4 ms·

I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos over

I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos over the wire - some time ago I saw a video [1] about wirephoto [2] that blew my mind a little, I would never guess that the first photograph sent over the wire was in as early as 1921! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto

digi_owl 10y ago
I think that's because the equipment was bulky and expensive until recently. So it was reserved for corporate and government offices.
SilasX 10y ago
Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Well, what I mean is, with phone calls you already had (as soon as someone picked up) a data feed. If you could automate that pickup, and relay it to the ticker, you have a kind of email, albeit without the storage. Why couldn't they do something like that? (Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      And while looking into the ticker tape i completely missed the obvious, the teletype. You know, that device that gave us the the /dev/tty in unix. That said, it seems most of them were operated over dedicated networks. And the one i can find a reference to that was operated by AT&T had their own area codes etc. All in all i get the impression that it could be done, but likely only so at great expense. Consider that having a ticker tape printer in your home suggested you were someone with great wealth that was watching the stock market 24/7. Even having a telephone was not chump change. My parents talk about having one phone for several households, with the bell patterns used to indicate who it was for. I suspect we should not underestimate how much the IC and packet switching has driven down cost of installation and operation.
    - chipsy 10y ago
      Faxing did exist essentially as soon as they came up with wirephoto. It was just really, really expensive for a long time, and you got a better average benefit out of a long distance call or telegram.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Edison's first profitable invention, in 1869, was a way to get stock tickers to sync up automatically. It was a hack (send lots of idles every once in a while to force the printing wheel to hit a stop) but it was good enough to deploy. Previous printing telegraph technology, back to 1852, required a skilled operator at the receiving end to manually sync. That was used only for main lines with heavy traffic. Howard Krum finally figured out how to do sync right in 1919, when he invented serial stop-start async as we know it today. In 1924, he came out with the Teletype Model 14 tape printer, with the first reliable mechanical async decoder. That design was used into the 1960s, and most computer serial ports are compatible with it. (45.45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.) Telegraphy was store and forward, but manual at first. By the late 1920s, punched tape was used, but someone had to manually look at tape, tear off each message, and put it in the proper outgoing reader. This was manual Sendmail. After WWII, automated forwarding centers were built, with paper tape punches connected to readers via a bin as the storage mechanism and telephone-like switches to change connections. These were hugely expensive to operate for the amount of data transferred, but it was essentially email, with electromechanical technology. (I restore Teletypes as a hobby. Here's a Model 14 working.[1]. If you want to see some in action, they'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, Memorial Day weekend, in San Jose.) [1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14 https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14
    - SilasX 10y ago
      Interesting! Thanks for the detailed explanation and info!
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Thinking about it, i guess magnetic tape replaced those paper tapes for a while. Before various "solid state" solutions were worked out with enough capacity to handle the same job.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  The transistor was patented in the twenties already but only created in the forties. I wonder what could have been possible if the information revolution happened a lot earlier? Coexisting Biplanes and BBS:es.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Someone discovered that a 3-terminal semiconductor device could be built using copper oxide as a semiconductor in the 1920s. But copper oxide is a lousy semiconductor, and it was a lousy transistor. So it was just an interesting lab phenomenon. It wasn't until Bell Labs finally figured out the physics behind semiconduction in the 1950s that transistors really worked. But suppose someone like Edison had gotten hold of the 1920s transistor lab experiment and tried to make it better by trying many different materials. (That's how he got a usable, cheap light bulb filament; thousands of materials were tried, ending with carbonized paper.) They would have tried selenium (selenium rectifiers were known) and galena crystals (crystal radios were known). They probably would have gotten a point-contact transistor out of galena, which would have led to germanium. It would have been unreliable and heat-sensitive until germanium purification was figured out. They might have tried grey tin, which is a semiconductor but a dead end. They probably wouldn't have tried silicon, because you have to grow silicon crystals first, which is hard and wasn't done until 1950. So a transistor radio might have been demoed by 1930 or so.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Wealthy people could have a telegraph line installed, and did. Ulysses S. Grant got news of his election as president in Galena, IL, (along the Mississippi River, near the Iowa-Wisconsin state line) at the house of a local businessman with a private telegraph service. More generally, though, "email" was called "mail". In cities, there were often two, and sometimes three mail deliveries daily. It would be possible to carry on a round-trip correspondence over the course of a day. The precursor of online shopping was called "catalog stores" -- Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the canonical example. I just caught an item over Ansible last week that Sears had discontinued its catalog in 1993, the year before Amazon started. Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University, has just published a book on technology and growth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In it he notes that the typical urban home of 1920 was connected to five "networks": water, sewer, gas, electricity, and phone. I'd add postal mail and the highway, railroad, canal, and shipping networks as well, though those had a "last mile" component of individual delivery. Still, this largely offered similar capabilities to today's Internet. Email was postal mail. Online shopping was catalog shopping. References, information, and entertainment (as well as advertising, without tracking or pop-ups) were performed via books, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines. Phonographs provided audio, as well as over-the-air radio broadcasts. Libraries provided extended access. Latencies were higher, but the throughput of even a horse-drawn cart is pretty good.
MistahKoala 10y ago
Not especially relevant, but that explainer clip was amazingly easy to follow. I can't remember the last time I watched a clip that explained something potentially complicated with sufficient detail. The string/line analogy worked really well, too.

digi_owl 10y ago

I think that's because the equipment was bulky and expensive until recently. So it was reserved for corporate and government offices.

SilasX 10y ago

Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?

digi_owl 10y ago
Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Well, what I mean is, with phone calls you already had (as soon as someone picked up) a data feed. If you could automate that pickup, and relay it to the ticker, you have a kind of email, albeit without the storage. Why couldn't they do something like that? (Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    And while looking into the ticker tape i completely missed the obvious, the teletype. You know, that device that gave us the the /dev/tty in unix. That said, it seems most of them were operated over dedicated networks. And the one i can find a reference to that was operated by AT&T had their own area codes etc. All in all i get the impression that it could be done, but likely only so at great expense. Consider that having a ticker tape printer in your home suggested you were someone with great wealth that was watching the stock market 24/7. Even having a telephone was not chump change. My parents talk about having one phone for several households, with the bell patterns used to indicate who it was for. I suspect we should not underestimate how much the IC and packet switching has driven down cost of installation and operation.
  - chipsy 10y ago
    Faxing did exist essentially as soon as they came up with wirephoto. It was just really, really expensive for a long time, and you got a better average benefit out of a long distance call or telegram.
- Animats 10y ago
  Edison's first profitable invention, in 1869, was a way to get stock tickers to sync up automatically. It was a hack (send lots of idles every once in a while to force the printing wheel to hit a stop) but it was good enough to deploy. Previous printing telegraph technology, back to 1852, required a skilled operator at the receiving end to manually sync. That was used only for main lines with heavy traffic. Howard Krum finally figured out how to do sync right in 1919, when he invented serial stop-start async as we know it today. In 1924, he came out with the Teletype Model 14 tape printer, with the first reliable mechanical async decoder. That design was used into the 1960s, and most computer serial ports are compatible with it. (45.45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.) Telegraphy was store and forward, but manual at first. By the late 1920s, punched tape was used, but someone had to manually look at tape, tear off each message, and put it in the proper outgoing reader. This was manual Sendmail. After WWII, automated forwarding centers were built, with paper tape punches connected to readers via a bin as the storage mechanism and telephone-like switches to change connections. These were hugely expensive to operate for the amount of data transferred, but it was essentially email, with electromechanical technology. (I restore Teletypes as a hobby. Here's a Model 14 working.[1]. If you want to see some in action, they'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, Memorial Day weekend, in San Jose.) [1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14 https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for the detailed explanation and info!
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Thinking about it, i guess magnetic tape replaced those paper tapes for a while. Before various "solid state" solutions were worked out with enough capacity to handle the same job.
Gravityloss 10y ago
The transistor was patented in the twenties already but only created in the forties. I wonder what could have been possible if the information revolution happened a lot earlier? Coexisting Biplanes and BBS:es.
- Animats 10y ago
  Someone discovered that a 3-terminal semiconductor device could be built using copper oxide as a semiconductor in the 1920s. But copper oxide is a lousy semiconductor, and it was a lousy transistor. So it was just an interesting lab phenomenon. It wasn't until Bell Labs finally figured out the physics behind semiconduction in the 1950s that transistors really worked. But suppose someone like Edison had gotten hold of the 1920s transistor lab experiment and tried to make it better by trying many different materials. (That's how he got a usable, cheap light bulb filament; thousands of materials were tried, ending with carbonized paper.) They would have tried selenium (selenium rectifiers were known) and galena crystals (crystal radios were known). They probably would have gotten a point-contact transistor out of galena, which would have led to germanium. It would have been unreliable and heat-sensitive until germanium purification was figured out. They might have tried grey tin, which is a semiconductor but a dead end. They probably wouldn't have tried silicon, because you have to grow silicon crystals first, which is hard and wasn't done until 1950. So a transistor radio might have been demoed by 1930 or so.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Wealthy people could have a telegraph line installed, and did. Ulysses S. Grant got news of his election as president in Galena, IL, (along the Mississippi River, near the Iowa-Wisconsin state line) at the house of a local businessman with a private telegraph service. More generally, though, "email" was called "mail". In cities, there were often two, and sometimes three mail deliveries daily. It would be possible to carry on a round-trip correspondence over the course of a day. The precursor of online shopping was called "catalog stores" -- Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the canonical example. I just caught an item over Ansible last week that Sears had discontinued its catalog in 1993, the year before Amazon started. Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University, has just published a book on technology and growth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In it he notes that the typical urban home of 1920 was connected to five "networks": water, sewer, gas, electricity, and phone. I'd add postal mail and the highway, railroad, canal, and shipping networks as well, though those had a "last mile" component of individual delivery. Still, this largely offered similar capabilities to today's Internet. Email was postal mail. Online shopping was catalog shopping. References, information, and entertainment (as well as advertising, without tracking or pop-ups) were performed via books, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines. Phonographs provided audio, as well as over-the-air radio broadcasts. Libraries provided extended access. Latencies were higher, but the throughput of even a horse-drawn cart is pretty good.

MistahKoala 10y ago

Not especially relevant, but that explainer clip was amazingly easy to follow. I can't remember the last time I watched a clip that explained something potentially complicated with sufficient detail. The string/line analogy worked really well, too.