Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/06/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Brian, Thank you for an excellent post. I can't match your knowledge of communications technology, and I'm not even going to try. We're dealing with the age old debate; "there's nothing new under the sun" versus "everyday a new discovery." The philosopher and theologian in me loves to get people to say, "humbug" because I like to get people thinking about their presumptions and prejudices. Clearly 20th century communications technology is vastly superior, particularly on a practical functional level, that anything which came before. I have never written a letter with a Goose quill pen, and I plan never to do so except perhaps maybe just once to see what it's like. Science, I think, does progress by building on what came before. Art doesn't. That's what makes them different. I simply want people to give some thought to the notion that the points at which the accumulation begins frequently go much further back in history than one might think. I enjoy the paradox of all this. My new R8 ( OK, we're on topic now ) is totally different than Matthew Brady's view camera, and I'm more than grateful for that. But, in another sense it's identical, or at least quite similar. Again, I bow your superior knowledge of communications technology. But I would point out that the ability to use electricity to transmit information from place to place via a wire is a nineteenth century development. As someone who spent his first career as a broadcast engineer I would like to nominate Major Armstrong for your list of important people. I would argue that AM is a very old idea which certainly pre-dates the 1800's. FM may be based on nineteenth century calculus, but it is clearly, to me, a twentieth century development. Isn't this the basis for the first modems? Doesn't that come before quaditure modulation? These are just ideas I enjoy kicking around. Leonardo, his sketch books not withstanding, never built a functional jet liner. I like to argue against myself as much as I do against anyone else. If it's true that the roots of progress often go surprisingly far back in history, I think that it's also true that it has taken an astonishingly long time to find the answers to some questions. AC circuit theory is, I think, an example. DC has been well understood for a long time. The math required for AC has been around since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, yet is wasn't until the first quarter of the twentieth century until individuals such as Charles Steinmetz finally got the pieces put together. The politics of science never ceases too both alarm and amaze me. Thomas E. himself seems to have done all he could think of to keep AC from being placed into commercial use. Don't get me wrong. I am not anti progress. The fact that I can do Morse code a 25 words a minute doesn't mean that it is my preferred mode of communicating with people. It simply means that it's something I enjoy doing from time to time. What I am fighting is this. I react with great vigor to the idea that people who came before us were intellectually inferior because they lacked our technology. Quite the contrary. They made a gift to us of the foundation which has allowed us to have all that we have. It makes me quite crazy when I see what I presume are "new-age" flavored TV shows which are talking about things like the Egyptian Pyramids. These shows always seem to argue along these lines.... The Pyramids are made from stones which weigh 200 tons each. How could the backward ancients in the desert ever have moved such a rock without a nice, modern truck. It must be that they had help from extra terrestrials. If that's what one wants to believe, then fine. But I say that it's only a big rock. Give me a couple of hundred guys, some truck loads of beer, and tent full of sex workers, and I'll get the damn rock moved for you. Enough. Let me close by saying that leaving the wonderful technological developments which have happened during my life time aside then the history of the twentieth century scares the living hell out of me. And I think that it damn well should. What's wonderful about the 20th century is truly grand. What's black about out times is profoundly disturbing indeed. I try not to be arrogant about our technology because, in my sadder moments, I think we have too much else to answer for. Barney Brian Reid wrote: > > the entire history of twentieth century technology can be > > understood as nothing more that an elaboration of nineteenth > > century inventions. > > Only true with a very parochial focus. All communications technology is > based on 20th-century work starting with Claude Shannon in 1922. In terms > of the technology that allows us to talk to each other here on the LUG, I > think the five most important technologies are QAM (Quadrature Amplitude > Modulation) from 1953, Erbium amplifiers from 1975, packet switching (1965 > or so), Winchester magnetic domain deposition (1970 or so), and the theory > of directed acyclic graphs (1960's). > > Those enable modems, fiber optics, hard drives, internetworking, and global > mesh routing. Next howabout liquid crystal (first understood in 1922, > manufactured in 1960, mass-produced in 1980) or cathode ray tubes (the > knowledge that electrons hitting rare earth would make light didn't happen > until 1935). And though it's too soon to recognize it as a technology, the > very concept of a mouse and a window and the interactive human factors that > make it work took 35 years to develop to what we now all take for granted. > In the 19th century nobody would even have recognized human factors as > being technological. > > All of these technologies are based on theoretical understandings that were > utterly unknown in 1901, though David Hilbert, who was alive in 1901, did > much of the math that made QAM possible. Never mind that it took 50 years > to invent and build the vacuum tubes and ferrite-core coils that would make > it possible to test his math. > > The Erbium amplifier, which makes long-distance fiber possible, is based on > theoretical research published for the first time in the 1960s; it is an > outgrowth of laser technology, based on work by Weber and Townsend in the > 1940's that was not even conceivable until a generation of scientists had > used electron microscopes (1937) to study the crystallographic structure of > semiconductors. > > Humbug > > Brian Reid, > a 20th-century guy who is quite proud of the contributions of my century.