Technology and Democracy - 2016

A new president has been inaugurated. The 2016 presidential campaign showed us just how vulnerable our country is to the misuse of our now-ubiquitous internet and communications technologies. Consider some of the abuses we have seen: 

• The Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee servers.
• They fed those documents to Wikileaks with the deliberate intent to undermine confidence in our electoral integrity and perhaps to help Donald Trump win.
• Fake news stories circulated on Facebook and Twitter to misinform and incite higher levels of partisan anger.
• Google search results were compromised by partisan groups to bring up negative stories first when searching for information. 
• The media provided virtually nonstop coverage of Donald Trump and his campaign across both television and mobile platforms.
• Twitter became Mr. Trump’s platform of choice to lead a cyber-bullying campaign against anyone who criticized him. And every Tweet became a news story.
• Smartphone videos and photos provided instant “evidence” at campaign events and rallies supporting partisan views that were shared on social media platforms. 

We live in a world where the technology that was promoted to bring us together has instead driven us apart. Instead of connection we ended up with polarization. We live in our own social media worlds listening to those we agree with. We are beginning to doubt almost everything else we hear, see or read. We are living in a “post-fact” world.

The campaign we have just witnessed could not have happened even as recently as fifteen years ago. We simply did not have the connectivity and bandwidth that allowed this digital assault to be shared instantly. The iPhone is only ten years old. Same for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The connecting of the cellular network, the internet, and smartphones was the link that permitted this political monster to be born. 

On May 24, 1844, the first message that was transmitted on the newly-invented telegraph was, “What hath God wrought?” We should be asking the same question now. We have created a superb, virtually real-time, global information network. It can be used for great good or it can do great harm. We have not lived with this technology long enough yet to know how to manage it or to manage ourselves when using it. The average time between checking our smartphones is now about six minutes. Ten times an hour we can get a jolt, a fix. When it comes to politics, it almost always zaps our nervous system. Like lab animals in some Skinner Box, we learn which buttons to push to get our hit.  It makes us a feel crazy and we pay the price through our inability to focus, sleep, or think clearly. 

In my view, smartphones are much more like television than they are like telephones. They are a screen that we seem powerless to ignore. We watch that small screen constantly, even while driving!  And all of these hundreds of millions of screens demand new content which Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other social media sites are happy to provide. This can be problematic at any time but it becomes a real worry when it disrupts our political systems. Behind all this low-cost access and seemingly free content is money - eyeballs on advertising. While there is legitimate discussion regarding the corrupting influence of money in politics, no one talks much about the corrupting influence of the money being made off of political postings on social media platforms.

We have come to a juncture in our connected world. The questions we should be asking ourselves now are: how do we protect ourselves from the inherent vulnerabilities of this information network? How can we differentiate real news from fake news? How do we make our systems less vulnerable to being hacked? How do we reign in the urge to be isolate ourselves in our like-minded camps?  The challenges presented by our desire to be constantly connected will only grow. We can only hope to manage it better than we did in 2016.

The Future of Telephones: The 1962 World's Fair

We are always predicting the future, whether that future comes in the next week, the next decade, or the next century.  Not surprisingly, we miss the mark when it comes to the fine points. The details are always harder to see through the heatwave of time. What is perhaps most surprising is that at times we get the broad outline more or less right.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a video produced by AT&T for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. So how well did this short film of fifty years ago do in terms of its vision for the future? Check it out, the future of phones starts around the 4:50 mark:

The film was set in the world of the rotary-dial telephone. Every phone was owned by the Bell System. The up and coming technology of the future was (drumroll, please) the push-button phone!  No more rotary dialing, just the speed and simplicity of tapping the buttons. Other new technologies on the telephoning horizon included features such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conference calling. It was even predicted that you could dial a number while you were away from home to turn on your air conditioner or your underground irrigation system. And where would you make such a call when away?  In a telephone booth, of course!

The Ubiquitous Telephone Booth

There is always the temptation to chuckle at these past predictions of the future. They can seem naive and simplistic. What AT&T didn't see clearly in 1962 was the huge changes not only in technology but also in the business models that were going to turn their industry on its head. They couldn't foresee the government breakup of the company over concerns about its monopoly power. They couldn't foresee that phones would no longer be the property of the phone company but would become commodities purchased in electronics and discount stores. The future from the vantage point of 1962 certainly didn't include cordless phones and, most importantly, the future arrival of cellphones was completely invisible.

Not only did the rotary-dial phone disappear but shortly thereafter went the pay phone and even the phone booth. People used to want privacy for their phone calls. Now people chatter endlessly on their cellphones while walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant. But some things remain the same. They still use call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conference calling. People value new and better services.

The other major gap in Ma Bell's vision in 1962 was that the phone would morph from being a device strictly for talking and turn into a computer that you can carry in your pocket. I would guess that today's smart phones have more computational power than the entire 1962 switching system for a medium-sized city. And with Moore's Law still operating, smart phones have an ever more powerful future.

Lest we take too much pleasure at the expense of the folks of 1962, we are no better at looking into the future.  There are, of course, plenty of futurists who predict that we will be wearing our computers embedded in our clothing and that everything will be digital and online everywhere 24/7. But in these projections we miss the unpredictability of our non-linear world. Things will certainly be very different in some very unpredictable ways. But what remains constant is that we will still want to connect. We will still need talk to those we love and those we whom we work.  As AT&T's marketing slogan said in those days of fifty years ago, we will still want to "reach out and touch someone."  How we will do that remains to be revealed to us. Whatever the answer, I guarantee it will be interesting.

1962

2012

iPhone: Computer in My Pocket

Two weeks ago, I (finally) bought an iPhone 4S. I had been debating whether to buy one for a long time. For someone who writes a blog on technology, I felt almost as though I was some kind of anachronism. How could I not have a Smart Phone? Many of my friends have had one for years.  I was still on my plain-vanilla cellphone which, in addition to making calls could even send text messages using a little keyboard! Ooooh.

So why so long?  Well, I didn't want to be one of those people who whips their iPhone out walking down the street or while they are sitting in a darkened movie theater or while they are at the dinner table. I am all for connectivity but is it necessary to check your email or text messages every ten minutes?  The answer, I think, depends on your age. If you are a twenty-something, your life revolves around social networking. The expectation is that you are always online. Your friends want immediate responses. If you happen to be a little older, the fact that you can email someone when you get back to your home computer seems like connecting at light speed compared to growing up with snail mail. For the most part, my friends are not hanging out on line waiting for instant responses on where to meet up for tonight's social event.  Social networking with yourself isn't very much fun.

I have also learned that most of my email is, well... , boring. I have signed too many email political petitions and now my mailbox is filled mainly with the seemingly-urgent Rant-of-the-Day from one action group or another. I am suffering from Rant Fatigue and mostly hit the Delete button. Having removed the political email, I next winnow out the Groupons and Living Social coupons. Most days, I don't need a Brazilian or a facial so those go in the trash. What's left is an all too meager number of real emails. So, I didn't get an iPhone to check my emails and text messages.

Why did I get the iPhone? I wanted a mobile Information Appliance. I wanted to be able to look up locations on Google Maps. I wanted to find a good restaurant with Yelp. I wanted to know the answer to some question using Wikipedia. I wanted to check movie reviews on IMDB. I want to know if it's going to rain in the next 30 minutes. Could I have done without any of those functions? Sure. I have done without them so far. But the ability to have a computer in my pocket (for that is what a Smart Phone is) gives me an odd sense of freedom. I can navigate through my day a little better. I can find the answers to questions I will surely forget to look up by the time I get home (senior moments).  I feel...I admit it... hip.

I worried that I would become a slave to my new iPhone but, so far, I have surprised myself at how infrequently I check my emails (maybe for all the reasons I already mentioned).  My iPhone just nestles down in my pocket ready to give me answers when I ask. Oh, did I mention Siri?  This little artificial intelligence gnome is someone I want to get to know better.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to check my iPhone. I want to know...

The Serpent and the Telegraph

It's interesting how connections sometimes come about. I am on an email list for the Library of Congress and there was a post on their blog about Hans Christian Andersen (yes, the same Andersen of fairy tale fame). The blog post was announcing that an American family had donated some letters between one of their family members and Andersen that were written in the 1860s and 1870s. The blog mentioned that some of Andersen's stories, including "The Great Sea Serpent", had first appeared in english language publications such as Scribner's magazine.  The "Serpent" appeared in the January, 1872 issue.

"The Great Sea Serpent" is a fairy tale of how the fishes and sea creatures reacted to the laying of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable in 1866.  In the story, the cable is thought to be some great sea serpent that originated from the creatures on the surface. The fish were trying to decide whether to bite it in two because they despised its presence in their world. The wise ones among them advised the more adversarial fish to leave it alone. The story ended with this paragraph:

Good for nothing!” said all the creatures in the sea, and held fast to the sea-cow’s opinion, so as to have an opinion. The little fish had its own thoughts. “That exceedingly long, thin serpent is perhaps the most wonderful fish in the ocean. I have a feeling it is.

The very most wonderful,” say we human folks, and say it with knowledge and assurance. It is the great sea-serpent, long ago the theme of song and story. It was born and nourished and sprang forth from men’s cunning and was laid upon the bottom of the sea, stretching from the Eastern to the Western land, bearing messages, quick as light flashes to our earth. It grows in might and in length, grows year by year through all seas, round the world, beneath the stormy waves and the lucid waters, where the skipper looks down as if he sailed through the transparent air, and sees the swarming fish, brilliant fireworks of color. Down, far down, stretches the serpent, Midgard’s snake, that bites its own tail as it encircles the earth. Fish and shell beat upon it with their heads—they understand not the thing—it is from above. Men’s thoughts in all languages course through it noiselessly. “The serpent of science for good and evil, Midgard’s snake, the most wonderful of all the ocean’s wonders, our—GREAT SEA-SERPENT!

I always find it interesting when technology intersects with art and literature. Who would have thought that something like the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable would inspire a fairy tale? And yet, through the form of the fairy tale, we see Andersen revering the cable as one of mankind's greatest achievements. He was not alone.  The cable of 1866 (there had been an earlier attempt that failed in the 1850s) would connect the continents and that connection would never again be broken.

Now, of course, the telegraph looks so terribly antiquated.  We can hardly imagine that messages would have taken two weeks to travel in letters from England to America before the advent of the Trans-Atlantic telegraph. I wonder if Hans Christian Andersen was alive today, would he write a fairy tale about the internet? Would we have something like "The Great Spider Web of Communications"?  It would be nice to think so - but somehow I doubt it.

Technologies R'Us

The Conservation of Energy is one of the fundamental laws of our physical universe. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can - and is - transformed continuously from one form to another.  Potential energy to kinetic energy. Heat to work. Work to motion. Energy moves constantly through our universe making the universe as we know it possible.

I sometimes think of technology in its broadest sense as a form of energy. While it gives the illusion of having been created through countless inventions, new technology always comes from a convergence of older technologies which make the new technology possible.  It is a flow, not an aggregation of static ideas. In the 18th Century, a new understanding of steam and other gases opened the door for the first steam engines to pump water from mine pits.  Coal powered not only the first steam engines but it also made possible the scientific fabrication of steel. Steel and the steam engine opened the door to manufacturing on an industrial scale.

In the 19th Century, iron and steel and the steam engine morphed into a revolutionary form of transportation - the railroad.  With the easy movement of goods and people, more trade evolved. The movement of goods and people became faster and cheaper. Costs dropped dramatically as manufacturing increased in scale. For the first time, almost everyone in the 19th Century owned at least something that was factory made.

Paralleling the advances in manufacturing and transportation came equal advances in communications, illumination, and motors - all based on a growing knowledge of electricity. The telegraph made communications across long distances virtually instantaneous. Eventually, transoceanic cables made the world a much smaller place.  As the century progressed, people wanted the electric lights, telephones, and electric street cars made possible through new technology. By 1900, the world was poised to explode on a wave of mass production facilitated by transportation, communication, and distribution networks.

The early parts of the the 20th Century were dominated by the emergence of the automobile.  The lure of being able to travel where you wanted when you wanted, free of the train and trolley schedules, was irresistible to anyone who could afford a car. New and better roads led to everything from suburban living to extended vacation travel across the country.  Mass consumption demanded a ready-made mass market which was created by raising consumer advertising to a virtual science.  Now, people commonly owned the products of technology - radios, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, and telephones. Not only did people buy these products but an ever-wider array of choices became available. There were products for people to buy not just for their function but as symbols of a rising status in the world.

The 20th Century unleashed people's feelings of autonomy. They could travel when they wanted, where they wanted. They could listen to any number of radio programs, choose the style of clothing that suited them best, and furnish their homes with a seemingly-endless array of consumer goods.  After World War II, new technologies and mass consumption kicked into yet a higher gear. Radio gave way to television. Live broadcasting was supplemented with video tapes and DVDs. A panoply of cable channels supplemented the major television networks. Music was unfettered from the home and car radio and became a more personal and portable form of entertainment through the Walkman and later the iPod. Electronics opened the floodgates to affordable information technologies starting with the personal computer which morphed into the internet and then to the wireless world of smart phones in an endless variety of models and capabilities.

We stand at the doorway of the 21st Century which will surely be the age of ubiquitous and constant information. Everything will communicate in some way with everything else. Information will wrap the planet in a garment of bits so thick that we will no longer remember what it was like to have to write a physical letter, or find a pay-phone, or do our taxes by hand and mail them at the post office (which may also disappear).

The advances of the last three centuries have been mind-boggling.  We have gone from a mostly agrarian world to a predominantly urban and connected culture.  But each advance has carried its own costs - its own Conservation of Good and Bad.  As people moved to the mill towns of the 18th century, they lost their independence and became dependent on the mill owners for a (usually poor) wage. The air became fouled with smoke and pollution. The density of housing with poor sanitation brought epidemics of disease. Eventually, of course, the worst of these ills of the mill towns started to be addressed - by new and better technology. Technologies moved on but so did the side effects.

In the 19th Century, more and more people gave up the farm for the factory, for what clearly seemed to be a better way of life. The route to prosperity was through the middle class with its better wages and better education for the children. More people worked for larger companies which, with the advent of the railroads, gave rise to the modern corporation. People were no longer just owners or laborers but occupied intermediate rungs on the corporate ladder.  Time became regulated by the clock to dictate everything from the hours of work to the schedules of the trains. The world became more networked with the sharing of stock prices by ticker tape and the creation of world time zones to unify travel and communication. Cities grew ever larger and more congested.

The 20th Century gave people a sense of autonomy while at the same time making them evermore interconnected and interdependent.  There were more choices of products but fewer choices on how to earn a living without being part of the interconnected web of commerce.  The population continued to grow and with it came more cars and traffic jams, more need for electricity and more air pollution. The world was both much richer and much more complex than ever before.

Now we face the Knowledge Age with only the slightest grasp of how pervasive and powerful it will become in our lives. We gain a sense of exponential connectivity while at the same time we face the specter of losing our privacy almost completely.  We will live in a world where our actions and intentions become the stuff of marketing research and directed advertising. Our children will never know what it was like to live in the Prewired World - and likely they would not choose to live there if they could.

We live in a world where we are becoming increasingly inseparable from the technology that we create and that surrounds us. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it should give us at least some pause for thought.  Can we control our technology or has it moved beyond our control into a stage of evolution that is almost biological in form?  Technologies now define us, define how we work and how we play.  We use communications technology ubiquitously. We social networker on Facebook, Google, and Twitter.  We are hooked to our iPhone even while we watch a movie in a theater. We drive and talk on our cell phones and think nothing of it.  Technologies make our everyday life possible. Do we know how many functions in our automobiles are now controlled by computers?  Digital electronics run our refrigerators and even our furnaces.  We have crossed the threshold and there is no going back.  But this is not a new phenomenon. The same was true a century ago - just to a lesser degree. We live in a world that is evermore shaped by our own hands and minds but that same technology is now shaping us.  We may no longer be masters of our own destiny.  Ready or not, Technologies R'Us.

The Inexorable March Towards the Virtual

Second Life, The Sims, video games: the virtual world seems to be taking an ever-stronger hold in the high-tech world we live in.  Some people seem to feel even more comfortable in the virtual world, where they can craft new and different identities through their self-invented avatars.  But it's not hard to hear the murmured fears about how much time some people spend in these Neverlands rather than being grounded in reality.  The people that inhabit these binary universes are thought to be somehow just a bit whacky.

But these fears of the virtual are not new.  The move from the physical world to a more virtual world has been going on for a very long time.  I was reminded of this as I was reading T.J. Stiles National Book Award-winning biography, The First Tycoon, The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.  In the first decades of the 19th century, the economy consisted of individual proprietors and limited partnerships.  As the first corporations began to be chartered to build canals and railroads, the concept of what constituted a business began to become untethered from the hard and comforting reality of the physical world.  The structure of the corporation not only created a new entity that had a legal life of its own (including legal immortality), the stock issued by the corporation began to move away from an accounting-based recognition of the value of the corporation's real property.  Stocks began to be issued for financial reasons and were now free to seek their value in the open market.  This uncoupling of what used to be considered "real" for something more intangible created great angst in the general public.  Shares that were issued for financial reasons were considered to be "watered stock", an expression that derives from the trick of old drovers who would would let their cattle over-drink just before being weighed to determine their market value.  What did stock represent if not the total capital assets of the corporation?  If it couldn't be taken apart and sold, many felt it wasn't real.  Things like an existing customer base, brand recognition, or know-how were considered to be intangibles and hence of no monetary value.  People like Cornelius Vanderbilt helped to move the country forward into a new era, a more virtual era, through his creation of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

The march to the virtual continued during the Civil War when the lack of enough gold in the U.S. Treasury made it impossible to procure all that was needed to fight the war.  The Greenback was issued as legal currency and it set off a wave of negative reaction that went on for decades.  Why should a piece of printed paper be worth something?  It wasn't either gold or silver.  It was just... paper.  We moved another step towards a more virtual world.

When Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, communication took a giant step towards the virtual.  No longer would long-distance communication require either people or a written document moving from place to place to carry information.  Information could now move instantaneously, unfettered by the limitations imposed by geography.  The same sense of uncoupling followed the introduction of the telephone and the phonograph.  Edison was known as The Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his lightbulb, but because his phonograph took the physical world of sound and somehow encapsulated it so that it could be reproduced at will.

So many of our technologies have a component of abstraction to them; photography, motion pictures, radio, and television all uncoupled the real from the virtual.  With the blooming of the Information Age, we have moved to virtual money through ATMs, cash cards, and PayPal.  We make friends through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.  We chat through text messaging, tweets, instant messaging, and video calls.  We shop on the internet without giving it a second thought.  We fight our wars using pilots who fly Predator aircraft through virtual links halfway around the planet.  The boundaries blur rapidly.

As surely as there is an Arrow of Time that moves in only one direction, there is also an Arrow of the Virtual which moves ever more away from what we like to call the Real World.  The rate of change often exceeds our capacity to cope.  We feel disoriented and apprehensive as we are pried loose from the old objects of our security.  But what was uncomfortable to one generation is taken for granted in the next.  Our world of 2010 is only a way station on the journey to something that will seem even more disconnected from what we think of as real.  Maybe the comfort in all of this is to realize that it is not only natural, it is inevitable.  People will feel just as comfortable (and uncomfortable) with the world of 2110 as people felt in 1910.   Maybe the secret is to relax and try to enjoy it.

Realtime Innovation

I have been seeing the buzz around Google's new instant search service called Google Realtime.  I hadn't tried it so I wandered over there this morning to see for myself.  The search box looks much the same as the standard Google search window but the results come from blogs, tweets, and other social networking sites and are displayed in near-realtime.

I typed in "innovation" and sat back to watch the action.  I wasn't disappointed.  A new posting containing the word "innovation" would pop up on average every three seconds.

 It was mesmerizing to see this flow of consciousness being spewed forth - all in the name of innovation.  Most of the torrent of returns were tweets - some from companies but many from bloggers who seem to be pushing innovation as a way to get consulting gigs.

The Google site itself is somewhat innovative but you get the same effect of watching the stream if you monitor Twitter or Facebook for a time.  But the effects of aggregation take Google Realtime to another level.

The question that I am struggling with is whether all of this gushing of web consciousness on innovation helps anyone become more innovative?  A debate team taking the Pro position might argue that this shows how much innovation is a part of our collective consciousness, how easily we can cross-pollinate ideas, or how much more easily we can find other people who can help us achieve some specific goal.  The team for the Cons would say this isn't dialogue, it is a monologue with people spewing forth tweets simply in an attempt to be visible, that the people who are really innovating aren't spending their time tweeting, they're actually innovating, or that the chatter actually contributes to less innovation because it is so distracting.

Having read quite a bit about this history of technology and innovation, I come away more on the side of the Cons than on the side of the Pros.  It seems to me that most innovators have a single-mindedness that shuts out all extraneous voices.  I think about John Fitch and the first steamboat, or Oliver Evans automating the first flour mill, or Henry Ford and his plan to put America on wheels with the Model-T, of even more recently, Steve Jobs bringing us a succession of "gotta-have" Apple products.  True innovators are tuning the noise out while they doggedly press forward against all the naysayers.

I remain convinced the we have many innovators today, just as we have had them throughout our history.  They just aren't getting carpal tunnel syndrome from overuse of their thumbs on their Blackberries, tweeting away constantly.  There is a place for all the latest tweets.  I write them myself on my companion Facebook and Twitter pages.  But this is more akin to journalism than it is to innovation.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some tweets I have to get out.

Tech Almanac is on Facebook and Twitter

It might seem ironic for someone who writes about technology and innovation, but I have been resisting the use  of Facebook and Twitter.  Actually, I tried Twitter over a year ago but I quit because I found tweeting about what I had for breakfast to be a colossal waste of my time and boring to everyone else.  Facebook was a bit of a different animal.  I thought of Facebook as a semi-live chat for college and high school kids or maybe a good way to share pictures of the last vacation.  I have had a Facebook account for a year but have hardly used it.

Then I started following the Chicago History Journal blog.  Sharon Williams, who writes the blog, clued me in to the value of Facebook and Twitter as a way to enhance and connect a blog to a wider group of readers.  When I saw how interesting her own pages were, I took the plunge.

So if you don't know about it yet,  I have extended the Technology Almanac to Facebook here.  My Facebook page isn't the same as what you will find in the blog.  The blog links will show up there, of course, when they are posted but most of what is on Facebook are articles and links relating to topical stories about technology and innovation.  I follow the news pretty closely and when I see something that I think others might find interesting, I post it on my Tech Almanac Facebook page.

Similarly, I have a Twitter page for the Tech Almanac that more or less mirrors the Facebook page. They link back and forth so if you prefer one over the other, you can see what's up in stories relating to technology and innovation.  If you see a story that you think would be of interest, send it my way.

One of the things I have learned out of this experience is that Facebook and Twitter are more than tools to connect with friends.  The number of businesses and institutions that are on both of these platforms is astounding.  We are becoming ever more dependent on our social networking tools.  That is not to say that there isn't a lot of mindless clutter out there.  Arguably, the time that I spend minding the store on Facebook and Twitter might be more productively spent elsewhere.  But I do learn a ton by what I see passing by my Facebook and Twitter windows.

I'm not sure where all this is leading but I do know that the way we connect and communicate is undergoing seismic shifts.  I guess I want to go along for the ride.

The History of the Internet

I came across an interesting graphic via first the Resource Shelf website which sent me to the Online MBA.  Both sites are worth a look.  Here's the graphic:


Via: MBA Online

You can date your entry into online technology by where you intersect this timeline.  Few of us had access to ARPANET.  In fact, most of us couldn't even connect to the internet until well after the launch of the World Wide Web in 1992.  It took the first web browser, Mosaic, in 1993 to let people begin to explore.  I started using the World Wide Web with that first browser.  I can remember clearly how blown away I was with what I could find even then.

What struck me about the graphic was how "early" some things happened.  Pizza Hut gets the nod for jumping on the the e-commerce bandwagon as early as 1994.  But even more striking was how many technologies that we now simply take for granted have come about so recently:  Google in 1999, Wikipedia in 2001, and YouTube in 2005.  I use these services every day and never think of them as new.  Still, I often think to myself how incredible it is that I can find virtually anything from my networked computer.

As I write this, I am sitting on my screen porch connected over WiFi to my home network.  I have checked my e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS reader accounts.  I have looked at a product offering from Woot.  I looked up a very informative article on hummingbirds on Wikipedia (a hummingbird is at the feeder next to the screen porch).  I listened to hummingbird calls via the Cornell Birds website's mp3 files. I checked the weather forecast and the news headlines.  And I haven't left my laptop and my cup of coffee.  All this in only 17 years since the first web browser was launched. If you are younger than 20, you have no recollection of life before the web.  How quickly we take it all for granted.

What isn't on the chart, is the record of the Creative Destruction that has come with this new tsunami of technology.  All of this has come with a cost.  Not so much in the obvious impacts like the decline of daily newspapers (although that is pretty bad, especially if you are a journalist). The greater impact has been in the less visible world of corporate and government information systems which have shed layer upon layer of people whose jobs have been replaced with software systems.  Managing the transitions in technology is tough.  Maybe "surviving the transitions" would be a better description.  Still, I would not want to go back even if I could.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to check FaceBook and a Tweet has just popped up.

New (Old) Wax Cylinder Recordings

I am on a bit of a roll at the moment looking around various news websites for stories that relate to the history of technology.  Forgive me if this gets to be too much.  This phase will probably pass rather quickly.

I just read a very interesting story about recording on wax cylinders.  Now, this was not news in the late 1800s or even the early 1900s but it IS news if you want to do it today.  A British Steampunk band called The Band That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, who loves all things Victorian, decided to release 40 copies of their new CD on wax cylinders.  However, they did not release a wax cylinder player thus the crew at the BBC Technology website decided to "give it a go" (as the Brits might say) and build their own wax cylinder record player.  You can see the results in the video below:



You can also read the full story at the BBC website here.

Thomas Edison (pictured above with his first recording device) was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his electric lights, but because of his invention for mechanically capturing sound for the first time in history.  He thought his invention would be most useful as a stenographic tool for business and actually frowned upon the idea of using it for entertainment purposes.  But technology has this habit of morphing into forms that users want rather than what inventors conceive.  Clearly, the customers had spoken (no pun intended).

Cheerio!

De Laude Scriptorum

I have been reading an interesting book by Clay Shirky entitled, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.  Shirky is a good writer.  His book looks at the fundamental changes taking place as the cost of organizing continues to collapse because of the internet.  Shirky contends that we are usually quite aware of organizations or businesses that do what we do, only better.  However, we are completely unaware of new technologies from outside our current paradigm that can not only do the job better, but make our skills irrelevant.  The newspaper is the most obvious current example.  Newspapers have not suffered at the hands of a better printed news format.  They have been decimated by on-line news, or maybe more importantly, on-line advertising.  

Shirky points out that this is nothing new.  In 1492, almost fifty years after the invention by Gutenberg of moveable type, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim (pictured above), wrote a book entitled De Laude Scriptorum Manualium (literally, In Praise of Scribes).  The Abbot was railing against the fact that printed books were destroying the culture and skills of the highly-trained scribes of the monastic tradition.  Who needed scribes when a book could be typeset and printed with ease? The Abbot wanted to get his concerns in front of the widest audience possible.  So what did he do?  He had his book printed!  His own choice of technologies to disseminate his ideas undermined his basic thesis.

A new and powerful technology that dramatically improves on the old cannot be held back.  Printing replaced hand-copied books within half a century.  The automobile replaced the horse-and-buggy in twenty years.  The internet has displaced numerous other technologies in only a decade.

Each of these technology shifts were unstoppable because they changed the fundamental cost structures of the old way of doing things.  Those costs weren't always just monetary costs.  They included time, effort, ease of connection, and a variety of other social costs.  To quote the Borg in the Star Trek movies, "Resistance is futile."  Most of the time, though, we do resist because we have such a vested interest in the old ways of doing things.  Or we see the new way (in its technical infancy) as inadequate, not recognizing that it will improve dramatically.

We are very poor at projecting the future.  If we do attempt to foresee what is coming, we think in a linear extrapolation from what is happening today.  We cannot foresee the non-linear future, the future of disruptive technology shifts.  There are a few among us who can see a bit more clearly but we usually dismiss their predictions as science fiction (or worse).  These futurists may get the broad strokes right but the details are always different and hence we don't remember later that some had seen it coming.  Maybe it's better that way.  Most of the time, I like surprises.

Solar Storms and Damage to the Communications Grid

I was interested to read over at the Discover Blog, 80 Beats, that NASA is going to be launching a new satellite next week tagged the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO.  For all that is known about the solar system and the universe, surprisingly little is known about the engine of our own sun - specifically the deep causes for solar storms.  The SDO's mission is to take a very high resolution image of the sun every 60 seconds in order to provide visual clues to measurable electromagnetic behavior here on earth.  The hope is that eventually, NASA will be able to forecast solar storms.

One of the biggest storms ever observed occurred on Sept. 2, 1859.  The electromagnetic field was so strong that telegraphers operating between Boston and Portland, Maine were able to communicate without any electricity in the system except that generated by the solar storm.  They actually had to disconnect the batteries that normally powered the telegraph so as not to burn the batteries out.  I had never thought about the communications grid being vulnerable even in the days of the telegraph!

In 1989, a massive solar storm took out some of the power grids in the United States and Canada.  Last year, the National Academy of Sciences released a study report that estimated the damage to the power and communications grids from a solar surge the size of the 1859 storm at one trillion dollars.  The sun operates on an eleven-year sunspot cycle and reverses its magnetic poles every twenty-two years.  While the 1859 storm has been established to be the single largest event in the last 500 years, it is only a matter of time before another major solar storm erupts.

At least solar storms are a force of nature and while they can damage the grid, it is not the same as the damage from malicious hacking attacks.  Given the ever-increasing dependence on the grids, however, anything that can be done to harden them seems like a good investment.

Coming Soon: Disruptive Technology

Heather Havrilesky wrote a piece on Salon yesterday entitled, "Digital Nation": What Has the Internet Done to Us? Her article anticipates the broadcast coming on Tuesday night of the PBS Frontline episode of the same name.  You can watch the trailer for the Frontline episode here.  If you miss the broadcast, you can watch the program later as a streaming video on the Frontline website.

Havrilesky, who has spent the last 15 years in the world of web companies and journalism,  writes of her growing sense that we have created a monster, a world in which all we have are web and media distractions.  We can't seem to disconnect, even if we want to. 

One of the Frontline producers of this week's program is Douglas Rushkoff who has been an internet guru and champion of the digital age.  Havilresky quotes Rushkoff as saying,

I've always prided myself on offering soothing answers to people's anxieties about this stuff," Rushkoff continues later. "I felt like I was in on a secret, that these old fuddy-duddies were panicking unnecessarily, underestimating our kids' ability to adapt to the new reality unfolding before us...Combating distraction, it's not as easy as just turning off your e-mail program. You turn off your e-mail program, it's not your e-mail program that complains, it's your friends, it's your boss, it's your bills. You know, 'Where's that report?' 'Why haven't you answered your e-mail?' 'Are you mad at me?' You can't do this in isolation. If you're going to deal with the problem of distraction it's something that we're all going to have to deal with together.

I think we can all relate at some level to an ambivalence about the Wired World.  Personally, I cannot imagine living without access to Google or e-mail.  I love being able to read everything from the news to blogs.  YouTube and a host of other web video services brings the world to our laptops or desktops.  We are fifteen years into our new, digitally-connected world and we are not quite sure where it is taking us.

If it is any comfort, people have been here many times before.  Every new disruptive technology brings out our greatest hopes and our greatest fears.  Shortly after Gutenberg invented moveable type, the authorities (both the church and the monarchies) tried to ban some printed books as they  quickly realized that a reading populace might just start asking questions.  (I wrote about this in a post a couple of years ago on William Caxton.  You can read it here.) The authorities wanted to have this new printing technology deployed in ways that served their needs - but they also wanted to maintain control.  Of course it didn't happen that way.  The borders between countries were too porous.  Trade and travel brought books back home.  Once unleashed, printing changed everything.  I think we could agree now that printing was a good thing.  It certainly has caused problems along the way but who (but tyrants) would want to live in a world without printing?

People were equally concerned about the first railroads.  They changed the way people saw their world.  Speed annihilated distance.  Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his book The Railway Journey, writes of one early observer:

Heinrich Heine [a German journalist] noted this [the disorientation of space-time consciousness] in 1843 when he wrote of the 'tremendous foreboding such as we always feel when there comes an enormous, an unheard-of event whose consequences are imponderable, and incalculable', and called the railroad a 'providential event', comparable to the inventions of gunpowder and printing, 'which swing mankind in new directions, and changes the color and shape of life.'

Railroad journeys changed everything.  Schivelbusch, later in his book, quotes Francis J. Lieber's writing in 1834: 

From Albany to Schenectady, you travel by rail-road; and the least exciting of all traveling, it seems to me, is decidely locomotion by steam on a rail-road.  The traveler, whose train of ideas is always influenced by the manner in which he proceeds, thinks in a steam car of nothing but the place of his destination, for the very reason that he is moving so quickly.  Pent up in a narrow space, rolling along on an even plain which seldom offers any objects of curiosity, and which, when it does you pass by with such rapidity, that your attention is never fixed; together with a number of people who have all the same object in view, and think like you of nothing else, but when they shall arrive at the journey's end -- and situated, you find nothing to entertain and divert you, except now and then a spark flying into the window of the car...There is no common conversation, no rondolaugh [sic], nothing but a dead calm, interrupted from time to time, only by some passenger pulling out his watch and uttering a sound of impatience... (Italics in original.) 

I read in this passage the deep impact on people's lives of the experience of a new and disruptive technology.   Would we be better off without railroads?  Highways?  Automobiles?  Yes, I can imagine times when I might want to throw these out in favor of a quieter, simpler life but I think most of us wouldn't want to go back to the world of the 1830's or even the 1930's.

Technologies can fundamentally change our world and fundamental technologies can change it profoundly.  We cannot even fathom where the Wired World is leading any more than the speedy early railroad traveler could envision the connected world of air travel and interstate highways that we now take for granted.  No one frets that we will lose our marbles from going too fast.  It is doubtful that we have been ruined by the railroad, the automobile, or the jet plane.  

We are on a very fast ride into the future driven by the next generation of technology.  As humans, we develop new ways of adapting to disruptive technologies.  But it can feel really scary at times. Keep your seatbelts buckled in the event of unexpected turbulence.

The Love Affair with the Automobile May Be on Its Way Out

I just read a short report from the Earth Policy Institute which revealed  that after a century of growth, the U.S. car fleet peaked in 2009 and started to decline.  The 14 million cars that were scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold.  The report gave many reasons for the downturn including higher gas prices, the poor economy, longer commutes, and growing urbanization.  But another reason that intrigued me is that young people just don't care about cars like their parents and grandparents did.  The car is no longer the portal to socialization - it is now better accomplished on social networks and cellphones.  New teenage drivers' licenses are in decline.  The number of teenage licenses peaked in 1978 at 12 million and is now under ten million.

I remember in my own teenage years that my friends and I would drive endlessly up and down the main street of our small town looking to see who else was driving up and down the main street.  This endless do-loop of a drive was punctuated by occasional stops at the drive-in restaurant for a soda and some french fries.  The whole point was to see and be seen in something that looked a great deal like the movie, American Graffiti.  Of course, every family had a telephone but that usually involved talking in a place where any conversation could all too easily be overheard by parents or siblings.  The web, text messages, and cell phones allow so much more privacy from prying ears.  These newer technologies are perfectly adapted to teenagers who are dealing with the angst of adolescence (which comes with a certain built-in level of paranoia).

There has always been a push to develop new communications technologies.  We are a social species and we feel compelled to share our thoughts and ideas.  We need to connect with other people to have the sense of community. It was revolutionary when Gutenberg made it possible to widely share ideas in book form.  The telegraph and then the telephone changed long-distance communications forever.  Radio, television, motion pictures, and now cellphones and the web have all been driven by our insatiable desire to connect in richer and more immediate ways.

One of the byproducts of new communication channels is a reordering of older technologies, in this case, the automobile.  Who would have guessed that a cause for fewer cars on the road would be changing communications patterns in young people?  I always figured that the next generation would help solve the energy crisis but I didn't guess that it would come about because their new ways to connect mean they don't need cars to do so.  This is not good news for automakers anywhere.  But changing patterns are never good news for the old ways.  Still, I put my faith in our kids.  They will be better connected, and greener, than their parents.

What Hath God Wrought, the Book

I just finished reading Daniel Walker Howe's recent history of Antebellum America that goes by the title of today's blog.  The book won a Pulitzer Prize in history and it is a mighty read indeed...all 850 pages of it.  But the book, despite its length, was a great read; more a story than a dull historical tract.  Howe makes the premise that two technology revolutions were fundamental to the changes in the United States during the time period he covered: 1812 to 1848.

The first revolution was in transportation.   America moved from the slow plodding of foot and horse travel to the swiftness of canals, steamboats, and railroads.  This tied the ever-expanding geography of the country together.  The plunging cost of shipping (whether raw materials, agricultural products, or finished goods) made a business-driven society possible.

The second revolution was in communications, more specifically the telegraph.  For the first time in history, communications over long distances became instantaneous.  While we often feel like we are living through the biggest communication revolution that has ever happened, I think it takes second place to the telegraph.  Our expectations have always been for instantaneous communications.  But when the telegraph was invented, people had no prior experience to prepare them for such an amazing technology.

The U.S. Government, which initially was reticent to fund the telegraph, finally put up seed money to build the first demonstration line.  On May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse (pictured at right), in the offices of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. typed the message, "What hath God wrought", to his colleague in Baltimore who echoed it back to him within a minute.  Observers understood immediately the significance of the invention.  The message, by the way, was chosen from a biblical text (Numbers 23:23) and was selected by Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth, who suggested it to her daughter Annie. Morse was in love with Annie and was hence disposed to listen to her suggestion.  (Nancy Ellsworth's husband was Henry Levitt Ellsworth, head of the patent office and a friend of Morse.)

The telegraph was used immediately by business  for stock and commodity prices, the news establishment (it led to the Associated Press being formed in May, 1846), governments, and finally private citizens.  Markets in cities like Chicago and New York could start to transact business on a near real-time basis.  The railroads soon picked up on the technology to schedule the smooth flow of trains.

But I digress.  The point is not to focus on the telegraph but rather on Howe's book and its central hypothesis that technology shapes history.  Howe didn't say this but I might wonder if these two technology revolutions accelerated the gap between the mercantile North and the plantation and slave-owning South, making the Civil War all the more likely.  Technology can have far-reaching effects, often created by the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Today, the Web is creating similar far-reaching changes and we cannot foresee what the unintended consequences may yet be.  It would be interesting to get a peek at the history books that will be written in another hundred years to see what comes of it all...or, maybe not.

The Decline of the Motor City

I often blog about technology's intersection with our culture. Most of the time, I think that on balance, technology is a positive influence. But every now and then I see something that makes me wonder.

I recently came across a survey of 3400 hundred people done by TripAdvisor.com in which Detroit was ranked as the most hated city in the United States. That is quite a contrast to the Detroit of the mid 1960's. In those days, Detroit was at the top of its game.

I was reminded of this by a video I came across in the Internet Archives. I was looking for a reference to an old radio program that used to be on WJR in Detroit. The Internet Archive has a promotional video made by the radio station in 1966. It is a wonderful snapshot of technology at that time. There are shots of the old (then state-of-the-art) radio broadcast equipment, the newsroom with typewriters and teletype machines, cars with AM radios, kitchens of the era, and shots of shiny new GM cars. The narrator in the film talked about the prosperity of Detroit. The city had disposable income 15 percent above the national average, and seventy percent of people were home owners. What a difference forty years makes.

Now, Detroit is a virtual welfare case. I doubt that in their wildest imagination the boosters of Detroit in 1966 could have seen their bleak future. Technology created Detroit and failure to stay current with technology, and bad management, was the city's undoing. What new Detroits are among us today, the failures in our future? Can we do something different this time to re-write the outcome? Can Detroit be resurrected? Tough questions but questions that won't go away.

Here's the video. It runs about 20 minutes but it is a fun look back.

Technology Revolutions Redux

The future of the newspaper was the topic of a post I wrote about a month ago. Clay Shirky has written a great article on the topic which I featured in my blog. Recently, I read a corresponding article on the future of the book (or e-book). Steven Johnson wrote this one for the Wall Street Journal and I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it. The future of the book seems to me to look much like the future of the newspaper: smaller and smaller chunks of content sold piecemeal rather than as a whole unit, writing that is directed at least as much at ensuring that it hits the top of Google search results as about the content itself, not to mention the disappearance of a physical world of packaged printing.

I am proud to be a bibliophile. I love books and I love bookstores. I love the feel of books and I love having a nice satisfying pile of unread books ready to be savored. But, I also admit to being a gadget geek. I love my iPod Touch with its ability to download e-books from Project Gutenberg (free via Stanza) and now even from Amazon (not free) with their Kindle App. There is something to be said for the ability to have a library in my pocket. I am even toying with the idea of buying a Kindle 2, but that might be pushing it a little too much.

Given my dual loves, it probably isn't surprising that I feel ambivalent about all of this deconstruction of the book. I see e-books as simultaneously a step forward and a step back. Is the gain from broader access offset by the cost of a more fragmented attention span? Who will have the time or attention to read a five-hundred page work of history or a great novel? How will we cope with an ever-increasing number of book options available both digitally and in good old fashioned paper?

While the winds of change seem to be blowing us in the direction of fragmentation, I am actually optimistic about the future of the book. I think both the printed book and the e-book will continue to grow and complement each other. That is not to say that publishing will remain what it has been. I think the whole domain of printing-on-demand, self-publishing, and micro-presses will continue to grow. But books as we know them will not disappear any time soon. Remember the much-hyped "paperless office" of a decade ago? Office printers have never been so busy.

We are in the midst of a technology revolution and any sort of new quasi-equilibrium is still in the distant future. When it does arrive, we can be sure it will not be what we might predict today. That is the whole fun of living through a revolution. At least on my better days it seems that way. On my conservative days, I grumble and rant about how it just isn't what it used to be. But it never has been what it used to be and for that we can count our blessings.

Staying Connected: Text, Audio, Video? Less is More

Our daughter is spending this year in Mali, Africa. Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. The small town of Douentza in which she lives in is a 14 hour bus ride from the capital city of Bamako. Yet, even in Douentza we can talk to her by cellphone and she can e-mail from the local internet cafe to give us updates. Global communication is truly amazing. But the internet connection in Douentza is not broadband and is slow most of the time. It is not fast enough, for instance, to support real-time video conferences. So until just recently we hadn't seen our daughter's smiling face in months.

Last week, she went to Bamako on business. A colleague of our daughter who lives there has a high speed connection in her apartment and we were able to have a wonderful video conversation using Skype. Being able to see her while we talked gave us a much better feeling of how she was doing. Every parent knows the signs of stress in their kids and we could see that she was really doing quite well. The video added a special dimension to our regular phone conversations. With Skype on both ends, the whole conversation was free. When I stop and think about this even for a moment, it is amazing. I can talk to someone half a world away in real-time video at virtually no cost. The internet has changed our lives in so many ways we could not even imagine 15 years ago.

Video phones are a sci-fi novelty idea that has been around since I was a kid. I can remember seeing prototypes demonstrated on television that showed the Modern Family of the Future sitting at their video phones and talking like they were in the same room. AT&T actually tried to commercialize video phone service in several major cities in the 1970's but the costs were so high that the business was a flop. The equipment had limited capability, the network was expensive and proprietary, and the bandwidth for transmission was extremely limited. This was still a very primitive communication technology era. It would take another 25 years, low-cost, powerful microprocessors, and the world wide web to make the impractical possible.

The idea of being able to remotely see someone while talking to them is something that seems to have always caught the imagination. Wikipedia has an image of a picture phone that dates from 1910. With the advent of television, the video phone seemed to be just around the corner. Today, many cellphones are enabled for video conversations. The average laptop or desktop computer comes with a small video camera that allows web-based video conversations to take place easily. So why aren't video calls more popular? Why isn't everyone checking in via a video link with friends, family, and business colleagues?

But as we all know, it is not video that has become the ubiquitous mode of communication, it is text messaging. Every day while driving I will see some other driver who is busily punching out a message while keeping just half an eye on the road. Somehow, the need to text even while doing something that could get you killed has become a compelling need for so many. Why do people feel so compelled to be linked at every moment? Why not just talk rather than text? After all, texting requires you to type on a teeny-weeny keypad and use a shorthand language of abbreviations and emoticons. But in some ways, this seems to make texting more attractive rather than less.

The biggest advantages of texting is that it (1) doesn't require the other person to be available at the moment and (2) you can be available for connection anytime, anywhere via your cellphone. It is basically a stripped down e-mail system that works because people carry their "computer" (read: cell phone) with them and always have it on. Texting frees you up from having to answer the phone when you are busy or don't feel like talking. Texting allows you to be one step removed from the audible cues you can hear in someone's voice which can at times be a good thing. Texting allows you to stay in touch in places where talking is annoying or prohibited. You can even write some things that you might not be willing to say out loud.

Whole new paradigms have sprung up that are based on our ability to send small messages to not just a single person but a whole world that might be reading. Twitter is the most notable of these. Twitter turned out to be one of the principle means of getting the news out in rapidly-unfolding events (like the Mumbai massacre) that otherwise would be unavailable to us. Much of the power of what has been dubbed Web 2.0, or social networking, is built on small text messages that connect us billions of times a second.

So often, it turns out that less is more. Given the option of full-blown real-time video communication, we choose instead to chat asynchronously via small cryptic strings of text and emoticons. Somehow, despite the limitations of the medium, we can make ourselves perfectly clear. We need to stay connected to each other but that doesn't mean that we want to be in a face-to-face conversation, even with our best friends. Texting and Twittering. We love to connect. We love the immediacy. But we also love the sense of being able to control when we talk and when we listen. Technology allows us to connect and it allows us to maintain a certain distance. We struggle with the balance point and we probably always will.

The Fire of Genius

The patent system... added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.
Abraham Lincoln, Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (Feb. 11, 1859)

This year, the focus of President’s Day falls especially brightly on Abraham Lincoln as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth on February 12, 1809. By one reckoning, over 16,000 books have been written about him. Lincoln was indeed a great man and arguably our greatest president.

Great presidents are often defined by the challenges of their times. Theodore Roosevelt, himself a great president, was quoted as saying of Lincoln:

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

That may not do justice to Lincoln for clearly there is more than circumstances that define a great president. I think one of the defining characteristics is a deep intellectual curiosity coupled to an inclination towards practical action. Washington was a trained surveyor, a military leader, and a statesman. Jefferson was a true intellectual who read widely in virtually every field of knowledge. He loved novelty and invention and he was a man who was deeply engaged in the events of his day. Theodore Roosevelt was a writer and historian before he was President, but he also was a military commander, a cowboy, and an adventurer. Franklin Roosevelt invented many advances in the treatment of polio when he formed the Warm Springs Clinic in the 1920’s.

But back to Lincoln. He is the only President to hold a patent (Patent No. 6469 for the invention of a means to lift steamboats over shallow river snags). Lincoln was always curious about new technology. He studied virtually every new machine he came in contact with and was the first President to use the power of instant communications (the telegraph) to direct a military campaign. During the Civil War, he haunted the local telegraph office and eventually had a telegraph installed in the White House. U.S. News and World Report has an interesting article about Lincoln in the current issue that says that if Lincoln were alive today he would fight just as hard as Obama did to keep his Blackberry. The point is not that Lincoln or any other great president was a geek but rather that each had a wide and deep curiosity and intellect and embraced the new and the novel. They recognized the value of the “fire of genius”. That is surely part of what made them great. The advance of technology depends on our leaders as much as it does on great inventors and innovators.

Exchanging Numbers

and my number is
Beechwood 45789
You can call me up and have a date
Any old time

I was in a fast food joint the other day for lunch. The Muzak in the background was a string of 50's Rock and Roll oldies to go with the Faux-Diner decor. The song that caught my ear was "BEechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes. (If you are a little older, maybe the song of choice is PEnnsylvania 6-5000). The song somehow triggered memories of my early childhood days when our own telephone number in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan started with the exchange named MElrose. That got me to wondering about exchange names: where they came from, how they were derived, how unique they might be.

My first stop was Wikipedia, which was somewhat helpful. In the early days, phone system switching (e.g., connecting the caller with the receiver) was handled through operators using patch cords to literally plug the two phone lines together. With automatic switching equipment, most local calls could be completed without an operator. A geographic area would be covered by a telephone exchange that might cover up to 10,000 numbers. When more people subscribed to the phone system, the limitation in the number of unique, short (four or five digit) numbers became a problem. Hence, a group of subscribers in one physical exchange were given an exchange name (such as MElrose) that made it easier to remember than a longer, seven digit phone number. Instead of seven digits, the subscriber's number was the exchange name plus five digits (BEechwood 4-5789) the "B" stood for 2 and the "E" for 3, hence 234-5789. Using exchange names greatly expanded the number of available phone numbers. (Our more modern equivalent was the addition of area codes and we seem to keep needing to subdivide areas into more area codes for just the same problem: not enough unique phone numbers.) The exchange names also were selected to be phonetically clear on otherwise low audio quality lines. "No, no, I said MELROSE not MILHOUSE" (This brings to mind the ever-present cellphone conversation, "Can you hear me now....?")


Most of the exchange names went the way of the old black dial telephone in the 60's and 70's. But like so many other technology memorabilia, there is a group of people out there working hard to assemble a huge database of old exchange names for towns and cities all over the country. I learned from this database that my home town had two exchanges: MElrose-2 and MElrose-5. That would seem about right for a town of 15,000 people. Check out your own town here. This group is even trying to get people to back-convert current numbers to an old exchange name. The telphone prefix for my current address starts with 941. Hmmm...WIlson, WIndsor? How about something more current like "WIi" for the game machine?

Now if I could just get that stupid Marvelettes song out of my head.