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LETTERS
NAME THAT TUNE
What was the music in the 1895 talkie?
I READ WITH GREAT INTERest Frederic D. Schwarz’s article about the oldest talkie (“Notes From the Field,” Spring 2003), which described the world’s oldest film with synchronized sound, recorded in Thomas Edison’s laboratory. It was fascinating, but I was sorry to reach the end of the article without finding the answer to a question that has puzzled me for several years: What piece was the violinist playing?
In the late 1990s the producer of an IMAX film asked me to provide music to be dubbed over that film clip. It was to be part of a film for a major history museum. (I play fiddle as an avocation, and my primary work is writing and developing history-of-technology exhibits.) At the time, the cylinder with the original music on it was still being restored, and we couldn’t find out what the violinist was playing. The dancers seemed to be waltzing, so I watched the violinist’s bow to come up with a waltz that reasonably matched the bow’s movement. Once it was recorded, the producers muddied the recording a bit to make it sound old. (It’s the only time I’ve recorded anything that was deliberately altered to sound worse.) I played a waltz that I had learned from friends in North Carolina. What was the original music?
Mary Seelhorst
YPSILANTI, MICH.
Frederic Schwarz replies: It was a barcarole from a French operetta of 1877, Les Cloches de Corneville (The Chimes of Normandy), by Robert Planquette, which was popular at the time the film was made. A recording is available from EMI Classics.
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Washing at War
I LOVED YOUR “POSTFIX” column about “windwashers” (by Arthur G. Sharp, Fall 2002). I am an 87-year-old former Seabee who was put ashore on Eniwetok Island in April 1944. I was promoted to stevedore, and our small group unloaded shiploads of supplies onto the island. Our work was quite dirty, the temperature sometimes reached 120 degrees, and fresh water was at a premium. We didn’t relish washing with saltwater.
I had heard of windpowered washers, and while wandering around the small island, I began gathering up junk. I found discarded dunnage with which to make an A-frame. I made an axle by mounting a piece of pipe in discarded truck wheel bearings and used a discarded funnel for a plunger. I constructed a windmill of four three-foot boards attached to a hub fastened to one end of the pipe, and at the other end of the pipe I had a homemade crank that pushed the funnel up and down about five inches.
It was a crude-looking apparatus, but it worked for the 11 months I was there, quickly washing clothing in a bucket with soapy water. I was able to get fresh water to use with it because the evaporator operator lived in my tent.
Chalmer D. Martin
VERSAILLES, OHIO
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Beyond 3-D
MY THANKS TO TOM HUNTington for “The Gimmick That Ate Hollywood,” which made the Spring 2003 issue a definite keeper. Those of us in the business the article is about have a saying, “3-D is the wave of the future—and always will be.”
In 1987 Prentice-Hall published my book The 3-D Oscilloscope: A Practical Manual and Guide, which gave details, including construction plans, for a unit that requires no glasses and provides stereo and movement parallax over a wide range of viewing angles. The idea was that since television displays evolved from the ordinary oscilloscope, perhaps 3-D TV would benefit by starting from a 3-D oscilloscope. British Telecom bought two units from us to test the idea’s potential for television. Unfortunately it scaled down the viewing-angle width to its barest minimum, predictably dooming it to failure.
After investigating a variety of 3-D techniques for television and movies, we’ve concluded that a most effective technique that requires no new equipment is simply to move the camera smoothly and continually, horizontally, vertically, or at an intermediate angle, when still scenes are being shot. With personal-computer graphics displays, slowscene rotation or oscillation can be very effective. The legendary pilot Wiley Post had only one good eye, and most birds and fish have eyes with nonoverlapping fields of view and thus have no Stereovision, yet they navigate in a threedimensional world. Motion provides a highly effective depth cue that works even for one-eyed creatures.
Homer B. Tilton
President
Visantes Laboratories
TUCSON, ARIZ.
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Beyond 3-D
THOUGH QUITE INFORMAtive, Mr. Huntington’s piece contains a fundamental technical error in its explanation of anaglyphic stereography. It states that “in this system. … one [image] is projected through a red filter, making it invisible to the eye wearing the green lens, while the other is projected through a green filter, making it invisible to the eye wearing the red lens.” In fact the process works the opposite way. The red-on-white image is invisible to the eye looking through the red lens, and the red lens actually increases the contrast in the greenon-white image and makes it appear more or less black and white, and the green lens does the same for the red image.
Ed Newmann
CHICAGO, ILL.
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Torso Tech
THE ARTICLE ON THE BRA, by Curt Wohleber (“Object Lessons,” Spring 2003), brought to mind a little engineering book originally published in the 1963. Written and edited by Robert Baker, it was titled A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown and contained engineering stress analyses written in lay terms, with each chapter a different illustration of stressanalysis investigation. The title essay was by Charles E. Seim. Years ago I used it in teaching an introductory engineering class. The connection just struck me as amusing.
Andrew McFarlin
SAN JOSE, CALIF.
Editors’ note: Seim’s essay —which contains passages like “since these evening gowns are worn to dances, an occasional horizontal force, shown in Figure 2 as i1, is accidentally delivered to the beam at the point c, causing impact loading, which compresses all the fibers of the beam”—has taken on a new life as the inspiration for a work for a 70-piece orchestra, Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, by Deborah Henson-Conant, a jazz harpist and composer. It includes a tango movement that Ms. Henson-Conant says “illustrates the forces which hold the world up” and a movement titled “Gossamer” that is “about the ephemeral quality of the fabric of life.” It was given its premiere by the Springfield, Massachusetts, Symphony in 2001.
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Geniuses Are Different
I ESPECIALLY ENJOYED “Holography: The Whole Picture,” by Tim Palucka, in the Winter 2003 issue. I knew most of the people involved, and I can relate a tale about Dennis Gabor’s naiveté concerning social issues. In the early 1970s he told me that money would someday be replaced by electronic transactions. Almost the case. He also said this would mean an end to crime. No comment.
The day after Gabor’s Nobel Prize was announced I was at MIT having lunch with several theoreticalphysics types, who were distressed that the prize had gone to him and not to someone working in elementary particles. But none of them had ever seen the two short papers that established not only holography but so much of modern optics. I was able to tell them what was in the papers, and the issue of who should have been awarded the prize was quickly forgotten in a flurry of questions about the applications of Fourier optics. They moved to a chalkboard and re-created for themselves, from the little I could tell them, much of what Gabor had done. Some things make clear the difference between geniuses and the rest of us.
Erwin V. Cohen
ORLANDO, FLA.
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Ships Aboard Trains
THE “POSTFIX” FOR SPRING 2003 describes a neverbuilt concept for a railroad that would have hauled ships across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Mexico, as an alternative to a Panama Canal (“The Most Gigantic Railroad,” by Joseph E. Vollmar, Jr.). Some ideas never die. The Mexican government is now floating a scheme, at the urging of President Vicente Fox, to create a sort of railroad of heavy trucks that would haul yachts across Baja California between the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific Ocean. The idea is to encourage American yacht owners to bring themselves and their money to the Sea of Cortés (and a new string of marinas) without having to make the long trip round Cabo San Lucas—just as James Buchanan Eads thought that his ship-hauling railroad could avoid the long and dangerous trip around Cape Horn.
Dan Walters
ROSEVILLE, CALIF.
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Behind Mission Control
I COMMEND BRIDGET Mintz Testa for her excellent article “Mission Control” (Spring 2003). You might like to know that there was also a second real-time computer facility during the Apollo program, in addition to Mission Control’s Real Time Computer Complex (RTCC). The Real Time Auxiliary Computing Complex (RTACC), located in the other wing of Building 30, was staffed by NASA and TRW engineers, and it performed computations for trajectory, mass properties, solar radiation, extravehicular-activity heat load, and numerous other matters. Some were confirmations of calculations by the RTCC; others were things it couldn’t do. We worked with punch cards and printer output. The printout was placed under a TV camera, and flight controllers could dial Channel 35 to see the image. The RTACC had the flexibility to make changes during a flight, unlike the RTCC, whose software was frozen long before a mission, and during the flight of Apollo 11 we attempted to determine the orbit of a surprise unmanned Russian lunar probe, to avoid collision with it. There was a contingency plan to fly the RTACC staff and a group of flight controllers to the Goddard Space Flight Center if a hurricane threatened Mission Control, and this was not just a remote possibility. During Hurricane Carla, in 1961, the area where the Mission Control Center was later built was underwater. The RTACC was disbanded after Apollo 12, with increased confidence in the space program and an awareness that some of its obscure capabilities, like using the lunar module to bring the command module back to earth in an emergency, would never be needed.
Dennis Sager
RESIGN, VA.
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Metric and Miserly
THANK YOU, KEN ALDER, for “The Mis-Measure of All Things” (Fall 2002). This is a town that makes millions of gears and chains for the front-wheel drives of cars around the world, mostly metric but a mixed bag. The worst thing about converting to metric was what happened when the wine and liquor industry shifted. The half-gallon became 1.75 liters, but the price stayed the same—for almost 8 percent less. Beer stayed with the old system, as did surveyors and real estate. Try selling an acre in square meters.
E. Pete Scala
ITHACA, N.Y.
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Which High Bridge?
I ENJOYED DAVID PLOWden’s article “The Bridges I Love” (Winter 2003), especially the comments on the High Bridge here in central Kentucky. I’ve always wanted to walk across it but have been afraid an oncoming train would catch me in the middle. The article says it last saw traffic in 1985, but I know I was on the tracks in 1988 or 1989 when a train came along. Can you confirm that it no longer sees traffic?
David J. Hill
CATLETTSBURG, KY.
The editors reply: Youngs High Bridge, in Tyrone, has indeed not had traffic since 1985. However, the High Bridge, another spectacular span nearby, which was built in 1877 and crosses the Kentucky River between Wilmore and Harrodsburg, does carry freight.
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