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8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks #36

Von Osler wants Hart very badly to be his deliveryman, as we saw last week:

“I have a person who will make the delivery. But…” Von Osler shrugged. “He is not as skilled, creative, or lucky as you are. With you…? Let us say it is like having four jacks instead of four eights.”

Are 53,000 deutsche marks going to change his mind from spending some time at home? Hart turns the offer over in his mind:

Hart turned his gaze towards the window and the ocean beyond. He’d been hoping to spend some time at home. Enjoying his money. Now, however, fifty-three thousand deutsche marks were staring him in the face. And just to deliver a little box. By noon on the eleventh. He wouldn’t have much time. Probably have to catch a red eye out of La Guardia or Floyd Bennett tonight for Miami and then a three day flight on a Pan Am clipper.

To be continued!

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The Wonderful Machine Age: Mass Marketing/Consumerism

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair … because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity… One chanced … to say unto them, ‘What will ye buy?’

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. His description of Vanity Fair predates the Industrial Revolution by eight decades and the Machine Age by two centuries. And yet nothing characterizes the Machine Age and the Modern Era so much as the question, “What will ye buy?”

Mass marketing and the accompanying Consumerism began in The Machine Age. And as it began, so did the hue and cry arise for us to return to a simpler life and eschew the call to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” Writers such as John Burroughs, David Greyson, Edward Bok, Ralph Borsodi, and Theodore Roosevelt wrote books and articles and gave speeches extolling the virtues of a life without “stuff”. And all the while the Ad Men appealed to our sense of need.

I know for myself there is life before iPad and life with iPad. I confess, I prefer life with iPad. Although I could live without the iPad, it would be much more difficult to dispense with the world wide web altogether. I’ve become used to having volumes of information at my fingertips that would have been difficult for even my local research librarian to glean a mere 40 years ago.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, very much a voice for our age, counseled his friend that wealth was not in and of itself bad. What was bad was thinking we can’t live without it or that we should have it.

With stuff comes anxiety and the modern age is filled with anxiety. Thoreau’s image of the man pulling a massive barn-sized wagon down the road with all of his worldly possessions piled high in it comes to mind. There is something a whole lot simpler about a backpack.

How then did Mass Marketing and Consumerism arise? They arose out of the scale of production and the means to produce tens of thousands of an item, whereas previously only a hundred or two had been produced. They arose out of the dreams of our Victorian ancestors of what constituted progress and plenty.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were generally produced at home or in small shops. What today we call cottage industries. Local artisans and craftsmen produced goods to order in addition to what they produced for themselves. The extra money helped to supplement what was produced on the farm.

For example, in the American Revolution muskets and rifles were produced by hand. The British government contracted with gunsmiths to produce a certain number of weapons in a given period of time. An agent then went to the gunsmith’s place of business, collected the weapons, and paid the smith. The same was done for uniforms before the big textile mills were built.

The process was slow and costly. Production of goods was often secondary to the main livelihood of the producer, which was usually farming. With the advent of steam power and the invention of machines to manufacture goods, the scale of production went up. Instead of maybe ten or twenty pairs of socks a cottage industry could produce by hand, the mills could produce ten or twenty thousand in the same period of time or less.

This, however, caused a problem for the manufacturer. He simply had too many items on his hands. The cost to him to produce a thousand was often greater per item than to produce ten thousand. The economics of scale gives us a lower cost per item the more we produce because it is cheaper to buy in bulk than singly. So what was a manufacturer to do with the extra goods? Enter the Ad Man and the Salesman and the call, “What will ye buy?”

An interesting article is “The Commercial Christmas”, which gives a quick look at how the Victorians commercialized the holiday. And by 1890 editorials were appearing in The Ladies Home Journal complaining of Christmas being too commercial.

Today we have, through the world wide web, everything at our fingertips and ad agencies convince us we just can’t live without _________ (you fill in the blank). The amount of consumer debt is frightening. In the US, as of 31 March 2015, household debt was $11.85 trillion. Of that credit card debt was $684 billion. And as of the end of 2013 28% of Americans had more credit card debt than savings and only 51% had more emergency savings than credit card debt. And this doesn’t include other debt, such as school loans, car loans, and mortgages.

Consumerism is alive and well. Every government in the Western World worries when consumers stop spending and every developing country’s government tries to figure out how to get its people to buy. The modern world is built on consumerism.

So why don’t we see more of this in our retro-future novels? Clearly the Steampunk and Dieselpunk real life worlds saw the beginning of mass marketing and consumerism and were in large part formed by them.

Is it a case, perhaps as with television, they are so much with us we see no fictional value in them?

I think of the short-lived, late ‘80s sci-fi TV show Max Headroom. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it was a satirical and cyberpunk look at ourselves “20 minutes into the future”. The first episode, entitled “Blipverts”, explored mass marketing. [Spoiler alert here.] People were mysteriously exploding. It was discovered that Network 23 was using high-intensity commercials which had the ability to overload people’s nervous systems, causing them to explode.

Of interest is that the atmosphere of Max Headroom was about as depressingly noir as one can get. I think it was cyberpunk at its finest.

Surely there is something in this the steampunk or dieselpunk writer can use. After all both steampunk and dieselpunk are children of cyberpunk. I see both subgenres ignoring major expanses of territory which need to be explored. Where is the inventiveness of Jules Verne and H G Wells? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fritz Lang (the movie Metropolis from 1927).

Both subgenres are science fiction and from my observation (of my own work too), both have degenerated into using highly selective tropes to produce works which are simply mysteries or romances or adventure yarns set in an alternative historical universe. There is nothing wrong with this. I just think there is so much more. Something like “Blipverts”.

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8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks #35

Last week we found von Osler telling Rand Hart why he was so interested in the professional poker player. This was part of the conversation:

“I have no notoriety, if that is what you mean.”

Von Osler looked at Hart. “Precisely. That is what I mean. And you are skilled, creative, and lucky. You are exactly the person I was looking for. In point of fact, we’ve been watching you for some time.”

“Really?” The question dripped of sarcasm.

The question is, of course, why has von Osler invested so much time into learning about Hart. Was it all for just this one mission? Perhaps. Von Osler, though, has other things on his mind. Here is today’s snippet:

Von Osler nodded. “So, Herr Hart, if the airfare is going to be an issue, I will add another three thousand deutsche marks to cover tickets and expenses. Will you accept my little delivery job?”

“If I don’t?”

To be continued!

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8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks #34

Last week we learned Rand Hart was exactly who von Osler was looking for in a courier. This week we find out why. We begin this week’s snippet with the tail end of last week’s:

It was von Osler’s turn to look out the window. “Herr Hart, you are a simple man. Even, let us say, an invisible man. Yes?”

“I have no notoriety, if that is what you mean.”

“Really?” The question dripped of sarcasm.

To be continued!

If you write or read Dieselpunk, join in the fun: 8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks.

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The Wonderful Machine Age – His Master’s Voice

Who isn’t familiar with the picture of the dog focused on the phonograph horn listening to the voice of his deceased master? Such is the power of sound, especially familiar sounds.

While typing this post, I was listening to the incredibly beautiful work of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, entitled “The Solent”. Prior to 1877 such would not have been possible. For in that year, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and within decades home entertainment was revolutionized. The piano in the parlor began to collect dust and piano lessons began to become a thing of the past.

Edison’s machine used a needle to record little hills and valleys in a wax cylinder, which when played back produced sound. In 1887, Emile Berliner patented the gramophone which used a flat disc. The needle followed a track with moved side to side instead of up and down.

Below is Edison’s phonograph from 1899.

Eventually Berliner’s gramophone won the commercial battle because the process of producing records instead of cylinders was cheaper. A record cost 20¢, whereas a cylinder cost 50¢. For the cost of 2 cylinders, I could buy 5 records. Pretty simple math and the cylinder became a footnote in history. Ironically enough, Edison had already contemplated the disc but favored the cylinder because it was scientifically more perfect. I guess even geniuses make mistakes. And that’s why many of us grew up collecting records instead of cylinders.

Below is picture of a wind-up gramophone.

Edison’s phonograph was the first machine to both record and playback sound. However, an earlier machine, the phonautograph, invented in 1857, made a visual image of the voice for study by doctors and scientists. The image could not be played back. At least not until 2008 when, with the help of optical scanning and computers, the pictures were turned into digital audio files and listened to for the first time. The oldest recordings of the human voice.

Just as Bell had competition for the telephone, so did Edison with the phonograph. That competition came in the form of Charles Cros’ paleophone. Cros, who was a poet and amateur inventor, came up with the idea to use photoengraving to transfer the phonautograph image to a disc or cylinder for playback. He wrote a letter describing his idea and deposited it with the French Academy of Science on 30 April 1877. Cros’ idea became public on 10 October 1877, however by then he had improved upon his original concept by inventing a way to capture and record sound using an acid-etch method.

Learning of Edison’s machine, Cros had his April letter opened and claimed scientific priority over Edison.

Cros’ method became standard procedure to produce the metal masters from which the flat records could be pressed. Unfortunately, he died in 1888 and could not enjoy his triumph over Edison. Today, no one’s even acquainted with the name of Charles Cros.

The phonograph, or gramophone, is perhaps one of the most iconic inventions of The Machine Age. Rivaled only by the telephone and the automobile. It appeared at the age’s beginning and was going strong when the age faded away. Today, the phonograph has morphed into the ubiquitous iPod.

There was a gramophone on board the Graf Zeppelin on its round the world flight in August 1929. Brought on board by millionaire Bill Leeds, Commander Hugo Eckener had it promptly removed. Leeds retrieved the machine and told Eckener if weight was the problem he’d leave behind his luggage.

Bram Stoker, in his novel Dracula, had Doctor Seward record his diary on a phonograph. Seward, however, was worried the count might be able to melt the wax cylinders with his mysterious powers and destroy Seward’s recordings of the vampire’s machinations. That is perhaps the first literary example of the dictaphone, which has also gone digital.

Of equal lineage with the phonograph is the tape recorder. We don’t really use them anymore but we do use digital versions to record our voices.

The tape recorder was invented in 1886 by Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory. The machine used a strip of paper coated with beeswax. Magnetic recording was first conceived of in 1877 and demonstrated in 1898, first using wire and later tape.

Below is an early magnetic wire recorder from 1898.

The record player and tape recorder were everywhere in the 20th century — even more widespread than the TV. I think retro-futurist writers with a little imagination can easily come up with something true to form and yet truly fantastic. Bram Stoker did so simply by including a phonograph in his novel. Now what if that record player or tape recorder could fit inside a small brown box about the size of a deck of cards?

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8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks #33

While the offer is tempting, Rand Hart is still unsure about the situation. In last week’s portion of the conversation, we had:

“Must be something pretty big in that little box,” Hart said.

Von Osler picked up the small brown package and turned it in his hand. A smile touched his lips. “Let us say history is in this little box.”

Hart looked at von Osler. “History, huh? I suppose I have to pay my own airfare.”

“You will agree to deliver my tiny package?”

“Why don’t you just deliver it yourself? Or have some errand boy from your company drop it off?”

That is the question: why doesn’t von Osler simply have someone from his company deliver the darn box. Why go through all this folderol? Today, Hart gets the answer to that question. Here is today’s snippet:

“It is best if my company is not involved in the transaction. Nor do we want the German government implicated in any direct involvement.”

Hart’s eyes bored into the German. “So this isn’t as innocuous as you make it sound.”

It was von Osler’s turn to look out the window. “Herr Hart, you are a simple man. Even, let us say, an invisible man. Yes?”

“I have no notoriety, if that is what you mean.”

To be continued!

If you write or read Dieselpunk, join in the fun: 8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks.

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8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks #32

Last week we left off with Rand Hart ruminating:

Hart looked out the window. The Hindenburg was a couple hours away from Lakehurst. The ocean was giving way to the New Jersey shoreline. These occasional odd jobs were nothing new. They helped for those times when Lady Luck failed him. Most were very routine and this one sounded easy enough. There was a ship steaming west. Probably heading for the harbor in New York and maybe home.

So let’s pick up his conversation with von Osler where we left off:

“Must be something pretty big in that little box,” Hart said.
“Let us say history is in this little box.”
Hart looked at von Osler. “History, huh? I suppose I have to pay my own airfare.”
“You will agree to deliver the box?”
“Why don’t you just deliver it yourself? Or have some errand boy from your company drop it off?”

Why not some errand boy, indeed! To be continued!

If you write or read Dieselpunk, join in the fun: 8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks.

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The Wonderful Machine Age – Television

One of the things we take for granted here in the West is television. It is everywhere. You can find it in doctor’s and dentist’s offices, bars, and of course at home. Television is used for security monitoring and it has gone to outer space. Television is out of this world. Where would we be without it?

I have always known television. Growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I watched plenty of the black and white world of the tube. And when color came along in the later ‘60s, I thought I’d entered paradise.

Even though we may not be able to imagine a world where TV doesn’t exist, it wasn’t all that long ago that it didn’t exist. My parents grew up with radio for entertainment in the ‘30s and ‘40s. For them, television was something as fantastic as Buck Rogers and his space ship or Superman or Dorothy in Oz. I can remember my mother saying, while listening to radio dramas as a girl, how she wished she could see the show instead of just listen to it. She did get her wish.

So when did television begin? Would you believe the foundational technologies and machines responsible for TV were developed in the 1840s and 1850s? That the name itself was coined in 1900? And the first instantaneous transmission of images occurred in 1909? It is all true. The Victorian and Edwardian eras laid the foundation for what eventually became television.

I am continually amazed at how many things we take for granted today, were first conceived of or initially developed or had their roots in the Victorian era. The 19th century, second only to the 20th, was the most fertile time period for human inventiveness. The human imagination was operating on steroids.

Mechanical Television

Television, as we more or less know it today, began in the 1920s through the work of the Scottish inventor, John Logie Baird, and three Americans: Charles Francis Jenkins, Herbert E Ives, and Frank Gray (the latter two worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories).

The first TVs were mechanical devices and depended on a spinning disk called a Nipkow Disk for transmission of the picture. The disk separated a picture into lines which could then be transmitted by wire or wireless technology and then the disk played back the picture and the eye, due to persistence of vision, saw the picture as a unit.

Baird marketed his TV as the “Baird Televisor”. They were very expensive: costing $1000 back in the early depression. Somewhere between $13,000 and $14,000 today. A kit could be had for $39.50, or about $576 in today’s dollars.

The work of Ives and Gray led to the creation of the first television station, W2XB, known as WGY Television, in 1928 in the US. The station still operates today.

The BBC in 1929 had 30 regularly scheduled programs and in 1931 there were 25 stations broadcasting in the US, some in Iowa and Nebraska.

However the mechanical television had two major problems: small picture size and poor picture quality. Below is an example of what people would see on a Televisor. Do note, the reproduction is poorer than the actual image because the light level of the original is so low. But it gives you an idea of the wonder that was early TV.

This site has an animated version of what a mechanical TV picture was like: http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/MechanicalTV/MechanicalTV-1.html

The picture size was small due to practical limitations in how big the Nipkow disk could be made. Picture quality was poor due to there only being 30-60 lines per frame instead of the 525 for US standards or 625 for European standards.

Consequently, image size and quality killed mechanical television. The public just wasn’t interested. Broadcasts ceased in the US by 1933, except for a few universities which kept broadcasting until 1939. The BBC stopped in 1935 and the Soviet Union quit in 1937.

Electronic Television

While mechanical television was enjoying its day in the sun, work was progressing on the cathode ray tube, first invented in 1897. As early as 1914 a system for image transmission was developed, but image quality was very faint.

Image improvement came from Kálmán Tihanyi’s invention of “charge storage”, whereby the camera tube (or transmitting tube) accumulated and stored electrical charges which enhanced picture quality. RCA bought Tihanyi’s patents. In 1929, the first live human images were transmitted. They are 3 1/2 inches in size and used a system developed by Philo Farnsworth, a competitor to RCA.

The EMI engineering team in Britain won the race to produced a new camera which could make viable television images and in November 1936 began the world’s first regular high-definition television service.

Interestingly enough, Kálmán Tihanyi in 1936 described the principle of plasma display and the first flat-panel display system. Flat-screen TVs and Plasma TV are pure dieselpunk. Who would have thought it?

I don’t recall writers from the time period using TVs, which I find rather odd since they did exist. If they could envisioned fantastically futuristic airships, space ships, and death rays — why not fantastic televisions?

What’s even more odd, to my thinking, and I’m just as guilty, is why aren’t we retro-futurist writers putting TVs into our stories? Everything is possible in the retro-future, so why haven’t we put TVs into our stories?

The development of the TV is incredibly fascinating reading. Contributions came from all over Europe and the US to give us what we take for granted today. And now that I know about it, you can bet your next paycheck Rand Hart is going to be watching TV the next time he’s on the Hindenburg. Maybe a broadcast of the opera “Fedora” by Giordano.

Further Reading

http://www.earlytelevision.org/mechanical.html

http://www.tvhistory.tv/1920s%20TV%20Picture.htm

http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/MechanicalTV/MechanicalTV-1.html This site has an animated TV picture.

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8 Sentence Sunday On Dieselpunks #31

In today’s snippet from Rand Hart, we pick up where we left off last week in Hart’s conversation with von Osler. Last week we ended with Industrialist Herr von Osler saying, “Maybe. Maybe not. I would say the odds are in your favor this delivery will be quite routine.” We begin today’s snippet with Hart speaking.

“Only if Luck decides to be a lady.”

“As you say, Herr Hart.”

“Deliver the box and get a total of fifty thousand deutsche marks.”

“Yes.”

Hart looked out the window. The Hindenburg was a couple hours away from Lakehurst. The ocean was giving way to the New Jersey shoreline. This was nothing new. He did the occasional odd job. Helped for those times when Lady Luck failed him. This one sounded easy enough.

To be continued!

If you write or read Dieselpunk, join in the fun: 8 Sentence Sunday on Dieselpunks.

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The Wonderful Machine Age

The Machine Age is that glorious sixty-five years of scientific and especially technological development occurring between 1880 and 1945. Virtually everything we take for granted today, for good or for ill, has its origin in The Machine Age. In the coming weeks I’ll share with you some of the inventions, social movements, and artistic expressions originating in that glorious era when science and technology were going to solve all of our problems.

I became interested in The Machine Age when I started writing speculative fiction (or science fiction, if you prefer). And I soon discovered The Machine Age also touched upon the crime and horror fiction I also write, although much more indirectly. The Machine Age directly or indirectly touches on all writing.

Speculative fiction, whether heavily based in science or not, takes the known and extrapolates it into an alternative world from the one in which we live. That world might be in the future, another dimension, or an alternative past.

The speculative fiction I write falls into the subgenres of post-apocalyptic cozy catastrophes and dieselpunk. In both, I make heavy use of the wonders of The Machine Age.

In The Rocheport Saga, the hero, Bill Arthur, has set for himself the task of not letting the human race descend into the Stone Age after a mysterious illness wipes out nearly all of humanity. He is determined to overcome our modern lack of knowledge of how things work in order to rebuild society. The knowledge is all there, in books and old people, we just need to learn how to do what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did as a matter of course.

Bill Arthur takes comfort in the fact that The Machine Age inventions were largely produced by amateurs. The Wright brothers made bicycles and Santos-Dumont was a wealthy kid who liked to tinker — they weren’t aeronautical engineers. The Stanley twins, one a photographer and the other a school teacher, were not automotive engineers. Count Zeppelin was a retired military officer who knew nothing about flying. His chief engineer and designer, Ludwig Dürr, knew nothing about airships. And the greatest airship captain of all time, Hugo Eckener, was a journalist.

In a very real sense, amateurs built the foundations of our modern world. Therefore in the post-apocalyptic world of Rocheport and Bill Arthur, amateurs can do it again. People simply need to understand how things work.

In the Lady Dru series and the forthcoming Rand Hart series, I build dieselpunk alternative histories based on The Machine Age. From the late 1800s through World War II, the dreamers of what the future would be like came up with some pretty fantastic ideas. Robots to be our servants and fight our wars. Airships to provide safe and quiet transportation for people and cargo. Cities free from pollution and traffic congestion. And, yes, flying cars.

Those same dreamers also came up with things like particle beam weapons and orbiting parabolic mirrors to send the sun’s light in death rays to destroy cities. They even speculated on thought beam weapons. The flying wing, jet engines, the ballistic and cruise missiles also came from those same dreamers.

The Machine Age was a wonderful time of fantastic technological advancement. I look forward to sharing with you some of the things I’ve discovered while doing research for my novels and I hope you enjoy the discoveries as much as I did.

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