Visions of Electric Media

Front matter

7 llita: 814, oP a | Y9 y W c af Ly pe

/ Ivy Roberts

Television in the Victorian and Machine Ages

Table of Contents

1. The Telephonoscope: How a Satire of Electric Light became a Visual Telephone

2. The Far-Sight Machine and the Kinetograph How Television Brought Liveness to the Cinema

3. Human-Seeing Machines From Annihilating Space to Mediated Vision

Epilogue

Bibliography About the Author Index

List of Figures

Figure1. George Du Maurier, ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope, Punch, 9 December 1878.

Figure 2a. Thomas Alva Edison, Sketch of the Telephonoscope, Laboratory Notebooks, 2 April 1878.

Figure 2b. James E. Kelly, Sketch of the Telephonoscope, Laboratory Notebooks, 17 May 1878.

Figure 3. George Du Maurier, ‘A Suggestion (Fair Female Phonographers), Punch, 20 April 1878.

Figure 16.

Figure 17a.

Figure 17b.

Figure 18.

‘Awful Possibilities of the New Speaking Phonograph,’

Daily Graphic, 21 March 1878.

James E. Kelly, ‘Gossip, by the Megaphone,’ Scribner’s, November 1878.

‘Edison’s Megaphone,’ Scientific American, August 1878.

‘Edison’s Latest Inventions; More About Edison’s Wonders, Daily Graphic, 19 July 1878.

‘Brightness and Beauty, Punch, 13 November 1878.

‘The Coming Light,’ Judy, 24 December 1878.

‘Prometheus Unbound: Science in Olympus, Punch,

9 December 1878.

‘Museum of Modern Antiques,’ Punch, 9 December 1878.

‘Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Underclothing,’ Punch,

9 December 1878.

George Roux, ‘Telephote,’ in Jules Verne, ‘In the Twenty-ninth Century: The Day of an American Journalist in 2889, Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1910.

Shelford Bidwell, Telephotography, Nature 10 February 1881, 344-346.

Thomas Alva Edison, ‘Telegraphic Photography,’ Patent Series — Caveat Files: Case 115: Electric Light, Ore Milling, Phonograph, Telegraph, Telephone (12 May 1889) [PTo31AAF1, TAEM 113:497].

‘Henley and the March of Science, Penny Illustrated (London), 6 July 1889.

‘Professor Goaheadison’s Latest,’ Fun, 3 July 1889, 6.

‘Goaheadison’s Real Latest,’ Fun, 17 July 1889, 24.

‘Edison’s Phonographic Doll, Scientific American,

‘The Kinetograph,’ The Sun, 28 May 1891, 1-2.

Antonia Dickson, ‘Wonders of the Kinetoscope,’ Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, March 1895, 256, 257.

Constantin Senlecgq, ‘The Telectroscope’ The Electrician, 5 February 1881, 141-142.

George Carey’s Selenium Camera, ‘Seeing by Electricity, Scientific American, 5 June 1880, 355.

Shelford Bidwell, ‘Telegraphic Photography, Journal for the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians 10, September 1881, 357.

48 49

50 52 53

56 58

80 81 82

84 89

Figure 35.

Figure 36.

Figure 37.

Jan Szczepanik and his marvelous invention. ‘The Latest Triumph of Electricity, Illustrated London News, 23 April 1898, 593.

‘Siemens’ Sensitive Electric Eye’, Scientific American,

Fritz Lux, Der Elektrische Fernseher. Ludwigshafen, 1902.

Szczepanik’s Telectroscope. Cleveland Moffett, ‘Seeing by Electricity, Pearson’s Magazine, 1899.

Jan Szczepanik, ‘Method and Apparatus for Reproducing Pictures and the like at a Distance by Means of Electricity, British Patent 5031, 1897.

A. A. Campbell Swinton, schematic for distant electric vision, ‘Presidential Address, Journal of the Réntgen Society 8.30, 1912, 10.

Hugo Gernsback, ‘Television and the Telephot, Electrical Experimenter, May 1918.

‘How Television Equipment Works at One End of the Two-Way Line,’ illustrated by H. G. Seidstad for Popular Science. ‘Talk, Hear, SEE on This Phone: Two-Way Television Is Demonstrated in Laboratory As an Engineering Stunt,’ Popular Science, July 1930, 22.

Alden Armagnac, ‘A Telescopelike Window,’ Popular Science, 1929.

Illustration by Will B. Johnstone, ‘Face with the Smile, New York Morning World, 10 April 1930.

H. W. Secor, ‘Television, of the projection of pictures over a wire, Electrical Experimenter 3, August 1915, 131-132.

H. W. Secor, ‘Television Perfected at Last, Science and Invention, 1927.

C. H. W. Nason, ‘A Short Course in Television,’ Television News, 1931, 31.

Armagnac, ‘Television Brought into the Home,’ Popular Science Monthly, April 1928, 20-21, 143.

Jenkins Televisor, Modern Mechanics, January 1929.

‘How the Light Waves from the Subject are Transmitted by Radio and Converted back into a Picture at the Receiver, in ‘What Television Offers You’, Popular Mechanics, November 1928, 820-824.

141 141

Sanabria Television System, Television News, September-October 1931.

‘The Transmitter for Radio Pictures,’ in ‘Television for the Home, Popular Mechanics, April 1928, 531.

‘The Ultimate System,’ in David Sarnoff, ‘Where Television Stands Today,’ Modern Mechanics, April 1932, 42.

Zworykin’s ‘Iconoscope’ Cathode Ray Tube (1933) in Alden Armagnac, ”Human-Eye” Camera Opens New Way to Television, Popular Science, September 1933, 11.

‘Seeing is a partnership of vision and lighting, in Matthew Luckiesh and Frank Moss, ‘The new science of seeing, Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society, January 1930, 17.

Representation of the CIE standard observer, colour-matching functions, CIE standard colour space.

Graphic representations of the Fechner Law ‘Color-matching functions for the 1931 CIE standard observer expressed in the CIE colorimetric coordinate system,’ in Deane Judd, ‘Fundamental Studies of Color Vision from 1860-1960, NAS Symposium 55, 1966, 1326.

‘Radiant flux of the spectrum primaries,’ in Deane Judd, ‘Fundamental Studies of Color Vision from 1860-1960, NAS Symposium 55, 1966, 1314.

‘Color-matching functions expressed relative to the Young primaries,’ in Deane Judd, ‘Fundamental Studies of Color Vision from 1860-1960, NAS Symposium 55, 1966, 1316.

‘Electric eye that never sleeps’ (Westinghouse Ad), Popular Science, February 1930, 7

A. R. Olpin, ‘New Types of Photoelectric Cells, Television News, July 1931, 212-214.

E. E. Free, ‘Magic Cell Works New Marvels: An Expert Tells How Photo-Electric “Eyes” Bring Television Nearer and Promise to Harness the Sun,’ Popular Science, October 1928, 25-26.

Front of the 1927 model. Photo courtesy of the Early Television Museum, Hillard, OH.

Invitation letter accompanying invitation card and instructions (left). Television Demonstration Invitation

175 178

Card, front and back (right). Photographs courtesy of the Early Television Museum, Hillard, OH.

1930 version of the Bell Labs two-way television.

Interior of Television Booth. Popular Mechanics, June 1930.

Opposite pages illustrating the electron camera and receiver, with a backdrop of the Baird Television Studios. ‘Electronic camera “shoots” television images, Popular Mechanics, June 1935, 878; ‘London station to serve ten million, Popular Mechanics, June 1935, 879.

Studio tour illustrating the onscreen subjects (above) and the engineers at home viewing their product (outline added). George Waltz, ‘Get it on television,’ Popular Science, July 1931, 16.

‘When we have Television...’ Punch, 4 May 1927.

221 236

How do ‘new’ media become old? What determines the ‘newness’ of a technology? This introductory chapter engages questions related to history, technology, culture, and communication as well as examines the cultural context in which a new technology informs our understanding of its changing identity. The success and failure of new technologies depends heavily on the cultural expectations of its emergence. This study of early ‘speculative era’ television begins with a foundation in the history and theory of new media and a call to adopt an historically reflective view of technological development. After laying a foundation for the study of ‘new’ media and technological change, this chapter provides an overview of the chapters and what to expect.

Keywords: Media history; media theory; cultural studies; media archaeology; new media; television

In its most literal form, ‘tele-vision’ means ‘seeing at a distance’ (tele=distant, videre=to see). Television relates to the uses of technological and electrical apparatuses that make it possible to see into the distance. That is, the viewer is not looking out over the horizon with bare eyes, or even gazing through a telescope. The precise term, ‘television’, was coined in 1900." Before then, television was known by many names, such as the telectroscope, the telephonoscope, and the diaphote. Nineteenth-century inventors dreamt of ‘seeing by electricity’. After 1900, new names emerged, indicating a growing cultural obsession with television: the telephote, the Ikonophone, the

1 Constantin Perskyi, ‘Television Using Electricity, in Congres International D. Electricite (International Congress on Electricity of1900) (Paris: Gauthier —Villars, 1901); R.W. Burns, Television: An International History ofthe Formative Years (London: Institutions of Electrical Engineers, 1998), 106; George Shiers, Early Television: A Bibliographic Guide (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 36.

Roberts, I., Visions of Electric Media: Television in the Victorian and Machine Ages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 DOI 10.5117/9789462986596_INTRO

Ikonoscope. The prospect of visual radio (radiovision) became popular, but people wondered whether it would be a fleeting fad. By the mid twentieth century, television became synonymous with broadcast and programming. By the time television emerged as a mass media in the 1950s, it had become a fixed idea.

Over the course of what has been termed its ‘speculative era’, ‘television’ evolved from a rough concept into a functional technology, eventually becoming a mass medium.’ Television’s speculative era spans two distinct periods. The Victorian Age, broadly understood as the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901), more generally applies to late nineteenth-century culture. The Machine Age, a term coined by historian of technology Lewis Mumford, refers to the early 20th-century culture of scientific progress, manufacturing, and industry?

The first printed reference to anything resembling an electronic screen appeared in 1877.4 On the heels of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention and demonstrations of the telephone, speculation began to circulate about a visual adjunct that would make it possible to see the person on the other end of the line. In announcements of new inventions and breakthroughs, journalists bemoaned the death of theatre.5 Satirists illustrated caricatures of the apocalyptic consequences of new media. Rumours circulated about how the very foundation of society would change irrevocably upon the arrival of a device for ‘seeing by electricity’. Electronic capabilities to support

2 RW. Burns, ‘Part I: The Era of Speculation 1877 to c. 1922, in Television: An International History of the Formative Years (London: Institutions of Electrical Engineers, 1998), 3-140; Shiers, Early Television; Andreas Fickers, ‘Television,’ in The Handbook of Communication History, ed. Peter Simonson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 239.

3 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9;John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 191-1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979); J. P. Telotte, A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999); David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1-2; Nicholas Daly, ‘The Machine Age, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Osborne, Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and A. J. Thacker (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).

4 The Electrician, ‘The Electroscope, letter to the editor, New York Sun, 30 March 1877; Louis Figuier, ‘Le Telectroscope,’ in L’'Annee Scientifique et Industrielle (1877).

5 ‘Edison’s Last,’ Boston Journal, 13 May 1889; ‘What Edison Claims,’ Chicago Journal, 13 May 1891.

6 ‘Untitled’ (This discovery mania), New York Tribune, 14 May 1878; ‘Professor Goaheadison’s Latest,’ Fun, 3 July 1889.

a television industry on a practical basis showed signs of maturity by the year 1930. In the intervening 50 years or so, a rich, diverse visual culture of ‘television’ emerged, creating expectations and myths about new media.

There is no question that, today, television is again undergoing a transition.” Some call it the ‘death of television’. Others herald the birth of convergence culture.’ The shift from broadcast to online delivery indicates a change in platform as well as the form of television programming. With such changes, one might ask if watching YouTube or Netflix constitutes a television experience, or if a new term is required altogether. Given the uncertain state of television today, there is no time like the present to ask, ‘when was television born’? To understand what television has become in the early 21st century, we need to look back to what television was before it became a mass medium.

Like the death of print, talk has been circulating for over a decade about the death of television. Television superseded radio, and the web and mobile media will supersede television, they say. Television producers and studios bemoan falling Nielsen ratings, declining viewership, and leaks and bootlegs. Fears such as these should be countered by recognizing that the media exist in harmony with culture. The media evolve, responding to cultural needs, economic capabilities, and technological possibilities. We need a new paradigm; we need to replace ‘supersession’ with ‘transition’.

This book engages the question of how new media and technology come into being, and the forces that conspire to bring one possible future into existence over another. Televisual culture in the Victorian and Machine ages created expectations about what television would become: idealistic, maybe; futuristic, certainly. ‘Television’ coalesced decades before engineers made images appear on screens. Engineers and inventors, journalists and writers, and artists and philosophers contributed to a dense and varied discussion about ‘television’. The general public also played an important role in constructing expectations about new technology. Responses to media announcements, letters to the editor, and rumour-laden op-eds document the vast range of speculations, anxieties, and expectations that existed

7 Amanda Lotz, The Television Will be Revolutionized, second edition (New York: NYU Press, 2014); Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Peele Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds, The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009).

8 c.f. William Uricchio, ‘The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television,’ in The Youtube Reader, eds. Peele Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 24; Henry Jenkins, ‘What Happened Before Youtube?’ in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 109.

before the rise of mainstream popular science. Television’s speculative era constitutes a distinct televisual culture in which agents (audiences, producers, inventors, engineers, critics, etc.) contribute to ways of thinking about ‘seeing by electricity’. The visual rhetoric and discourse of television’s speculative era provides a baseline for the study of media in transition.

This book promotes a conception of technology as a product of the imagination, sometimes called ‘imaginary media’? The possibilities of technology are limited only to what the inventor can dream and what the engineer can make possible. From an historical perspective, there is little difference between the imaginings of a science-fiction author and the inventor’s actual functional technology. The visual rhetoric and discourse of television’s speculative era highlights the peculiar similarities between science fiction and invention. Science-fiction authors wrote about it. Albert Robida ‘invented’ FaceTime, in the form of the telephonoscope, in 1882.’° Hugo Gernsback prophesized modern uses of television in his Telephote (1918)." Inventors toiled over designs and filed patents. Journalists speculated on the cultural uses of television. Science-fiction texts, along with news articles, rumours, and satirical illustrations, converge into a discourse that creates expectations about new technologies and media.

A New Approach to Old Media

The early 21st-century media landscape has been labelled a convergence culture and a participatory culture. Futurist thinking identifies ‘emerging media’ as if some progress were taking place. But ‘new media’ is a misnomer. The very term clouds the fact that media are in a state of constant transition. Are we living in a post-cinema or post-television age? In order to address the question of whether or not a change is really taking place, we need to rephrase the question itself. If we move past media form and supersession, the conversation becomes one of historical change and media in transition.

9 Eric Kluitenberg, ‘On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 48-69; Simone Natale and Gabriele Balbi, ‘Media and the Imaginary in History: The Role of the Fantastic in Different Stages of Media Change,’ Media History 20, no. 2 (2014): 203-218.

10 Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century), (Paris: Librairie Illustree, 1882; Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

11 Hugo Gernsback, ‘Television and the Telephot, Electrical Experimenter, May 1918.

A contextual approach to media history acknowledges that every ‘old’ or obsolete technology was once new, novel, and innovative. Media historians who adopt this approach have examined early photography, telegraphy, and motion pictures in many contexts. In their volume New Media, Old Media, editors Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan suggest an historical approach to ‘new media’ or ‘emerging media’..* David Thornburg and Henry Jenkins prefer the designation ‘media in transition’.’3 Film historian Rick Altman calls his method ‘crisis historiography’, referring to media in historical periods of identity crisis and change. ‘We find that the technology today confidently called cinema was for over a decade considered quite differently by its contemporaries. In their early years, projected moving images were subjected to multiple contradictory definitions and treatments|...]. New technologies are always born nameless.”4 In Silent Film Sound, Altman reveals that the very name we use today to refer to cinema before the coming of sound establishes an historically contingent designation that gets in the way of understanding how contemporary audiences would have experienced it.

‘Media in transition’ acknowledges that technologies are always in a state of flux. This is certainly true today, as the meaning of television and film are adapting to new systems for production and delivery. In a post-broadcast age, media industries are struggling with ways to identify film (‘digital cinema’?) and television (‘digital video content’?). Perhaps instead of focussing on the form, we can redirect our attention to the way these new configurations change and adapt to social and cultural conditions. Just because Netflix makes it easier for viewers to binge on television programmes does not mean that it was impossible to do so before digital content delivery. The habit became more pronounced, but it is not an entirely new behaviour.

Because media technologies are in a process of constant flux, reacting and adjusting to cultural and technological conditions, I adopt an interdisciplinary framework that accommodates a variety of perspectives. I approach production, practice, representation, and reception as various forms of discourse. Along the way, I acknowledge historical context and the many uses of media. Like media in transition, interdisciplinarity is always unsettled. Never satisfied with a single interpretive lens, interdisciplinarity aims to

12 Wendy Chun, ‘Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?’, in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-2. See also Benjamin Peters, ‘And Lead Us Not Into Thinking the New is New: a Bibliographic Case for New Media History, New Media & Society 11, no. 1-2 (2009): 13-30.

13 David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, eds. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

14 Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 19.

account for the multidimensionality and complexity of its objects of study.

This book conceptualizes the products and events of late nineteenth- and

early 20th-century cultural history, the history of technology and science,

and media history as examples of an ongoing visual rhetoric and discourse of ‘tele-vision’.

The visual rhetoric and discourse of speculative-era televisual culture comprises:

— Satirical illustrations published in magazines and newspapers;

— Illustrations of inventions published in technical journals and popular literature;

— Perspectives of journalists published in newspapers, magazines, and books, which comment upon and document the negative, positive, and conflicted views about this new invention of ‘seeing by electricity’;

— Commentary published in newspaper and magazine editorials and letters to the editor;

- So-called ‘ego-documents’ published in newspapers, magazines, and books by inventors and their supporters.

In identifying these resources as a discourse, this book draws on Foucauldianinspired cultural history. French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault developed two methods for the study of history throughout his career: archaeology and genealogy. I use a mixture of both, as they have been incorporated into current methods in the study of cultural history.

Whereas Foucault proposes archaeology as a method for the ‘history of the present’, his genealogy has been adopted more earnestly. But historians generally consider archaeology to be deterministic, a way of telling the story of the past teleologically. In comparison to archaeology, genealogy conveys a greater appreciation for the similarities and differences between historical periods, for cultural forces and agencies.

Additionally, art historians have adapted the method of semiotics for the study of images.° From this perspective, images as well as words constitute a discourse: communicating and contributing to an ongoing conversation.

15 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972); Aletta Biersack and Lynn Avery Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Victoria Bonnell, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Richard Biernacki, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); John Neubauer, ed. Cultural History after Foucault (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999). 16 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988). See also Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977); Michael Baxandall, Patterns of intention: On the historical explanation of pictures (Yale University Press,

Figure 1. George Du Maurier, ‘Edison's Telephonoscope; Punch, 9 December 1878.

Notably, Lynda Hunt’s Myths of Sexuality extends a method for the semiotic reading of images in art and history. The emerging fields of visual studies, visual culture studies, and visual studies in science address the visual rhetoric and discourse of images in culture, science, and history.”

The Birth of a New Medium

In 1878, Punch illustrator and humorist George du Maurier drew a picture of ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope’ (Figure 1). Imagining it as a marvelous new invention that could connect two remote places, the satire attributed the telephonoscope to American inventor Thomas Edison. Edison had recently made a name for himself with the phonograph and the carbon telephone. In 1878, Edison also unveiled several new devices that seemed to push the limits of what was possible. The megaphone was said to allow the deaf to

1985); Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, ‘Semiotics and Art History, The Art Bulletin 73, No. 2 (June 1991), 174-208.

17 James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl, Imagery in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

hear. The electric light would revolutionize power and energy, bringing a source of clean and safe illumination to the home. Du Maurier’s illustration suggested the next new thing: visual telephony. The telephonoscope would supersede the telephone before it even reached the market.

While Du Maurier’s illustration looks to us like a television screen, a nineteenth-century observer would not have seen it that way. With no concept of ‘television’, a reader of Punch might have noticed a resemblance between the telephonoscope and a mirror or an enormous photographcome-to-life. Alexander Graham Bell had only recently begun demonstrating his talking telegraph to a popular audience. It would be decades before the telephone reached that audience. This period of discovery mania sometimes called the technological revolution sparked discussion in scientific communities about the possibility of extending the range of vision as well as hearing. The sky was the limit. Popular rumour also contributed to these discussions, fuelling speculation and helping to construct expectations about new technology.

A contemporary reader would have drawn associations between Du Maurier’s ‘Telephonoscope’ and current rumours about new technologies. They might have recognized that Edison had in fact announced the invention of a telephonoscope to the public earlier that year. Since the initial neologism telephonoscope attracted so much ridicule, Edison settled on calling his ‘ear telescope’ a megaphone (Figure 2).'8 A contemporary reader could not have failed to recognize in Du Maurier’s ‘Telephonoscope’ a hint of satire and commentary on Edison’s current enterprise, electric light. In October 1878, Edison’s announcement of the invention of electric light sparked furious debate and speculation. Discussion ranged from exaggerated promotion to denial and rejection. Punch’s December 1878 issue reflected and contributed to the ongoing discussion of new technology and its effects on everyday life.

To a 21st-century observer, however, ‘Edison's Telephonoscope’ is nothing but a television. The goal of media history scholarship should be to address the discrepancy between these two perspectives. In this book, I propose to examine speculative-era moving-image media technologies with the goal of uncovering trends, shifts, and continuities. By acknowledging historical, contextual, technological, and cultural perspectives, media-history scholars can become aware of the many uses of old technology. Such a perspective reconfigures the ‘Telephonoscope’ from a television into a satire of electric light.

18 ‘Edison’s ‘Ear Telescope, New York Sun, 8 June 1878.

Figure 2a. Thomas Alva Edison, Sketch of the Telephonoscope, Laboratory Notebooks, 2 April 1878.

Figure 2b. James E. Kelly, Sketch of the Telephonoscope, Laboratory Notebooks, 17 May 1878.

20 VISIONS OF ELECTRIC MEDIA Chapter Outline

By defining ‘tele-vision’ as ‘seeing at a distance’ (tele=distant, videre=to see), Visions of Electric Media adopts a view of media technology in a constant state of transition. Any given cultural moment assigns an identity to a media form that supports, encourages, and facilitates the needs of audiences and inventors alike. Media identity is intertwined with its culture of origin. By looking at the late nineteenth- and early 2oth-century expectations of television, it is the goal of this book to defamiliarize the concept of television (presumably an immutable form), in order to speculate on the cultural uses, connections, and intersections of media in transition. Each chapter examines the relation of media technologies to conceptions of the body, the evolution of systems and networks, relationships between humans and machines, and enduring themes of control, communication, and ocularcentrism.

Visions of Electric Media investigates the many fluxing identities of ‘television’ before the invention of a functional apparatus in the late 1920s. The book consists of five chapters, organized into two parts. Part One examines late nineteenth-century speculative-era television, focussing on the cultures and technologies of ‘seeing by electricity’. Part Two investigates the 2oth-century transitions from mechanical to electronic engineering, focussing on the work performed at Bell Laboratories. By looking at the evolving discourse of television across the Victorian and Machine ages, I identify continuities and discontinuities between televisual culture in each age.

The telephonoscope emerged in the context of late nineteenth-century ‘discovery mania’. Victorian engineers began the project of designing television as a means to ‘annihilate space’. They pictured mirror-like screens and devices modelled after electrical telegraphs. The faith in the inevitability of technological progress drove inventors and audiences alike. Even though ‘seeing by electricity’ went down in history as a pipe dream, it continued to provide the impetus for engineers to develop televisual systems into the next century.

The assumptions underlying ‘seeing by electricity’ shaped the expectations and reception of television in later periods. A major transformation occurred at the turn of the century when engineers began to adopt a new way of thinking about distance communications. Engineers discarded the simple notion that a standalone device could do the work of bridging a gap between two places. While the analogy between the mechanical screen and the human eye persisted, designs matured into the reality of large technical systems. Machine-Age engineers adopted a new way of thinking about television that encompassed the wide expanse between viewers at either end of the circuit as part of a technological system.

When engineers finally achieved success with television systems in the 19208, it became apparent that electronic screens were not going to live up to the Victorian ideal of the magic mirror. These technological systems constructed a new relationship between viewer and screen, displacing the Victorian expectation of the ‘annihilation of space’ with a modern communications paradigm. The cognitive dissonance between the knowledge of a person on the other end of the line and the picture one saw on the screen was a challenging perception to overcome.

The Machine-Age press documented these first impressions, from newspaper announcements and magazine editorials to lectures, textbooks, and popular science. But while journalists and readers continued to imagine ‘seeing by electricity’ as a sign of the ‘annihilation of space’, engineers struggled to explain the processes in which electrical signals travelled along telephone cables and over radio waves. Engineers took on the job of making the presence of the person depicted on the screen seem as real as possible. While they recognized that there was nothing natural about such a relationship, their goal became to make the act of using television as effortless as possible. Television’s speculative era marks the shift from a culture of face-to-face presence to one of simulated presence. The modern, designed world grew up into artificial spaces engineered to seem natural.

If it has not already become apparent, the interdisciplinary study of speculative-era television history involves a diverse library of literature and methodology. As such, I have introduced the foundational works that support a contextual media history informed by cultural history and the history of technology. No single method accounts for both the technological development and the cultural construction of speculative-era television history. Therefore, I take advantage of different methods in each chapter.

Chapters One and Two investigate late nineteenth-century cultures and inventions for ‘seeing by electricity’: telephonoscopes, telectroscopes, telegraphic photography, and the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope. Inventors, engineers, and journalists alike identified ‘seeing by electricity’ as a tool for connecting people across vast distances, principally a form of visual telephony. I begin by investigating the circumstances surrounding George Du Maurier’s illustration of ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope’ published in Punch in December 1878. Media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic met Edison’s inventions with a mixture of zeal and scepticism. Contemporary readers would have been acutely aware of Edison’s invention of the telephonoscope (ear telescope or megaphone) and his claims to the invention of electric light that fall. I introduce the concept of ‘technological folklore’ to account for the rumours, hearsay, and journalist commentary that contributed to the construction of cultural representations of the telephonoscope and electric light.” Building on works from print history such as Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts and Grooves, Altick’s Punch, and Secord’s Victorian Sensation, I argue that ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope’ represents ‘discovery mania’ by negotiating between the exaggerated claims of invention and the satirical rejection of new technology for its own sake.”° This chapter encourages media historians to weigh the presentist perspective, which associates ‘Edison's Telephonoscope’ with a television or electronic screen, with the view of the contemporary reader, who would have made sense of the depiction not as a prophecy, but as a speculation and critique of technology.

Chapter Two leaps ahead ten years in order to address the aftermath. In 1889, Edison announced his invention of a ‘Far-Sight Machine’ in the lead-up to the Columbian Exposition (1893). When he unveiled his Kinetograph and Kinetoscope to the public in 1891, the subsequent confusion fuelled speculation of a hybrid electric-photography instrument that could transmit live images (like a television) as well as reproduce scenes (like the cinema). This discussion dovetailed into early cinema mythology that bolstered its identity as a spectacular attraction.