An amazing web site.
From The Appendix:
Wireless technology has always involved a delicate negotiation between state security, secrecy, and citizen oversight.
The wireless telegraph station in Sayville, New York was one of the most powerful in the world. Constructed by the German company Telefunken in 1912, it served as a transatlantic relay point for diplomatic messages and business communications. It was a beacon among amateur wireless enthusiasts around the United States who could tune their home-made sets to the station’s nightly press dispatches. All of this changed when one of those amateurs uncovered the station’s true purpose. The Navy seized the station in 1915 on suspicion of relaying covert commands from the German Empire to U-Boats in the Atlantic, and a congressional bill was introduced to ban all civilian wireless activities from the airwaves. The interruptions to the story that follows consist of excerpts from Hugo Gernsback’s serial novel The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen, which ran in Electrical Experimenter magazine right as news of the wireless cryptography scandal unfolded.
Static was always a problem as the summer heat rolled in.
Situated on a hundred-acre plot along the Long Island coastline and “dropped in a mosquito-infested field,” the Sayville wireless plant began experiencing the seasonal interference that comes with longer days and warmer weather in May 1915. At that point little older than the twentieth century itself, wireless telegraphy (a precursor to radio) was not an entirely reliable medium. Debates over the precise cause of this seasonal static soon broke out among the tinkerers and oddballs of the early wireless community. Some said that radio waves experience more interference as they propagate through denser, more humid air. (There was still talk at this time of the existence of a luminiferous aether.) Others speculated that because messages came in clearer at night, the heat of the summer sun on the station’s aerials was affecting their transmitting capabilities.
By late summer, Sayville operators announced that interference from so-called equinoctial storms was forcing them to restrict messages to official government communications. Some commenters quipped that wireless buffs were getting cause and effect mixed up: “they said the electrical effects [of the station] absorbed all the moisture and made Sayville dry as a Saratoga chip,” referring to the potato chip first invented in Saratoga Springs, NY in the 1850s. Perhaps the station itself was altering its surrounding atmospheric conditions.When one contemplates the marvel of sculptured sound on a graphophonic record, and realizes that from the cold vorticity of line there may magically spring the golden lilt of the greatest song voice that the world has ever heard, then comes the conviction that we are living in the days of white magic.At the rate of a dollar per word, civilians and government officials alike could relay messages from Sayville to its sister station at Nauen, Germany. In addition to commercial and diplomatic communications, Sayville sent out press dispatches every night at 9:00 that amateurs around the country tuned in to using their hand-built crystal detector sets. Receiving transmissions from the Sayville station was the gold standard for both wireless sets and their owners (who referred to themselves as ‘muckers’), and electronics manufacturers regularly promised easy reception of Sayville transmissions in advertisements for their products. The static that came with summer weather was nothing new for these wireless professionals and amateurs. Seasonal disturbances were simply a part of the natural rhythms of a new medium.
A 1907 crystal radio receiver housed in mahogany, designed by Harry Shoemaker in 1907.
History San José, Perham Collection
But this summer, Telefunken, the German company that owned the station, seemed absolutely determined not to let any atmospheric or climatic disturbances interfere with the transmission of messages between Sayville and Nauen. By June, to the surprise of the wireless community, the Sayville station could be heard clearly at much greater distances. Local observers reported that three 500-foot towers had been added to the system of aerials atop the plant. These new aerials were coupled with an increase in transmitting power from 35 to 100 kilowatts, effectively tripling the plant’s abilities “in order to insure absolute communication, under all conditions and particularly through the heavy static obtaining during the summer weather.” The Electrical Experimenter reported that Telefunken had imported the new equipment from Rotterdam, a Dutch port city clinging to its neutrality between Germany to the east and occupied Belgium to the west.
The outbreak of the great war of 1914 found me in the midst of the study of several new inventions which I was trying to perfect. But I welcomed the war, nevertheless, with a glad heart. Here at last was my long hoped for chance to get even with Prussia against whom I had nursed a growing hate during the past few years. My ‘révanche’ was at hand.‘Yes, Monsieur le Président,’ I replied fervently, ‘it was my misfortune to be born in Prussia, but I assure you that there is to-day no more ardent, patriotic Frenchman in France than myself. Down with the tyrant Prussia!’
The newly expanded station introduced a number of groundbreaking innovations designed by Telefunken, including a new lettered keyboard that produced a perforated paper tape of transliterated Morse code messages ready to be fed into an automatic transmitter. Type in alphabetic letters just as you would on a QWERTY keyboard, and out comes a ticker tape of machine-readable Morse code. Messages could now be sent at up to 150 words per minute, a speed that would have been impossible for any manual operator of a single Morse code key....MUCH MORE
Via The Appendix blog:
When Isaac Asimov visited the 1964 World's Fair, he was inspired to imagine life fifty years later.
Possibly the strangest (and surely the most erudite) anti-German propaganda of World War One.
The Soviet Union, unsurprisingly, was good at building robots.
Two of the oldest libraries in the world have joined forces for a new project to digitize ancient manuscripts and some of the earliest printed books.
The Sefer Raziel, an early medieval book of spells originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic. We came across a transcription of it written by an English lawyer in 1564 and it's utterly nuts ("drinketh the milke of a white or red or a black cowe, know thou that it maketh a man say things to come.")...Just awesome.
