Posts Tagged ‘radio’
“Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it”*…
Before he became the renowned author we know, Samuel Clemens– Mark Twain– worked (among other things) as a printer. He knew both the painstaking (and sometimes painful) labor of hand-setting type and the extraordinary cultural power of the mass-printed (by Twain’s time, on steam-powered presses) products that it enabled.
As Jeff Jarvis explains in an excerpt from Hot Type- The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, Twain lived through the transition from hand setting to the Linotype, and through the intertwined transition of the society of which the transition was a part…
In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling author and cultural celebrity; and as a publisher trying to invent a business model for books as an industry.
Now that their machinery could produce volume, publishers needed ways to sell at scale, to build the modern phenomenon of the best-seller. The problem: In 1859, only 1,090 bookstores dotted America. By 1914, there were still only 3,501. So if readers couldn’t find books, books had to find their readers. For certain authors and publishers, including Twain, that was accomplished through subscription publishing, with door-to-door canvassers taking orders for books before they were printed. Until the end of the nineteenth century, three quarters of books in the U.S. were sold this way.
In 1874, the New York Tribune estimated that 50,000 agents were employed by subscription publishers. What a wonderful fictional character it would be to imagine the itinerant peddler pitching not pots or patent medicines but literature and literacy, foot in door after door, blurbing Twain with a few dozen sample pages and illustrations to whet curiosity and demand.
Subscription publishing brought advantages. By collecting orders for books before printing, publishers knew how many copies to produce. Publishers could use customers’ capital to finance production—not unlike a content producer today raising money via Kickstarter or Patreon. Subscription publishing’s cross to bear was snobbery. William Dean Howells dismissed subscription books, carving out a caveat only for his friend Twain: “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”
The regular trade carped that subscription publishers “flood the country with worthless books, poorly written, poorly printed and bound, containing a small amount of matter in large type and with wide margins to the page, for a large price.” Elisha Bliss, Twain’s publisher, defended the trade to the Tribune: “Instead of injuring the regular book business I think we create a thirst for knowledge and thus increase the sale of all kinds of books. In the little town where there are no bookstores the book agent induces people to buy.”
Twain valued these readers as they valued him. They freed him from the expectations of high culture and its critics. And he was certain they’d make him rich. “Harper publishes very high-class books,” he wrote to a friend, “and they go to people who are accustomed to read. That class are surfeited. But there is a vast class that isn’t—the factory hands and the farmers. They never go to a bookstore; they have to be hunted down by the canvasser.”
Twain knew that a new, mass audience had to be corralled, one door knocked after another. As he wrote to London critic Andrew Lang: “The thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated—are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to cater to that little faction is of no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that.” He sought instead to entertain “the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath….I have never tried in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for that, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.”
In 1866, Twain nabbed the assignment of a dream: sailing to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to send back reports to the Sacramento Union. Upon his return to San Francisco, he launched a side gig as a lecturer, amusing ever-larger audiences with his travel tales and humor. “He wouldn’t be a cloistered writer so much as a showman, a public personality, a professional crowd-pleaser. In short, a celebrity,” wrote Ron Chernow. Next, Twain reported for the Alta California about a journey Back East. Then he issued his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which debuted to good reviews and established Twain’s reputation as a wry humorist. The book was published by Twain’s friend Charles Henry Webb, whom he soon dumped, complaining—as would become his habit—about sales.
Next came another enviable gig and a reputation-setting assignment from Alta California, to report from a five-month cruise to the Holy Land on the Quaker City. His letters ran in the paper and were picked up in others across the country. He returned home to a letter from Elisha Bliss of Hartford’s American Publishing Company, soliciting a book on the adventure, which became The Innocents Abroad.
Twain received negotiating advice from famed minister Henry Ward Beecher, who had inspired the Holy Land trip but didn’t go along. In Twain’s telling, Beecher offered a prophetic warning: “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.” Twain reported to his family, “I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations….But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it.” He soon complained this was a bad deal.
Subscription books were fancy and rich in illustration, not so much elegant as tarted up. Buyers had the choice of various bindings as upgrades. The average price of Innocents was $4 (almost $100 today). Readers bought them to display their erudition to visitors: every book a coffee-table book. The Innocents Abroad was received well, favorably reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly by Howells, who noted its length—“in compliance with one of the main conditions of a subscription book’s success, bigness namely”; praised its drollery five times, its irony three times, and its impudence twice; applauded the “amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature”; and counted Twain among America’s humorists, “quite worthy of the company of the best.” Twain’s head swelled sufficiently to accept the praise: “It was quite generally conceded that I was a valuable asset to the American nation and to the great ranks of literature.”
In a year and a half, Innocents sold 82,524 copies, nowhere near Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s 300,000 in its first year, but a success nonetheless. Twain had negotiated well, for he rejected a $10,000 flat payment from Bliss in favor of the 5-percent royalty, which added up to $16,504—about $400,000 today. During his lifetime, no book of Twain’s sold as well as quickly, fueling his chronic grievances with publishers.
Twain wrote a next book for Bliss, about his life Out West, this time demanding half of the profits after manufacturing costs, equaling a royalty of 7.5 percent. Twain told Bliss, “We shall sell 90,000 copies in the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of doubt of that.” Published in 1872, it sold 65,000 in the first year—again, respectable.
Twain and Warren joined to write The Gilded Age, published by Bliss for a 10-percent royalty. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first year. Twain thought he would be a better publisher. He would soon try.
He released The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, selling only 23,600 copies in its first year. He blamed Bliss for mistiming its release. He next published A Tramp Abroad in 1880. Walter A. Friedman provided an accounting: American Publishing sold 62,000 copies in the first year at $3.50 each for a total of $218,000. Just over half of that went to sales agents, who paid their canvassers. The company kept $106,000, out of which it spent $41,540 on printing, leaving a profit of $64,460, of which Twain received $32,000—nearly $1 million today.
As Twain was writing The Prince and the Pauper, Bliss died. He shifted publication of The Prince to his friend James Osgood. This time, Twain funded the book’s publication—complaining that he was out $65,000 before the first copy was printed. Instead of receiving a royalty, he paid Osgood 7.5 percent of sales. Neither was experienced in subscription sales, and of a first printing of 25,000, 5,000 remained in their warehouses after two years. He repeated the mistake with the publication of Life on the Mississippi, which lured only 30,000 orders, far from the 100,000 Twain hoped for. Osgood’s company ended in bankruptcy in 1885. This might have discouraged a sensible man from deciding to become a publisher. Not Twain.
Twain established his own publishing house, giving it the name of his general manager and dogsbody, Charles L. Webster & Co. The aim was to publish only Twain’s books. The first was his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in 1885. Infamously, an engraver subverted the publication by endowing Uncle Silas Phelps with an erect penis, necessitating the scissoring of the offending image from thousands of copies and delaying publication past prime Christmas season. Nonetheless, the Webster Company’s agents sold 60,000 copies, rewarding the author with a check for $54,000. “Once more I experienced a new birth,” Twain wrote. “I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.”
Huck’s success emboldened Twain and Webster to expand as a full-fledged publishing house. Twain worked diligently to solicit the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Twain offered Grant an astounding 70 percent of profits. He told Webster to hire veterans as canvassers, have them wear their Grand Army regalia, and deliver his script: “I presume it is simply a question with you of your choice of bindings, as no American will want to have it said that he has not read General Grant’s book, a work that will descend to your children and will increase in value with every generation.” The memoirs were a stupendous best-seller, 10,000 door-to-door canvassers selling 325,000 two-volume sets in 1886, earning the general’s widow and children as much as $15 million in today’s dollars.
It was downhill from there for Twain and Webster, their record studded with poor choices of books by a half-dozen Civil War generals or their widows, the king of Hawaii, and Pope Leo XIII (“’Twas kind of a fizzle,” recalled Twain’s maid Katy Leary). Twain signed Henry Ward Beecher to write his memoirs, but the minister died before setting pen to paper. Twain was inspired to publish the ambitious Library of American Literature with 1,700 selections by 500 authors in eleven volumes, but failed to grasp the perilous economics of selling such a gargantuan series by subscription. Readers paid a three-dollar down-payment, but Webster & Co. would not collect the rest of its thirty-three-dollar price until after paying the printers thirteen dollars, on top of twelve dollars to sales agents, with Twain carrying that debt in the meantime. The company needed capital to tide itself over, but where was Twain’s—and his wife’s—money? Sunk into the Paige Compositor. [see here] The business analysis was not complicated. His maid understood it: “Mr. Clemens was all deep in the typesetting machine, and he was putting all his money in that so he didn’t have much left to help out the publishing company. That was the beginning of the end of that venture.”
Even without their bad business decisions, Twain’s venture was likely doomed, along with the subscription publishing industry, for books were getting radically cheaper, with ever-more competition. The number of titles published in the U.S. more than doubled, from 4,559 in 1890 to 12,010 in 1914. In 1895, The Bookman began publishing the first lists of most-popular books according to store sales. The term “best-seller” came into general use around 1910, according to historian of publishing Frank Luther Mott, who set the bar for “best-seller” at “one percent of the total population of continental United States for the decade in which the book was published.” To meet Mott’s benchmark, books today would need to sell 3.4 million copies. For comparison, Kristen McLean, a lead industry analyst at NPD BookScan, reported that in 2022, of 45,571 titles released by just the top ten publishers, only 163 books or 0.36 percent sold more than 100,000 copies in a year.
In our age of mass media, we have developed a skewed definition of big—a presumption that many means most. To sell 100,000 books—and congratulations if you do!—is to speak to 0.03 percent of the nation, hardly a resounding expression of the cultural zeitgeist. The blockbuster economics of media—in film, television, music, and books—depends on a few best-sellers to make up for the vast number of lesser bets. But that eternal quest for blockbusters gives the impression that anything called a best-seller is widely influential, while all else is dismissed. Whether selling entertainment to an audience or an audience to advertisers, the mechanization and industrialization of media—begun with the steam-powered press and culminating with the Linotype—spawned a business and cultural obsession with scale…
The rise and fall of subscription book publishing and the birth of mass media: “Mark Twain, America’s First Celebrity Author and Publisher” from @jeffjarvis.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
* Mark Twain, in an April, 1900 letter contributed to the celebration of the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz
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As we roll the presses, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Lee de Forrest; he was born on this date in 1873. An electrical engineer and inventor, he ultimately held 300 patents on a variety of inventions crucial to electronic communications, and co-founded the forerunner organization to the IEEE, De Forest is probably best remembered as the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting (which he also pioneered) and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947.
Unwittingly then had I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite, whose structure shall persist while man inhabits the planet.
– Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (1950), p. 4
Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the award in 1930 of Philo Farnsworth‘s first patent: a television system (U.S. 1,773,980), with a description of his image dissector tube, which was his most important contribution to the development of television.
“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”*…
Following the often heated debate between Federalists and their opponents that led to the the ratification and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were still unsatisfied. Then-Representative James Madison, who studied the deficiencies of the Constitution pointed out by Anti-Federalists, collected proposals (16 in all), and then crafted a series of 12 proposed corrective amendments. Congress approved the twelve articles of amendment on September 25, 1789, and submitted them to the states for ratification. 10 were ultimately ratified– the first 10 amendments to our Constitution… or as we know them, The Bill of Rights.
In an excerpt from his book, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Ray Raphael elaborates…
The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, did not follow the precedent set by these state constitutions. Despite spending almost four months drafting their new plan, the framers did not include within it a thoughtful listing of rights but only a scattering of guarantees. On September 12, just five days before the end of the Convention, George Mason finally suggested that delegates add a “Bill of Rights” similar to the state declarations of rights, but his motion failed to garner the support of a single state delegation.
Although state conventions ratified the Constitution, several included a caveat: the new plan should be amended as soon as possible. In fact, they proposed scores of amendments, some resembling provisions of what we now know as the Bill of Rights, but many others altering or even deleting structural features of the Constitution. New York’s convention coupled its list of proposed amendments with a demand for a second federal convention to consider these various proposals. The profusion of proposed amendments, plus the prospect of a second convention, frightened supporters of the Constitution, who feared that a new convention, if it met, would revise the fledgling Constitution before it could be put into effect and gut some of its major provisions.
Most leading Federalists hunkered down. In arguing against a second federal convention, they insisted that a bill of rights was not necessary and could even jeopardize rights that were not included. The job of the Constitution, they said, was to state what government could do, not what it couldn’t do. Rights already were secured because the government possessed no power that allowed it to impinge upon them. In fact, any catalog of specified rights would imply that rights were limited to those in the catalog, and not others.
James Madison and George Washington agreed with this argument, but they also took an accurate measure of people’s displeasure. It was strong and it was widespread. Rather than fight a rearguard action against the wave of discontent, they preferred to channel and control it. Article V of the Constitution stipulated that either Congress or state conventions might propose amendments. If Congress acted first, Madison and Washington reasoned, it could take charge of the issue and protect the substantive features of the new plan–congressional taxation, for instance–while giving ground elsewhere. Madison, meanwhile, pledged to his Virginia constituents that he would work to add a bill of rights if they elected him to represent them in Congress.
Once elected, in the First Federal Congress, Madison whittled down the large list of amendments suggested by the states’ ratifying conventions. With President Washington’s blessing, he proposed nineteen that did not endanger key constitutional components. After considerable debate and some revision, Congress pared Madison’s list down to twelve amendments, which it sent to the states for approval. Ten of these, which we call today the Bill of Rights, were ratified by three-quarters of the states, as required by the new Constitution. The genesis of the Bill of Rights, like the origins of the Constitution, was political as well as theoretical.
The short-term effect of the framing and ratification of the Bill of Rights was to put a Federalist stamp on the amendments and to doom the attempts by the Constitution’s opponents to modify the substantive or structural features of the new plan. The long-term effect was to reinforce America’s culture of rights and to infuse specific rights into American jurisprudence. After more than two centuries, the Bill of Rights, which had been so casually dismissed by the framers, figures so prominently in our minds that it often eclipses the Constitution itself. In an era when the word “government” has a bad name, the ten amendments that circumscribe the federal government’s authority over individuals are often viewed more favorably than the Constitution the framers created in 1787…
The backstory of the Bill of Rights, via the always-illuminating Delanceyplace.com
For more on the process that yielded them, and the texts of all 16 proposed amendments, see here.
* Thomas Jefferson, a critic of Federalists, in a 1787 letter to James Madison (who had originally been opposed to the idea of a “bill of rights,” both because he believed that the Constitution as written did not grant the federal government the power to take away people’s rights, and because he [and some other Framers] believed that we have natural rights too numerous to list– and that anything not explicitly included in a Bill of Rights would be unprotected.)
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As we ponder precedent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that a BBC newsreader had nothing to communicate. His entire script for the 8:45 pm news bulletin was: “There is no news”… after which piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment. The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen’s Hall in London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.
“Nothing scares corporate radio like public radio”*…
These are tough times for those who love (and/or depend on) local radio. The Trump administration has eliminated the federal funding on which many local public stations have depended, and consolidation has “homogenized” local commercial radio. And this, at a time when the civic and cultural news and engagement that local radio provides has never been more important.
Still, community-rooted local radio perserveres. Consider ldial, a curated collection from Adam Scott— a list that let’s you sample some of the best independent and community radio stations in the US (and, ideally, encourages you to find your own local options).
Then, remembering that the best local radio is your local radio, consider supporting your local station(s).
* Tom Petty
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As we tune in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Hormel registered the name and trademark “Spam” for its canned meat product. It is interesting to note that the company had marketed the product since 1937, and only felt the need to protect the name 13 years later.
“This incompleteness is all we have”*…
The impulse to “systemitize” morality is as old as philosophy. Many now hope that AI will discover and organize moral truths. But Elad Uzan suggests that Kurt Gödel’s work on incompleteness demonstrates that deciding what is right will always be our burden…
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. Unlike human judges or policymakers, a machine would not be swayed by personal interests or lapses in reasoning. It does not lie. It does not accept bribes or pleas. It does not weep over hard decisions.
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context – qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates – assumptions about motion, force or mass – and derive increasingly complex consequences. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell’s equations are classic examples: compact, elegant formulations from which wide-ranging predictions about the physical world can be deduced.
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain – in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems. A consequentialist begins with the idea that actions should maximise wellbeing; a deontologist starts from the idea that actions must respect duties or rights. These basic commitments function similarly to their counterparts in physics: they define the structure of moral reasoning within each ethical theory.
Just as AI is used in physics to operate within existing theories – for example, to optimise experimental designs or predict the behaviour of complex systems – it can also be used in ethics to extend moral reasoning within a given framework. In physics, AI typically operates within established models rather than proposing new physical laws or conceptual frameworks. It may calculate how multiple forces interact and predict their combined effect on a physical system. Similarly, in ethics, AI does not generate new moral principles but applies existing ones to novel and often intricate situations. It may weigh competing values – fairness, harm minimisation, justice – and assess their combined implications for what action is morally best. The result is not a new moral system, but a deepened application of an existing one, shaped by the same kind of formal reasoning that underlies scientific modelling. But is there an inherent limit to what AI can know about morality? Could there be true ethical propositions that no machine, no matter how advanced, can ever prove?
These questions echo a fundamental discovery in mathematical logic, probably the most fundamental insight ever to be proven: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. They show that any logical system powerful enough to describe arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete. In this essay, I argue that this limitation, though mathematical in origin, has deep consequences for ethics, and for how we design AI systems to reason morally…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The incompleteness of ethics,” from @aeon.co.
And as if that were not enough, consider the cultural challenge implicit in this chart:
More background at “Cultural Bias in LLMs” (and here and here).
* Charles Bukowski
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As we own up to it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil received a patent (#2,292,387) for a frequency-hopping radio communication system which later became the basis for modern technologies like Bluetooth, wireless telephones, and Wi-Fi.
Hedy Lamarr made it big in acting before ever moving to the United States. Her role in the Czech film Ecstasy got international attention in 1933 for containing scandalous, intimate scenes that were unheard of in the movie industry up until then.
Backlash from her early acting career was the least of her worries, however, as tensions began to rise in Europe. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, grew up in a Catholic household in Austria, but both of her parents had a Jewish heritage. In addition, she was married to Friedrich Mandl, a rich ammunition manufacturer with connections to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Her time with Friedrich Mandl was bittersweet. While the romance quickly died and Mandl became very possessive of his young wife, Lamarr was often taken to meetings on scientific innovations in the military world. These meetings are said to have been the spark that led to her becoming an inventor. As tensions in both her household and in the world around her became overwhelming, she fled Europe and found her way to the United States through a job offer from Hollywood’s MGM Studios.
Lamarr became one of the most sought-after leading women in Hollywood and starred in popular movies like the 1939 film Algiers, but once the United States began helping the Allies and preparing to possibly enter the war, Lamarr almost left Hollywood forever. Her eyes were no longer fixed on the bright lights of the film set but on the flashes of bombs and gunfire. Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors’ Council in Washington, DC, where she thought she would be of better service to the war effort.
Lamarr’s path to inventing the cornerstone of Wi-Fi began when she heard about the Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes. She recruited George Antheil, a composer she met through MGM Studios, in order to create what was known as a Secret Communication System.
The idea behind the invention was to create a system that constantly changed frequencies, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the radio messages. The invention would help the Navy make their torpedo systems become more stealthy and make it less likely for the torpedoes to be rendered useless by enemies.
Lamarr was the brains behind the invention, with her background knowledge in ammunition, and Antheil was the artist that brought it to life, using the piano for inspiration. In 1942, under her then-married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, she filed for a patent for the Secret Communication System, patent case file 2,292,387, and proposed it to the Navy.
The first part of Lamarr and Antheil’s Secret Communication System story did not see a happy Hollywood ending. The Navy refused to accept the new technology during World War II. Not only did the invention come from a civilian, but it was complex and ahead of its time.
As the invention sat unused, Lamarr continued on in Hollywood and found other ways to help with the war effort, such as working with the USO. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s Hollywood career came to an end that her invention started gaining notice.
Around the time Lamarr filmed her last scene with the 1958 film The Female Animal, her patented invention caught the attention of other innovators in technology. The Secret Communication System saw use in the 1950s during the development of CDMA network technology in the private sector, while the Navy officially adopted the technology in the 1960s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The methods described in the patent assisted greatly in the development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Despite the world finally embracing the methods of the patent as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, the Lamarr-Antheil duo were not recognized and awarded for their invention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. They both received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, and in 2014 they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame…
“The sacred moon overhead / Has taken a new phase”*…
As Oliver Hawkins and Peggy Hollinger report, an analysis of commercial radio spectrum filings shows a growing number of players– government agencies, but increasingly private companies– bettting on the emergence of a lunar economy…
Private companies are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the aim of exploiting an emerging lunar economy, Financial Times research has found.
More than 50 applications have been filed with the International Telecommunication Union since 2010 to use spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enable all wireless technology, on or from the Moon.
Last year the number of commercial filings to the global co-ordinating body for lunar spectrum outstripped those from space agencies and governments for the first time, according to FT research. The filings cover satellite systems as well as missions to land on the lunar surface.
“We will look back and see this as an important inflection point,” said Katherine Gizinski, chief executive of spectrum consultancy River Advisers, which has filed for lunar spectrum for three satellite systems on behalf of other companies since 2021.
Although total registrations were lower in 2024 than the previous year, the increased proportion of commercial filings reflects a race to build the infrastructure that will enable the “cislunar economy”, the area between the Earth and Moon…
More on the players and the game: “The race to claim the Moon’s airwaves” (gift article), from @financialtimes.com. See also:
* William Butler Yeats, “The Cat and the Moon”
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As we linger over the lunar, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that NASA accomplished the third lunar EVA: Commander Alan B. Shepard and Lunar Module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell became the fifth and sixth men to walk on the Moon (in the lunar highlands near the crater Fra Mauro) as part of the Apollo 14 mission.
During this four-hour “activity,” they deployed the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP)– scientific experiments that were left on the lunar surface and other scientific and sample collection apparatus. B efore lifting off on the next day, the astronauts went on another moonwalk almost to the rim of nearby Cone crater, collecting 42.9 kg of samples along the traverse. At the end of this 3.45 km walk, Shepard used a contingency sampler with a Wilson 6-iron connected to the end to hit two golf balls.
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