Category: History Blog

Anyone familiar with the IT industry is surely aware of the hundreds of “industry standards” that have come and gone over the years: USB, FireWire, PictBridge, 802.11g, Bluetooth, Ethernet, PCI, ISA, RS-232… the list goes on and on. Most of these standards are (were) well thought-out systems created by engineers working with designers and marketing departments. But that’s not always the case. Industry standards are sometimes determined by available components or corporate warfare… or even one man’s random decision! And you can find all three of those reasons in the chequered history of the phonograph record.

As you probably know, the first commercially viable recording and playback system was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. The system used a needle to cut grooves into a spinning wax cylinder. The only problem with the system was the the cylinder was turned by a hand crank. This meant that you could record something at 30 cranks per second (cps), while your neighbor might record something at 50cps, while the guy down the street might use 60cps. It wasn’t long before Edison’s engineers were asking him to create a “cranks per second” standard so that any recording would play back correctly on any machine. Edison found a machine and played with it for a while before setting on 80cps… “because it sounded right”. No scientific testing, no focus groups, no careful study of the results… just Edison playing around with the machine for 15 minutes.

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There are around 2.8 billion people in Europe, North and South America, Japan and India. A huge chunk of these people are middle class. Neither rich nor poor, the middle classes are able to obtain comfortable shelter, an adequate supply of food, clothing and basic utilities like electricity and sewer service, as well as education for their children and entertainment for themselves. But I wonder how many people in the middle classes know that they owe their existence… to a flea!

Well, not to a flea, exactly. But rather Yersinia pestis, a bacteria that piggybacked on the flea… which in turn piggybacked on rats in the holds of ships. You might have guessed that I’m talking about the Black Death (a.k.a. the bubonic plague) which happened in Europe and the rest of the world between 1347 – 1351. Little is known about the epidemic outside of Europe except that it was also found in the Middle East, India and China and killed around 75 million people worldwide – around 34 million of which were Europeans. Of course, most of us learned about the Black Death in high school, yet we were often never taught about what the disease actually meant at the time and what happened after the disease had run its course…. which is odd, because one of the most important things to come out of the Black Death was the middle class itself!

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Imagine a scenario where Venezuela wanted a military base somewhere in the Caribbean and offered the United States a nice discount on oil if it would move the residents of Puerto Rico off their island, demolish all existing structures and lease it over to Venezuela in perpetuity… Sounds improbable, doesn’t it? Perhaps Puerto Rico isn’t a good example – with a modern infrastructure, a population of almost four million people and thousands of American businesses on the island, it would be a monumental task (logistically as well as politically) to pull something like that off. But what if the island’s population was much smaller? Could something like that happen?

Well, something like that already did. You might of heard of the island of Diego Garcia on the news. Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia is one of the largest American airbases in the world, and planes regularly take off from the island for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What you probably haven’t heard is how it came to pass that America got an airbase there in the first place. It’s a story of realpolitik, nuclear weapons, a few thousand Creoles and the mysterious powers of the British monarch.

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Can you name the Hollywood bombshell that partied with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, then developed a communications system to defeat them both… which is still an integral part of modern wireless communications?

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna on November 9, 1913. Aside from being amazingly beautiful, Eva was as smart as a whip, too. When she married her first husband – Friedrich Mandl, a German arms manufacturer – it wasn’t long before she knew his trade inside and out. And it was at various “business social” events that Kiesler ran in to Hitler and Mussolini… which is ironic, because both Kiesler and Mandl were Jewish. Mandl did everything he could do disguise his Jewish background, even converting to Christianity. Mandl was also insanely protective of his wife, and had her followed nearly everywhere she went. Between her husband’s obsessive jealousy and Germany’s ever increasing anti-Semitism, Kiesler just couldn’t take it anymore, so she fled to London.

It was in London that Kiesler met movie legend Louis B. Mayer – the last “M” of MGM. Mayer hired her on the spot and personally changed her name to the one film buffs and geeks everywhere still remember: Hedy Lamarr. She had already appeared in several European films – including the sexually provocative Ecstasy. But it would be in Hollywood where she’d have her greatest success, appearing in Algiers (1938), White Cargo and Tortilla Flat (both 1942) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949).

Continue reading “Hedy Lamarr, Adolf Hitler, and your cell phone”

If you’re a fan of the modern world, you owe a debt of gratitude to John Wilkinson. Wilkinson, whose father was an ironworker and a part-time inventor, was one of those fantastic industrialists that envision the entire world using his product in as many forms as possible. In Wilkinson’s England, people would sit at iron tables eating off of iron plates using iron cutlery in iron houses. Wilkinson was such a fan of iron that he was buried in an iron coffin and had an iron obelisk for a tombstone. But it wasn’t iron tables or iron plates that led John Wilkinson to change the world… it was cannon.

Prior to Wilkinson, almost all manufactured goods were made “in-house” by individuals. By that I mean that each product – and all the component parts therein – were either made by the manufacturer or someone local to him. Take a cabinetmaker, for example. It’s entirely possible that a cabinetmaker would have made all of his tools himself, as well as all of the component parts of a cabinet, such as the nails. And when he made those nails, he might make them the length of his pinky finger or as thick as his favorite book – or any other measure he chose. He might have “outsourced” his nail production to a local blacksmith, but that blacksmith was just as likely to use some other non-standard measure (such as the diameter of a coin) to determine the length of a nail. And, of course, a cabinetmaker or blacksmith in another town might use an altogether different measure to make his nails.

Of course there were large factories, especially when it came to complex products like carriages. Making a carriage required a blacksmith, a slew of carpenters and an upholsterer at a minimum. But a factory like this was more like a collection of tradesmen working under one roof than the single entity we think of today. If an upholsterer were to leave the factory, his replacement might have completely different tools and components than his predecessor. Of course, the factory owner had the ultimate say in the quality and appearance of his products, but by and large the tradesmen were left alone to do what they did best. And most of the time, “their best” was close enough.

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Wars have been started for any number of reasons: money, land, religion, xenophobia… you name it. But one of the strangest beginnings to any war in history has to be the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748).

Under the terms of the Treaty of Seville (1729), the British agreed not to trade in Spanish colonies. To enforce the treaty, the Spanish were allowed to board and inspect any British ship in Spanish waters.

In 1731, the British ship Rebecca was boarded and searched under the terms of the treaty. However, it seems that the Spanish minister and the British ship’s captain – Robert Jenkins – had some sort of disagreement that resulted in the Spanish minister cutting Jenkins’ ear off. For some reason, this news didn’t make it back to Westminster until 1739, but when it did the British public weren’t happy. British Prime Minister Robert Walpole reluctantly declared war on Spain, and the War of Jenkins’ Ear had begun.

The war itself wasn’t particularly interesting – which is why you’ve probably never heard of it before – but several interesting things did result from the war:

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Imagine walking through the Brazilian jungle. The lush canopy overhead nearly blocks out the sun and your senses are almost overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells of the rain forest. Now imagine that you come to a clearing in the jungle. At the other side of the clearing, you see Tara from Gone With The Wind, complete with Anglo-Saxon owners, African slaves… even a Confederate flag flying proudly in the wind. Although it might sound like a fantasy – and perhaps the image of an exact copy of Tara in the Brazilian jungle is a bit overblown – I assure you that many as 10,000 Southerners packed up at the end of the Civil War and became Confederados in the Brazilian wilderness.

Here’s how it happened: towards the end of the Civil War, Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II – one of only two Brazilian monarchs, and the only native-born monarch in Brazilian history – knew that the Southern cause was lost. He knew that his country needed the expertise of experienced cotton farmers, so he sent recruiters to the American South offering subsidies and tax breaks to unrepentant Confederates as an incentive to move to Brazil. Even though no less a figure than Robert E. Lee cautioned Southerners against such a move, thousands packed up everything and started life anew in the jungles of Brazil.

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One of the greatest “what ifs” in human history involves the “Trent Affair” of the American Civil War. As you might know, the Confederate states were eager to get official recognition from European countries. This would not only give the Confederate states a huge prestige boost, it would also have given them access to loans of money, war materiel and possibly even troops to fight the Northern states. To help secure this recognition, the CSA dispatched James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana to Havana, Cuba, where they boarded the British ship R.M.S. Trent en route to meetings with British and French authorities respectively. However, on November 8, 1861 the Trent was boarded by sailors from the USS San Jacinto. The two Confederate diplomats were arrested and taken to Boston while the Trent was allowed to continue to Britain.

Not surprisingly, this action set off a firestorm of controversy in the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston is alleged to have begun an emergency cabinet meeting about the affair by throwing his hat on the table and declaring, “I don’t know whether you are going to stand this, but I’ll be damned if I do”. Public opinion in the UK tended to favor the South over the North in the conflict, and support for the Confederacy was even greater amongst the people that had the means of making their opinion count: the gentry and aristocracy. As you probably know, one of Britain’s key industries at this time was the export of cotton and wool fabric, and the overwhelming majority of the raw cotton sent through British looms came from the American South. Not surprisingly then, support for the Confederate states was nearly unanimous within this key British constituency. A letter was therefore quickly dispatched to the American Secretary of State demanding the release of the Confederate diplomats as well as an apology to Britain for this blatant disregard for maritime law. The British also began ramping up on war materiel such as boats, guns and ammunition, and they also began moving troops to areas where they could be quickly dispatched… to go to war against the United States.

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The house I lived in for the first 14 years of my life initially had an unfinished basement. Shortly after my sister was born, my parents decided to turn the basement into a rec room. When it was complete it had carpet with checkerboards and hopscotch grids dyed right in, a pool table, one of those old “console” stereo systems, and a groovy set of white leather “barrel” chairs. But the piece de resistance of the rec room was the touch tone telephone. Although touch tone phones were fairly common in corporate settings, it was truly novel to have one back in your home back in 1976. Friends and family came over to see the new rec room yet spent most of their time playing around with the phone. Kids from the neighborhood came over just to monkey around with the newfangled phone and its 12 buttons.

Although home phones have changed greatly in the past thirty years, most touch tone phones still come with the same 12 buttons that the phone in 1976 had. But some folks with military experience might remember a time when some touch tone phones had 16 buttons. Those phones were part of the military’s nuclear weapon-proof Autovon network:

Autovon stood for “automatic voice network” and was deployed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Panama, Asia and the Middle East. Although there have long been rumors about Autovon cables being buried in concrete shafts deep underground, in fact much of the system was buried in simple dirt 30 feet or so below the street surface. The system used a variety of means to achieve its “nuclear weapon proof” status, such as building in redundancies via satellite and microwave. But perhaps the most interesting feature of the system was the calling priority feature, and that’s where the 4 extra buttons come in.

To make a basic phone call, the user would simply pick up the phone and dial the number. But if the user had some vital information that absolutely, positively had to get through, he could press one of the red buttons before dialing to assign a priority to the call. The priorities (in ascending order) were P (Priority), I (Immediate), F (Flash) and FO (Flash Override). So, for example, when a “Priority” phone call reached an exchange, a “regular” phone call would be dropped (if necessary) to allow the priority call to go through. Multiple levels of call priority were needed because of the expected deluge of calls to telephone exchanges in Washington DC and other important areas in the event of a nuclear attack. So a major on a “Priority” call with some important but not critical information could get bumped by a general with crucial information on an “Immediate” call. The most interesting option of all is (of course) “Flash Override” – a priority that was strictly limited in its use to the President and members of the National Command Authority. As you might guess, Flash Override trumped any and all traffic on the network; Flash Override was designed to allow the President to get his call through no matter what.

Although the system has long since been replaced, it’s still fascinating to read about it (check out the Wikipedia article or this site dedicated to the Autovon system for more details). It almost makes me wish I had my own Autovon system – wouldn’t that have come in handy for calling TicketMaster when Madonna tickets went on sale?