O Say Can You See?

The once-and-future spirit of Discovery

I felt like a kid again. On the morning of April 17, I stood amid a crowd of fellow staffers on the rooftop terrace of the National Museum of American History, waiting expectantly for the flyover of space shuttle Discovery. This shuttle, which flew the final shuttle mission, was taking its victory laps over Washington before retiring to the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport. Just before 10 a.m., Discovery came out of the western sky, strapped to its 747 mother ship and escorted by a single jet fighter that looked puny by comparison. My mind flashed back to a day in April 1981 when I was visiting the Science Museum in London. The whole museum came to a halt to watch a video feed of the landing of Columbia, the first of the shuttles. At once exultant and sad, I knew Discovery's final flight sealed the end of the shuttle program that had for a time thrilled the world.

Space shuttle Discovery, mounted atop a NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), flies over the Washington skyline as seen from a NASA T-38 aircraft, Tuesday, April 17, 2012. Photo by Robert Markowitz, courtesy of NASA.

As Discovery passed by the Washington Monument, I could hardly imagine anything more, well, patriotic. For 45 minutes it banked majestically over the city. The crowd, gazing skyward through sunglasses, binoculars, and camera lenses, completed the picture in a familiar scene—almost a cliché—from every space launch with humans onboard. But this flight was different. Discovery was not going into orbit but to its final, appropriate resting place in “Museumland.” After three decades, the space shuttles are now history, relics of 1970s technology. Yet, for their day, the shuttles were an amazing feat of engineering. When other American and Soviet orbiters simply parachuted to earth or ocean after completing their missions, the shuttles flew, glided, landed, and went back into space again. Discovery completed a record thirty-nine missions.

Eerily, just as Discovery appeared on the horizon, I heard the words of Joseph Henry (1797-1878), the Smithsonian’s first Secretary, echoing from the museum’s Mall entrance. It seemed almost on cue, but it was just a fantastic coincidence. Actually, it was the amplified voice of costumed actor Dwane Starlin, who at 10 o’clock every morning greets visitors at the museum, speaking in Henry’s own words about his vision of the early Smithsonian (and giving a preview of the exhibitions inside the museum). One of Starlin’s special talents is that he never drops out of character. You can’t trick him; I know because I’ve tried. That morning—I couldn’t quite hear—I’m sure he remarked on the sight of the space shuttle, which in fact flew over the Smithsonian Castle, where Henry lived and presided. I’m equally confident that he never let on to knowing anything about the mysterious machines overhead.

Dwane Starlin in character as Secretary Joseph Henry. Smithsonian photo.

The unexpected coincidence of Henry’s words with Discovery’s flyover led me to ponder what the real Henry would have thought about the advances in aeronautical engineering 150 years into the future. Could he have ever envisioned something like Discovery being brought into the Smithsonian collections?

Portrait of Joseph Henry (1797-1878), physicist and first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1846-1878). Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives

 

Thaddeus Lowe’s balloon experiment, with crowd watching, c. 1863. Unidentified photographer, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 54, Folder 09E, negative #SIA2011-0961.

 

The most famous American physicist of the 19th century and a pioneer in electrical invention, Henry was versed in the latest advances in American science and technology. Though he died a quarter-century before the historic flight of the Wright brothers, he had some involvement with human flight through ballooning. During the Civil War, Henry gave his endorsement to Thaddeus Lowe, a New Hampshire inventor and meteorologist, who offered his services to the Union cause. Lowe said he could use his balloons for aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions, and showed that it was possible to communicate from balloon to ground by telegraph, an invention that owed much to Henry’s experiments three decades earlier. The Smithsonian Secretary supported Lowe to become head of the Balloon Corps, but first insisted on a careful review of his claims and proposals to ensure that they were consistent with meteorological and other physical laws. Henry advised Lowe that only powered, heavier-than-air vehicles, which did not yet exist, could attempt to fly against the direction of air currents; lighter-than-air balloons would always be subject to the winds.

Henry regarded himself a scientist, but he was fascinated by technology and was always willing to give advice to serious inventors. Most prized of all by Henry were technologies of discovery—those at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. If guided by science, Henry saw no limits to what technology could do. This spirit of discovery was what he instilled into the Smithsonian. So, would he have been shocked by an aircraft called Discovery? On reflection, I don’t think so.

For more on one of Discovery's most beloved crew members, see Margaret Weitekamp’s blog post about the donation of Buzz Lightyear to the collections of the National Air and Space Museum by Toy Story creator, John Lasseter. And in the “Did you know?” department, one of Thaddeus Lowe’s balloons was named Enterprise, just like the shuttle at the Udvar-Hazy Center that Discovery is replacing!

Art Molella is director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

Today, the "Dog Vacuum." Tomorrow, who knows?

Recently, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation partnered with ePals, an online network for K-12 students, parents, and teachers, on an Invention Challenge. We asked students to use up to five common household items to invent a new product that will make their daily life easier, more fun or more efficient. They described their invention either in a 1-minute video, a 3-slide PowerPoint presentation, or a 250-word document with a digital image uploaded to the ePals Global Community.

Judging the ePals Invention Challenge was one of the most inspiring, rewarding (not to mention fun) things I’ve done at work in recent months. Along with two of my Lemelson Center colleagues, I judged more than 50 contest entries for “originality, effectiveness, creativity, and technical quality” and awarded points in each of these categories. Entries came from students in kindergarten through high school in six different countries.

The inventions ranged from fun and whimsical (the Dog Vacuum) to smart and practical (the Cycle Umbrella). But no matter what the idea, all of the projects showed a high level of creative thought by the students and demonstrated their ability to think critically, problem solve, collaborate with others, and communicate their ideas. Opportunities like the Invention Challenge allow students to practice these 21st century skills and apply them to problems and challenges in the classroom and beyond. Today, the Dog Vacuum. Tomorrow, who knows?

*Meet Our Winners*

Watch the slideshow

Tricia Edwards is an education specialist for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Editor’s note: This blog is the second of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

There is always something new waiting to be discovered at the Smithsonian, whether it is an artifact, a recorded sound, or an overlooked story.

Over the past two years, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Peter Alyea at the Library of Congress have partnered with the National Museum of American History to coax sound recordings dating to the 1880s into telling (and singing!) their stories. The recovered recordings are the Volta Laboratory Associates’ early experiments at recording and even reproducing live sound. These recordings were made in Washington, D.C., by Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. In some ways, the inventors anticipated the modern music industry. They experimented with reproduction and copying techniques for possible mass-consumption of their discs, and, unlike Edison’s phonograph cylinders, the Volta records were durable enough to be played multiple times.

Some of the Volta recordings were on wax mounted to pasteboard, a material similar to the covers of a hard-back book. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

Over 130 years after the Volta group sealed some of these recordings in tin boxes and deposited them in a vault at the Smithsonian, the Volta objects in the museum’s Work and Industry collection have been given back their voice. On Tuesday, December 13, 2011, the recordings were played publicly for the first time.

The sound recovery project has inspired others to look more closely at the Volta collection. Lemelson Center Fellow Patrick Feaster has been examining the museum’s experimental recordings to prepare a discography.

Patrick Feaster examines and photographs the early sound collection for his discography project. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

As Dr. Feaster worked with our collection of about 400 objects this fall, a handful of previously uncatalogued, virtually unknown Volta artifacts surfaced. About forty of these early recordings had stayed off the radar because they had never been assigned proper catalog numbers. This is highly unusual from a modern collections management point of view; today, new objects are almost immediately assigned unique numbers upon their entry into the collection. But for some reason, this had not happened to these discs. Though well taken care of, they had become a bit of a Smithsonian mystery. We’ve been able to listen to a few of the discs, but what else could they bring to light?

Early sound recordings have been stored at the Smithsonian for decades. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

My task was to examine and number these records to finally give them an official home within the larger Smithsonian numbering system. I gently inspected discs made of everything from copper (now chipping due to age) to cardboard to fragmenting plaster. Some discs had bits of foil imbedded in the wax coating the pasteboard, and others had notes etched into them by Bell and his associates. I found other strange, square-shaped objects that turned out to be impressions of recordings intended to be used for mass-reproduction.

These early recording prototypes would be abandoned in the late 1880s in favor of Volta’s wax cylinders, which were used for dictation and stenographic office work as late as the 1930s. But physically interacting with the Volta inventors’ initial creative thought processes was a privilege, and I was fascinated with the idea that these delicate discs have so much to tell and are now getting the chance.

The discs in the collection were made using a variety of metals, paper, wax, and foil. Photo by Christine Klepper.

So far, the voices on these previously unplayable discs remain unidentified. The next step for the recordings will be to recover and analyze those formerly silent voices. As the project moves forward, it is likely that we will be able to clearly identify Alexander Graham Bell himself.

Hear the Volta Labs Recordings, 1880-1885

PART 1: Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Annie Dobberteen is an intern in the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

 

The Italian soul of Steve Jobs

As far as anybody knows, Steve Jobs did not have a drop of Italian blood, even by osmosis from his adoptive parents. Yet he clearly had a strong affinity for Italy. According to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of the Apple genius, Jobs’s attendance at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1981 was a seminal moment, a turning point in his career. The meeting that year was devoted to the Italian style and included, among other celebrities, designer Mario Bellini, filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, carmaker Sergio Pininfarina, and Fiat heiress Susanna Agnelli. As a result, “I had come to revere the Italian designers … and it was an amazing inspiration,” he told Isaacson. From the Italians, he imbibed the principles of simple functional design that came to define his technological style and accounted for much of his spectacular business success. When he returned to run Apple in 1997, it was no surprise that he sought out such top names in Italian design as legendary car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro and architect/designer Ettore Sottsass, famous for his work at the Olivetti Company, which we’ll hear more about in a moment.

Time and again, that sense of style proved to be his comparative advantage in the digital marketplace. The development of the iPod is a prime case in point. Although he always loved music, Jobs awoke almost too late to the business possibilities of marrying personal computers with recorded sound. Capitalizing on the digital music craze, HP and other computer companies started including CD burners in their machines so users could create their own digital music mix.

Other start-ups had already come up with portable music players using the MP3 format. Suddenly realizing all this, Jobs told Issacson, “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.” And catch up he did, with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the fantastically successful iPod, a miracle of simplicity and functionality. What made the difference between Apple’s iPod and every other portable music player was the pure white minimalist concept conceived by Apple’s design chief, Jonathan (Jony) Ive, who epitomized the same ethos of functional simplicity. As soon as he saw Ive’s prototype, Jobs knew that the look and feel of the Apple iPod were destined for success.

Since his death, Jobs has been compared to other great technological visionaries. Isaacson likens him to Thomas Edison, others to Edwin Land. But what did he have in common with all those Italian designers who had made such an impression on him? A comparable figure, to my mind, would be Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), one of the most influential designers of the 20th century, in Italy or anywhere else, for that matter. Inheriting the business from his father Camillo in the 1930s, Adriano was president and guiding spirit of the Olivetti Company, famed for its elegant typewriters and business machines. A leader, like Jobs, in the high-tech manufacturing sector of his day, Adriano developed Olivetti into a hugely successful firm with global reach and reputation. In the 1950s, his company launched the mainframe Elea computer line and, in the 1980s, even a PC, the Olivetti M20, all stamped with the company’s signature style. (In a monumentally bad business decision, the company eventually shed its computer business.)

Central control unit of the mainframe Olivetti Elea 9003 (1957). Photo by we-make-money-not-art, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Olivetti and Jobs were soulmates beyond tracing similar arcs in the world of industry. Both made their marks at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Anyone who has ever owned an Olivetti Lettera typewriter will know why it is enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art. Not only did it work beautifully, it was gorgeous to behold.

Olivetti Lettera 22 (first model) typewriter. Photo by LjL, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

An enthusiastic modernist, Adriano considered his firm’s ambience to be as important as the products he created. Hiring Italy’s best modern architects in the 1930s and 1940s, he built model factories, stores, schools, and homes for his workers, even a model city (Robert Kargon and I wrote about this in Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century). In short, he viewed his business and his world as a work of art.

Adriano Olivetti in front of his factories in Ivrea, 1960. Courtesy Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti.

With his love of Italian design, Jobs was surely inspired by the Olivetti style in developing everything from the Mac to the iPhone and the iPad. Driven by a passion for technological beauty, both Olivetti and Jobs “collected” design geniuses in their companies; Apple’s Jony Ive had his counterpart in Olivetti’s Marcello Nizzoli. Jobs also shared the Italian’s passionate concern for architecture and ambience. Isaacson notes that Jobs, nothing short of obsessive about planning his Apple stores, insisted on covering the floors with the same gray-blue sandstone he had seen in Florence sidewalks during a 1985 trip to Italy. He imported Apple store stone directly from the same quarry, hiring Florentine designers to oversee the cutting and layout of the tiles.

Olivetti was an out-and-out utopian, Jobs perhaps a closet one. Despite often being, according to Isaacson, notoriously, meanly competitive and extremely demanding on his staff, he believed in perfecting the world through the power of technology and design. He and Olivetti avowedly cared less about money than how their innovations were improving society and culture. For both, design aesthetics was far more than window dressing; it was the soul of technology and the key to the future. Ill-designed technology was not only useless and unpleasant, it was alienating, oppressive, inhuman. Jobs and Olivetti believed that clean, simple, and honest design beautified, humanized, and ultimately redeemed our modern technological culture.

Art Molella is Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

 

Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Editor’s note: This blog is the first part of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

Until recently, the oldest recorded sounds of known date which anyone could hear had been captured in 1888 on the “perfected” phonograph introduced that year by Thomas Edison. But Edison had invented his original phonograph eleven years before that, in 1877—and recorded sound itself is even older. In the 1850s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville of Paris created the phonautograph, an instrument which scratched records of aerial sound waves on soot-blackened paper, not for playback, but for visual study. This left a big disparity between when sound was first recorded (around 1857) and the earliest recorded sounds we could actually listen to (1888).

That changed in 2008 when FirstSounds.org released a sound file created from a phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” as sung on April 9, 1860. Suddenly we could hear more distantly into the past than ever before.

Even so, the intervening history of recorded sound—including the transformation by American inventors of the phonautograph into a “talking machine”—has remained frustratingly silent. The indented tinfoil sheets produced by Edison’s exhibition phonographs of 1877-78 weren’t regarded as permanently playable recordings, and little care was taken to preserve them in a playable state. No intelligible sound recovered from a historical tinfoil recording has ever been published.

Patrick Feaster working with the collections. Photo by Carlene Stephens.

So what else exists from before 1888? If we exclude recordings that weren’t intended for playback or to be permanently playable, then the oldest sound recordings preserved today are found at the National Museum of American History—experimental phonograms made starting in 1881 by the Volta Laboratory Association, which consisted of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, scientific instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter, and chemist Chichester A. Bell.

With the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship and the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I carried out a study of early sound recordings at the Museum, including the Volta materials, between October and December 2011. By comparing artifacts from the Volta collection with experiments described in notebooks at the Museum and the Library of Congress, I was able to identify a number of unlabeled items. One of these—a small copper disc with a laterally modulated or “zig-zag” sound recording—turned out to have been prepared shortly before October 20, 1881, to test whether electrically depositing a layer of metal on a recorded wax disc, and then using the metal negative to stamp out copies, might work as a basis for duplication in a future recording industry. “In this way a piece of music, for instance, can be recorded once,” Tainter had speculated, “and any number of copies made from this original record, and the music reproduced from each of the copies.”

Copper negative of a recording made in October 1881. National Museum of American History, catalog number 312,119. Photo by Patrick Feaster.

The October 1881 date makes this one of the oldest known American sound recordings in existence, so a question naturally arises: What’s on it? The written documentation I could find identifies the disc’s content only vaguely as “words and sounds … shouted into the mouth-piece,” but the Volta group’s notebooks reveal the general kind of test recitation they were then using, as for example:

July 4, 1881: “Several trilled R’s—then—‘Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.’—Several trilled R’s—then—‘How is that for high’—trilled R’s—and—One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—”

July 9, 1881: “There was a girl named O’Brian / Whose feet were like those of Orion, / To the circus she would go, / To see the great show, / And scratch the left ear of the lion. Trilled R’s. – ‘How is that for high’ more trilled R’s.”

Apart from the recurring expression “How is that for high”—roughly equivalent in 1881 to “How do you like them apples”—the most striking common denominator here is the “trilled R’s.” From laboratory notes, I could tell that this sound had recorded unusually well, and that the Volta group had often inserted it at beginnings, ends, and section breaks. But I didn’t know quite what it had sounded like. After all, nobody alive today had ever heard any of these experiments.

Charles Sumner Tainter’s drawing of the apparatus that recorded the original wax discs used in the duplication experiments of October 1881. Charles Sumner Tainter Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Photo by Patrick Feaster

In December 2011, Dr. Carl Haber unveiled the first sounds extracted from Volta recordings using an optical scanning technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress. One of the items chosen for this pilot project was the copper disc from October 1881. So now, at last, we can hear, across a gulf of 130 years: Trilled R’s—one, two, three, four, five, six—trilled R’s.

PART 2: Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Dr. Patrick Feaster is an instructor in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a Lemelson Center Fellow. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.