Given the troubles we’ve had with mail delivery here in Chicago, it’s perhaps just as well that the U.S. Post Office gave up rather quickly on guided missile mail.
Yes, you read right. In 1959, in a short-lived experiment a postal official declared “of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world,” the post office arranged for a Navy submarine to fire a missile containing some 3,000 letters at a Naval base in Florida.
At the time, postal officials had high hopes for the innovative delivery technique. “Before man reaches the moon,” the spokesman explained, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles.”
Well, missile mail never quite took off, as it were. But it is an example of something we’ve seen a lot of in this technological century: an ingenious, if somewhat far-fetched, new form of communication that died almost as soon as it was born.
Missile mail may have been, as the Postal Service now officially concludes, “only a footnote in the history of mail delivery.” But it’s the sort of historical footnote that keeps the amateur archivists at the Dead Media Project up at night.
The Dead Media Project is not, despite the name, a secret conspiracy to rid the world of journalists. It is, rather, a unique collective attempt to dig up information on communications technologies that have, for whatever reason, fallen into obscurity. So far it has discovered hundreds of them — missile mail being merely one of the more dramatic failures.
“There’s a peculiar thrill whenever you unearth a particularly outlandish looking specimen,” says Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction author from Austin, Texas, who co-founded the project. “Someday we’ll understand what the human race is actually doing to itself with `media,’ and I intend to be one of the guys who helps figure this out.”
Sterling, along with fellow sci-fi writer and media junkie Richard Kadrey of San Francisco, launched the project two years back after becoming fascinated with all the strange bits of hardware he’d noticed lying discarded alongside that Information Superhighway we hear so much about.
The two writers envisaged a sort of source book, “disinterring and dissecting” all the dead media they could find. The only trouble was neither had the time to write such a book. They wanted someone else to write it, or for it simply to write itself.
And so the Dead Media Project was born. Sterling wrote up an appropriately stirring manifesto outlining his and Kadrey’s notion of “a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. . . A book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance.”
Then, having in effect written a feisty preface to this imaginary book, Sterling and Kadrey threw the idea into the public domain — starting up an electronic mailing list to allow the newly christened “necronauts” to share their discoveries with one another. And the idea has taken off. Two years after the project’s inception, the Dead Media Archives are stuffed with hundreds of entries, and several independently run Web pages are devoted to the project. The mailing list itself, with some 300 members, buzzes with talk of technological oddities with names like Zuccato’s trypograph, Gestetner’s cyclostyle, Loutherbourg’s eidophusikon and the Chromatic Rolmonica.
There is an obvious irony here: All this talk about obsolete media is taking place on the Internet — the technological marvel that itself (if we are to believe some of the hype) threatens to make so many old media, from telephones to newspapers, obsolete. Actually, the project is in many ways a reaction to the rapid turnover of new technologies these days, in which it takes only a moment before cutting-edge technologies become lumbering old dinosaurs. This is “the golden age of dead media,” Sterling says — of course — by electronic mail.
Pioneers and white elephants
So far, the necronauts have gathered up information on several hundred different media. Some are as old as the carrier pigeon, semaphore flags and the quipu (which were enigmatic conglomerations of knots the Incas used to store information); some are as new as the Betamax video recorder and the Super 8 movie camera. They define media quite broadly — anything used to store or transmit information of any sort is fair game.
There are forerunners to technologies we now take for granted — like Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, a daintily designed precursor to the modern movie projector. Others were ingenious if unwieldy technological dead ends — like the profusion of mechanical televisions developed by various tinkerers in the 1920s, strange machines that generated fuzzy images with the help of rapidly spinning disks, and which vanished once electronic televisions began to demonstrate their clear superiority. Still others were cutting edge only a few years ago; the list of “dead computer operating systems” is immense.
But the ones that really stir the blood are those magnificently impractical constructions that remind us that truth is stranger than science fiction.
Consider, for example, the telharmonium — the world’s first music synthesizer, and certainly the biggest. Designed and built by an eccentric genius named Thaddeus Cahill around the turn of the century, the telharmonium was a 200-ton monstrosity, stuffed with giant grinding gears and magnets — a sort of church organ gone mad. Cahill had grand plans for his grand machine: He wanted to use it to transmit music over the telephone system. (Radio, of course, had not yet been invented.)
It was not exactly a ringing success. But the sheer gaudy chutzpah of the thing has won it a position of honor, and the Dead Media folks use something they call “Cahill Ratings” to measure the relative coolness of various technologies they disinter.
Slightly lower on the Cahill Scale is, or was, Timothy Leary’s experiential typewriter.
With the help of researchers from Harvard and MIT, Leary constructed a device designed to help doped-up research subjects record the flow of their psychedelic experience. The special keyboard of the device was set up, Leary explained in the journal Psychedelic Review in 1966, to record “physical energy processes, phenomenologically labeled `void,’ `white light,’ `pure energy,’ `vibrations,’ etc.”
Alas, the actual experiments did not seem to go terribly well. “The subject reported drifting off into areas of reduced awareness,” Leary noted, observing the reaction of one 24-year-old male to a hefty dose of LSD. “He was apparently no longer aware of the room, the (experiential typewriter) and the task.”
And so another promising technology bit the dust.
An interesting mix
Though much of the information on the list seems rather improbable, it’s all carefully documented — with the necronauts drawing their material from such sources as scholarly books and articles, self-published volumes by carrier-pigeon enthusiasts, and even a few old comic-book ads for peculiar little gimmicks you once could buy by mail. (The information about missile mail came straight from the horse’s mouth — an official history of the mail that appears on the Postal Service’s Web page.)
The necronauts themselves are a diverse bunch. Stefan Jones, a Long Island civil engineer and aspiring science-fiction author, first became conscious of dead media when CDs first began driving out vinyl a decade ago.
“Add to this the disappearance of software for the Atari 800 computer I bought to play games on,” he says. “The machine became much less fun to play with after I realized that there’d be nothing new for it.”
Candi Strecker, a 41-year-old San Francisco writer and ‘zine editor, came to the Dead Media list via the thrift store, as it were.
“One of my grand obsessions in life is prowling through our society’s discards as they turn up in thrift stores and flea markets, and analyzing their rise and fall over time, a bit like an anthropologist,” she says. “So I see a lot of extinct and ephemeral technological items as they turn up in the grand river of stuff.”
Though Sterling realizes that most of the dead media on the list are gone forever, he does let himself dream a bit.
“I’d really like to see somebody reconstruct Faber’s Euphonia,” he says. “It was a 19th Century sideshow marvel made of bellows, wood and rubber that could speak German and English aloud when it was operated by a keyboard. … The thing’s got a Cahill Rating right off the scale.”
