

(More) Fun with Library Microforms

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

Happy July 4th from Fry & Laurie

(Hat tip: The Stranger)

Borrowing a Cup of Sugar

Found in an 1897 New York Herald:

How Ralph Lost His Groove

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

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

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

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

First the Bad News

Via Boing Boing, a blog of bad news from the past...

(Vampire autos?)

Back to work!

From Publishers Weekly:

John Glusman, at Harmony, acquired world rights to Paul Collins's Murder of the Century, about a Gilded Age homicide that sparked a tabloid war and led to the beginnings of modern forensics. Collins is a founding editor of the Collins Library imprint at McSweeney's Books and also teaches in the M.F.A. program at Portland State University; Michelle Tessler brokered the deal, and the book is slated for 2011.

(Also in PW -- another starred review for The Book of William!)

Dogfishing

Those of you with long memories may recall the Monkeyfishing hoax of 2001 in Slate. This was a piece by Jay Forman which revealed the existence of a illicit sport on an island of former medical research monkeys in the Florida Keys, where locals went... well, Monkeyfishing:

Once we found a nice spot, we prepared to fish. Sturdy deep-sea poles were the preferred tackle. I've never heard of anyone landing a monkey on lightweight fly rods, but I suppose it is possible. I have friends who have landed tarpon on them, and tarpon are much bigger than monkeys. A fully-grown rhesus monkey tips the scale at around 30 pounds, while a tarpon can easily break 200.... Fruits were the bait of choice. Apples were good because they stayed on the hook well. Red Delicious were chosen over Granny Smith for the advantage in contrast.

Other journalists called bullshit on the piece, and it quickly fell apart. (A couple years ago, Forman finally confessed the whole thing to Jack Shafer.)

But while perusing the October 1897 issue of Recreation magazine today, I found -- wait for it -- "The New Sport: Bait-Casting For Fox Terriers"...

Coffee and Cigarettes

One unexpected Wayback Machine trip produced by Google Books: it appears that all of New York magazine is available in full text, something that produces such charming finds as this pre-Starbucks cover story from June 27, 1977:


The results? Well, back in those days, you had to go to Zabar's or Macy's for good coffee:


Which you'd presumably follow up -- it being 1977 -- with a cigarette:

..."Decade"....?

Little House on the Amazon

Galley Cat notes speculation on a patent filed by Amazon for a small building design. (The patent's here...) The Street weighs in with that claim that "If, indeed, Amazon were to embark on retail locations, analysts think it would only spell disaster. "

Well, maybe it depends on what you mean by a "retail location." It's true that you'd have to be bonkers to build a bricks and mortar bookstore these days. That means that either Amazon is bonkers, or... It's not a bricks and mortar bookstore.

Along with some good guesses at TechFlash (including a reprise/hangover of Amazon Fresh), I'll venture one that hasn't been raised yet: that this is not an outdoors structure at all, but rather a kiosk for rail stations and airport concourses. Specifically, it's for renting out Kindles.

Right now Amazon's the only place to get a Kindle, meaning that there's no in-store way to "try before you buy." Once Amazon's pretty well scooped up early adopters from their own customer base, they've got to start hitting John Q Public. The easiest place to do that is in railways and airports filled with travelers ready to spend on books and magazines for their trip. Why not spend the same money, plus a modest deposit off the credit card, on a preloaded rental Kindle?

And, of course, if you get hooked on the Kindle during your flight... why, they'd also be happy to sell you one as well. It's a way for Amazon to expand their reach into a natural market, all while keeping a tight rein on overhead by keeping clear of big-box retailers and other middlemen.

While Amazon's Terms of Service prevents owners from renting out Kindles, it doesn't prevent the company from doing it. (In fact, digging around reveals that they did indeed try a Kindle student rental pilot program last year.) And if they're doing a fresh load-up of the books and mags with each rental, the publishers won't care either.

We'll see. But if you notice a bunch of workers building stuff by that transfixingly awful magician mural in SeaTac, don't say you weren't warned...

Science Coverage Explained

From PhD Comics, via The Stranger:

"Not Even Wrong" Hits the Stage

S'true! "Wild Boy" is debuting this week at the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California -- it's a stage adaptation of "Not Even Wrong" by Ugly Betty and Lipstick Jungle executive producer Oliver Goldstick.

There are now stage versions of a "Paul," "Jennifer," "Morgan" and "Uncle Marc" ... something I find both flattering and totally surreal.

Oliver first encountered the book during some down time on the Ugly Betty set, and actually flew up to meet us -- in fact, I took him to the house in the Hawthorne where the events of the book took place, and then headed over to the Pied Cow, where he laid out a series of index cards wrestling with a plot -- and I realized just how extraordinary it was that he was taking an absurdly discursive memoir with a nonverbal lead and actually turning it into a recognizable story.

Shows start this Friday, and run through July...

Flying Purple People Tweaker

In the Guardian coverage of the Hay Festival, nature author and forager John Lewis Stemper warns from experience that if you eat the wrong mushrooms from the English countryside, you become simultaneously heavy and light, and then everything turns purple.

Tape Oddity

After my Believer piece a couple years ago on the Birotron -- a 1970s analog sampling keyboard constructed from 8-track tapes (!) -- I heard from a documentary maker who wanted to find inventor Dave Biro for the documentary she was making about the Mellotron.

The Mellotron, for non-gearheads, is basically what the Birotron was meant to replace -- check out the awesomely L7 demo video above. It was analog sampler intended for home cocktail parties. But the instrument was instantly hijacked by rock musicians -- check out the strings in "Space Oddity" -- or Paul McCartney in Abbey Road Studio 2 demonstrating "Strawberry Fields" on his:



Anyway, now the Mellodrama documentary is making the festival rounds. Check it out!:

Recreated Victorian Village for Sale

From the Guardian:

The entire collection of the Shambles, a museum of Victorian life recreated as a small town on an acre of land, has been split into 2,300 lots and is up for grabs.... From the taxidermist's shop, a pair of stuffed guinea pigs (guide price £10-£15) has piqued the interest of collectors, and a very battered, stringless double bass that Jenner-Fust had wanted thrown away has attracted a surprising number of inquiries. Very collectible items that are bound to do well include a vast array of stoneware, enamel signs and metal tractor seats, which turn out to be surprisingly desirable.

Inexplicably, they don't link to the auction itself -- it's here.

We Inspire Complete Coincidences

Amazon, last seen on Slate not answering questions about corporate philanthropy, now has a new web page up -- complete with an application form for "nonprofit author and publisher groups that share our obsession with fostering the creation, discussion, publication, and dissemination of books."

(Hat tip to Dizzyhead Ed!)

Penguin Geeks Are Go!

The Guardian's books blog finds a wonderful website on old Penguin sci-fi covers.

Headline of the Week goes to...

"Hat for Hitting People."

Though I think Malcolm McDowell established the correct hat for hitting people as the bowler.

Scanners

New Scientist turns up a new patent for rapid infrared scanning over at Google Books:

...Bindings cause pages to arch up either side of the spine - bending text and making it hard to interpret. However, last week Google was granted a patent (US 7508978) on an answer to this problem. Its trick is to project an infrared pattern onto the open page spread. This lets a pair of infrared cameras map the three-dimensional shape of the pages by detecting distortion to the pattern. This in turn allows the distortion of the text to be determined - and therefore the degree of correction needed to read it accurately.

Meanwhile, the patent for the infrared Flashing Earring Heartbeat Monitor goes tragically unused: