Sound film changed the
standard
of voices and even more noticeably that of movements.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
In other words, it becomes a high-frequency transmitter, which must then only be coupled with a low-frequency amplifying tube
in order to send radio or television signals. In the first step, after they are converted to electricity, the acoustic or optical data signals are variably increased through low-frequency amplification. In the second step, the data signals become transmissible without wires over variable distances by modulating them on a high carrier frequency.
As the basic circuit of microphones and radio transmitters, this was already clear in 1913. But World War I provided new applications for the technology and the means for its mass production. Trenches brought an end to the possibility of commanding soldiers from a
192
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
distance through optical or acoustic signals, yet this was precisely why a need for electronic feedback between invisible fronts and equally invisible control centers emerged. The first radio transmitters only served to entertain radio operators with music in exceptional cases, and eventually this was officially forbidden as a "misuse of army equipment. " But to a greater degree they were used to manu- facture feedback loops between ground personnel and reconnaissance flyers, who were told over the radio which enemy objects were invis- ible from the ground and still needed to be photographed or filmed.
This high-frequency military technology led to the worldwide explosion of electronics companies. Five years later, and again through the misuse of army equipment, the national radio institu- tions of Europe and the commercial stations of the USA emerged, and this was followed a decade later by the first television transmitter.
But low-frequency military technology also had consequences for entertainment electronics. The triumph of amplifier tubes allowed electronics companies to revolutionize Edison's and Berliner's old- fashioned mechanical sound recording technology. AT&T in the USA and Siemens & Halske in Germany wired a record player with a pick-up and electrically controlled speakers. This also resolved the problem that Edison's sound recording system failed to remedy in the Black Mary studio. The trumpet of the phonograph worked only when it was held directly in front of the actors' mouths, and it could thus embarrassingly be seen in the film that was being made at the same time. Tube amplifiers first made media acoustics into a sixth sense that could match up to the sixth sense called the camera.
Sound film was developed simultaneously in Germany and in the USA immediately after World War I, but it is completely senseless, at least on the American side, to list the individual inventors by name. It is enongh to know that Warner Brothers was in serious financial trouble compared to the competition, and for this reason they reached for the life saver of sound film. The leading American electronics laboratory, AT&T's Bell Labs, gave the technically clue- less Sam Warner a hand. After the record had been electrified, AT&T was also able to offer Warner Brothers a special model: a huge record that could be synchronized with the silent film and broadcast in the cinema hall using an amplifier and loudspeaker. This vitaphone system was and remained a patent of Western Electric.
For this reason, it was useless to interpret or explain films any more. Becanse the content of a medinm is always another medium, sonnd films simply enhanced the reputation of the electronics compa- nies that had made them possible. The first sound film in 1929 was
193
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
not called The Jazz Singer by chance. A Jewish ex-chOIrboy, who had sung with religious wise men in synagogues in New York as a child, defects to the American media after puberty and becomes a jazz singer (at least that is what white people called it in 1929). It breaks the heart of his pious father, who had not yet been disabused of his Mosaic faith by the melting pot of New York. The jazz singer is in the middle of a concert when he receives the news that his father is dying - let us say of heart failure - and he strikes up an old Jewish song that brings the entire audience to tears. Let us rather say: the recently electrified record companies, which are on the hunt behind the backs of all concert-goers, have a new hit in record sales. The Jazz Singer implies, therefore, that with the introduction of sound film Hollywood became a branch of electrical companies like Western Electric or General Electric, which possessed both record companies and radio stations at the same time and which, in turn, were only branches of large banks like Rockefeller or Morgan (Faulstich, 1979, p. 160).
In Germany, the development of sound film proceeded more sys- tematically and on a much smaller scale. After losing the war, there was hardly any money, and instead demobilized army radio equip- ment stood around everywhere in 1919. In only four years, the signal corps had increased from 3,000 to almost 300,000 men. But even with misused army equipment, it was still possible to develop the very first sound film system without the use of records.
The developers of this wondrous work called it Tri-Ergon, which seems reminiscent of the triode tube but was actually intended to combine the names of the three developers - Hans Vogt, Joseph Masolle, and Dr. Joseph Engl - into a single anonymous "work of three. " Luckily Vogt, the main player, left his memories to the German Museum in Munich. His "first contact with silent film" took place in 1905, when he was a 1S-year-old peasant boy and he saw documentary films from the ongoing Russo-Japanese war in the cin- ematograph. "Eight years later," when he was already serving in the imperial navy at the experimental radiotelegraphy station in Kiel, the German auteur film had replaced the documentary cinematograph. Vogt enjoyed the "beautiful, highly dramatic" film The Student of Prague, as Evers and Seeber had just filmed it. However, there were two things that disturbed the young radio technician, who had been entrusted with the latest AEG tubes: "in close-ups, the lips of the actors moved like ghosts," and "the comments of the explainer ruined the atmosphere" (Vogt, 1964, p. 7). As is usual with autobiog- raphies, Vogt claims that he would have immediately invented a new
194
? OPTICAL MEDIA
media system If only World War I had not broken out. Four years later, partly at the front and partly at the high-frequency laboratory of a certam Dr. Seibt in Berlin, Vogt took part in the ether war:
Soon I was active on the water, air, and earth fronts, soon again in the Berlin laboratory. A medium for communicating with buried trenches had to be created and tested. Radio direction finders and radio stations for the weather contingent zeppelins. The sad end of the war came. (Vogt, 1964, p. 7)
Vogt overcame this sadness while unemployed in postwar Berlin by once again returning to his film idea. With world war technology and know-how, it must have been possible to combine both of the media of the pre-war period - moving images without sound and constant noise without image - into the multimedia system of sound film. For this reason, the first thing that the Tri-Ergon people did was to establish technical specifications with systematic clarity:
We take the following principles as the basis of our work:
1. The same film that carries the image must also serve as a sound carrier.
2. The sound must be recorded and reproduced through photo-
graphic processes.
3. All of the equipment necessary for sound recording, amplifica-
tion, transmission, storage, reproduction and playback are not
permitted to deform the original sound print. (Vogt, 1964, p. 11)
The most difficult part of this project was naturally amplification. Sound signals are initially so weak that at best they can make a hog's bristle vibrate, like Scott's phonautograph. Accordingly, the Tri-Ergon people first had to develop a tube amplifier that reacted "with a repro- ducible steepness of approximately six milliamperes of anode current change per volt of grid voltage change" (Vogt, 1964, p. 16). It turned out that a very similar tube amplifier had already been developed at Siemens by the great Dr. Schottky, to whom today's transistor tech- nology owes all Schottky diodes. Patent rights thus no longer applied, but the Tri-Ergon people had still resolved their fundamental problem.
Only Tri-Ergon had now become a system project comparable perhaps only to Edison's electrification of theaters, streets, and resi- dential homes. It could no longer be managed through individual inventions, but rather it required an entire chain reaction of new developments. After the solution of the amplifier problem, there
195
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
was still the task on both the transmItter and the receiver side of transforming an acoustic signal into an optical signal that would be compatible with the filmstrip. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl solved this problem in a way that already prefigures the merging of sound and television technologies: because electricity had become the medium of all possible media or sensory channels, the sound signal could first be converted into current through a newly developed, highly sensi- tive, and inertia-free microphone, whose noise had been minimized compared to the old carbon button microphone. This current, which was still amplified by the new tube, then regulated a glow-discharge lamp, whose oscillations were visible and thus filmable when they were in the high-frequency range of up to 100 kHz (Vogt, 1964, p. 20). Despite their name, therefore, soundtracks are not sounds at all, but rather they are varyingly bright and varyingly wide images of the vibrations that sounds or noises physically are, which makes them extremely close to the Braunian tube.
And because the receiver side of a media system - according to Shannon's information theory - implements the inverse mathemati- cal function of the transmitter side, the three Tri-Ergon developers constructed a selenium cell for their film projectors, which was also crucial for television. Selenium cells converted light into electricity again, which then in turn only had to be converted to the cinema sound system - and this was the historical reason why sound film engineers also included a few early television engineers, like Mihaly or Karolus. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl completed their technical speci- fications most elegantly: namely, they built the first electrostatic loud- speaker, which at that time conld fill the entire cinema with sound and which is still ideal for headphones and stereos today. With this static loudspeaker, Edison's entire mechanics of sound storage was replaced by an electronic control.
So far, so good. Tri-Ergon had done its work and integrated an entire chain of new developments into a single media system. On February 22, 1920, the sound of a harmonica and the noteworthy word "milliampere" could be heard in a playing film for the first time (Vogt, 1964, p. 37). One year later, shortly after midnight, this contemptible yet wonderful word from the mouth of a technician was replaced with a female speaker "in close-up" reciting the poem Heather Rose by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Vogt, 1964, p. 38). This would have pleased Miinsterberg, who claimed that film techni- cally liquidates all classical-romantic substitute sensuality, such as the virtual reality of that rose, which as you know represents a virgin shortly before her defloration.
. ? . 1
196
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
However, those sorts of successes did not yet make the new multimedia system a commercial success. As the Tri-Ergon people presented their technical Gesamtkunstwerk to the director of a large electrical company, which to my mind could only have been Siemens, their absolutely correct argument was that a systematically developed chain of tube amplifiers, microphones, and loudspeakers could support sound film as well as civilian wireless telephony - in today's words, therefore, entertainment radio. The director's counter- argument was that no listener "would spend good money for some- thing that comes into his house for free like air and light" - in other words, no one would make Siemens happy by paying radio license fees (Vogt, 1964, p. 47).
In September 1922, the silent film industries reacted accordingly to the first public demonstration of sound film. From the viewpoint of their financial area of competence the Berliner Borsenzeitung briefly wrote: "The extent to which talking films are really the future, however, remains to be seen. It should not be forgotten that the talking film loses its internationality, and it must always remain limited to smaller works, as large films are only profitable on the world market" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
When Hans Vogt told this counter-argument to his wife, she came up with an idea that led to the Tri-Ergon people's siugle lucrative patent: the Gisela patent. Gisela Vogt proposed, namely, "to over- come speech difficulties in the future by making consecutive record- ings of each sound film scene in the studio in multiple idioms, in the primary cultural languages" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
With this new principle of synchronization, which had been con- ceived by a woman, the multimedia system was perfect. By rights, it would have had to wipe ont the cinema equipment that had already been established, but the three amateurs were not able to also finance this mnlti-billion dollar replacement. It was clear that the conver- sion of silent film to sound film was only the first in an entire series of conversions that would turn the existing media system operating worldwide completely inside out without interrupting its efficiency or its finances. The same holds true for television systems or technical wars in general, both in the recent past and in the future.
In the case of sound film, it is easy to predict the outcome of this immense need for capital: as in the USA, the German film industry also fell into the hands of electrical concerns like Siemens and AEG, which got involved in lawsuits with the American patent holders for years until the worldwide marlcets were divided up, as usual, and UFA was taken over by Deutsche Bank and Hugenberg. And one
197
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
fine day, after the inconsequential Tri-Ergon patents had long been sold in Switzerland, an American film giant conceived of the idea of commercially surpassing Warner Brothers and their vitaphone system. William Fox, who had first made money, as I said, with Edison's automatic kinetoscopes, bought the Tri-Ergon patents and converted them into a completely auto-referential form of film publicity: Fox's Movietone talking newsreels, the first sound documentary film.
However, all of the international networks between companies and banks, or between Zurich and Hollywood, could not alter the fact that sound film - in contrast to silent film - does not constitute an international medium. The Gisela patent is and remains a com- promise. As long as people continue to speak American or German, and have thus not yet defected to a worldwide standardized computer language like Algol, C or Ada, sound film will continue to serve as national propaganda in so-called national languages. This is rather inconsequential today, in the age of the computer, as the greatness of film is now a thing of the past and only computer languages still count. But because the English themselves refused at that time to recognize the dialect of Hollywood and California as English (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 612), sound film virtually appeared to form nations, just like the radio of that time. It thus restricted the com- panies of the interwar period to national language borders, which also committed them to the possibility of a second world war. Our film history must therefore turn to this war.
It should be emphasized beforehand that the difficulties of sound film synchronization also have an internal technical-aesthetic aspect. The numerous conversions between sound, image, and electricity that are necessary for this process already indicate that acoustic and optical signals are naturally less compatible. For precisely this reason, sound film was the first model case of a multimedia system long before television - if this term is understood as a system that manufactures not natural or physiological but rather technical con- nections. Sound film thus had to bridge two fundamental differences between optics and acoustics, which can briefly be explained.
First, acoustic signals only depend on a single independent vari- able: time (provided that stereophonic sound effects are disregarded, of course). Every musical signal is the momentary amplitude of a complex yet solitary vibration in time. As moving images, film, and television also depend on time. However, they also depend on two spatial coordinates: the height and width of each individual pixel (apart from 3-D experiments, the third spatial coordinate of depth
198
? OPTICAL MEDIA
can be ignored in the same way that stereophonic sound can be dis- regarded when making sound recordings). A one-dimensional vibra- tion or line is thus adequate for sound recording, whereas optical media principally require two-dimensional signal processing. When calculated by the technical-economic standards of engineers, this means that the amount of information to be processed is raised to tbe second power. For this reason, the image fills almost the entire celluloid of a sound film, whereas a band at the edge of the image is sufficient for the optical soundtrack, which in principle could even
be implemented as a simple line.
Second, the acoustics compensate for this simplicity by functioning,
since Edison's days, as an analog medium. In every given moment, the stored technical signal corresponds to the precise amplitude of the recorded sound signal. Until the introduction of audiotape, as I said before, this continuous image of continuous vibrations made it unimaginable and unfeasible to cut the soundtrack into pieces and then rearrange these clips arbitrarily, as is customary with film montage. According to the Breslau radio play pioneer Friedrich Bischoff, when the first radio play directors received the strange assignment to invent a new art form they in desperation chose the feature film as their specific model. Their quasi-cinematic radio play tricks even included slow dissolves and fades, which the new radio art borrowed from films. On the other hand, abrupt cuts and montages, which Andre Malraux called the operating principle of film, did not find their way into the emerging radio play.
By the same token, film and television are discrete processes that deal with nothing but individual frames or pixels, because optical storage is impossible even today. Even electronic switches work far too slowly to store or process light as the mixture of frequencies that it physically is. As is well known, audible sound ranges from approximately 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and that is why it was so easily conquered by low-frequency technology. Visible light is ten billion times faster and ranges from 700 to 380 terahertz. These are numbers with 14 zeroes, which is roughly 8 zeroes beyond the switching time of today's standard electronics, and therefore no medium could even come close. For this reason, film and television do not store light itself but rather only its photochemical effects (as we have already thoroughly discussed), which can then be stored and played back every twenty-fifth of a second, that is, in the low-frequency range. A compact disc that would sample sound events not at the usual 40,000 times per second but rather as slow as film or television would be a unique disaster for the ears.
199
? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
The problems of television and sound film can only be understood on the basis of these physical principles of media technology. The Tri-Ergon process had to be capable of transporting the film images jerkily as a discrete signal, while simultaneously reading the optical soundtrack continuously as an analog signal.
To soften this collision between digital and analog, the Tri-Ergon people developed a new film transport system. Before and after a frame was projected, the celluloid went into a waiting loop, which compensated for the static images during the projection time. Behind the second waiting loop, the film roll continued running the entire time without any interruption, which also made it possible to read the soundtrack as an undisturbed continuum.
The mechanical solution to this problem also had a systematic side. Through millisecond-precise coupling between image and sound, sound film had carried out Messter's standardization proposals for the first time, which means that it had also required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images. Otherwise, a film star with a soprano voice would have been able to sound like a bass and a film star with a bass voice like a eunuch. You all know
such sound manipulations from tape recorders that run too quickly or too slowly.
In the days of silent film, on the other hand, time loops and time lapses were not technical-experimental exceptions but rather daily practices in order to sell as many meters of celluloid as possible to a paying audience. For the first time, therefore, sound film opened up an absolute difference between experimental films and feature films. Real-time processing of tbe visuals first became genuinely verifiable through the ear and the acoustics. For this reason, sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics.
To begin with, many performing artists became unemployed in the middle of the global economic crisis. In 1929, a flyer with the following headlines in bold print was circulated in German moving picture theaters, as they were still so beautifully called (I have left out the fine print):
To the public!
Attention! Sound film is dangerous!
Sound film is kitsch!
Sound film is economic and spiritual murder!
Sound film is bad conservative theater at higher prices! Therefore:
Demand good silent films!
200
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Demand orchestral accompaniment with musicians! Demand stage exhibitions with artists!
Reject sound film! (quoted in Greve et aI. , 1976, p. 287)
This social-revolutionary pamphlet, written in the style of the Com- munist Party or the Nazi Party, was of course signed by the Inter- nationale Artisten-Loge, the performers union, and the Deutscher Musiker-Verhand, the musicians union. These unions were some- what Justified, as the epoch of easy and therefore pointless theater or literary adaptations had indeed begun, bnt they were unable to comprehend a technology that entirely dispenses with acceptance or rejection, needs or fears. Circus artists and musicians were therefore just about as intelligent as many theorists, from Miinsterberg to Bela Balazs, who praised silent film as a self-contained art form and harshly called the possibility of adding a soundtrack absurd. Only theorists, at least at that time, were less frequently unemployed.
The second point is reminiscent of a real historical joke that sound film played on a famous silent film star. John Gilbert had enchanted America's screens and women for 11 long years without having to betray the secret of his voice. However, in 1929 Gilbert's first sound film made what I have presented to you as a technical possibility literally or physiologically true: even without time-axis manipulation or sound time lapse, Gilbert's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse or a eunuch. Immediately after the premiere of this film, the star was a dead man in his own lifetime. Only Garbo threw a pair of roses into his grave (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 607).
The total securing of evidence through which people are registered by multimedia systems can also have a rebound effect on people themselves.
Sound film changed the standard of voices and even more noticeably that of movements. As you all know, all of the expressionistic gestures employed by silent film actors for 30 years, which had barely made up for the lack of words and simulated the superimposed intertitles, disappeared; in facial expressions and ges- tures, sound film asserted a verifiable ordinariness. The crude time of small people - in other words, Hollywood cinema - could begin. For reasons that were less democratic than technical, it became practi- cally impossible to cut or interrupt people in the middle of speaking, unlike the old days of silent film when the actors were inaudible. Even today, we must patiently watch and listen in front of the screen until no one in the studio has anything more to say. Expressionistic gestures, which had been developed as the last defense against cuts, film doubles, and trick film shocks, thus gave way to a new movement
201
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
style, as the inability to cut acoustic events also dictated the optical
events.
Funnily enough, one of the last German silent films, which had actually been made in the era of sound film, illustrated the difference between the two media within the plot as the difference between two generations. Using expressionistic silent film gestures, Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) depicted an old, poverty-stricken professor who dreams only theoretically of moon rockets. In contrast, the young engineers, who turned this theory into blitzkrieg technology at practically the same time as the real Wernher von Braun, are depicted with the economical gestures of sound film, the new objectivity, and the Wehrmacht.
We can leave the content of sound films to themselves, because according to McLuhan's law the content of any medium is always only another medium. And thus, to adapt de Sade freely, we can bring the history of film with one final exertion to an end. With key words like rocket technology and Wehrmacht, a third subchapter has opened whose title, in a modification of a Foucault book, should be called: From the Birth of Media Technologies to the Color of the World War.
3. 2. 5 Color Film
In short, World War II was colorful. The reason was actually because the chief sponsor of the German film industry was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, who had declared war on black-and-white film. In the name of total war or total simulation, World War II eliminated the last remaining differences between fiction and reality, and thus all the ways in which so-called artworks and so-called empiricism have been differentiated from time immemorial. After 1944, for example, German tank crews could no longer operate during the day due to allied air superiority, and they were equipped with night-vision devices that not only put Herschel's discovery of infrared light into practice, but also realized various dreams from a thousand and one nights. Conversely, Sir Watson-Watt provided the English air force with the first operational radar system in the world, which improved on Ritter's discovery of invisible ultraviolet light by extending it towards even higher light frequencies. If it was possible to see colors beyond even the visible color spectrum, such as infrared or radar waves, then visible colors were not permitted to remain hidden. The end of silent film as a consequence of World War I was thus followed by the development
202
? OPTICAL MEDIA
of color film as preparation for World War II. The Redness of Red in Technicolor, which was the lovely title of a 1960s book, was also the red over London, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
The first attempt to use homemade Agfacolor colors was the film Women Are Better Diplomats, which was banned by Goebbels at the beginning of the war simply because in his eyes the colors were "shameful. " The Wehrmacht, or more precisely the navy, had discov- ered feature films in American Technicolor on captured allied ships and sent them as spoils of war to the propaganda ministry. Among these films, naturally, was Gone with the Wind, the self-promotional color film about the American Civil War and the wonderfully color- ful fires that develop when one burns the wooden palaces of old- fashioned southern slave owners.
The German Agfacolor film followed this brilliant example and was gone with the wind. As usual, the leadership of the Reich con- tacted IG Farben, whose chemicals and poisonous substances were crucial to the war effort, and an optimized Agfacolor finally caught up with the criteria for realistic color set by Technicolor. This war over realistic color was supposed to define the entire history of optical media from 1939 to color television in 1965. But in 1942, Veit Harlan was already able to delight all of fortified Europe, from Cherbourg to Kiev, with his Golden City, a color film that was still primarily a form of publicity for itself. The propaganda minis- ter's strategy, whereby only perfectly made entertainment could raise morale, had once again been put into action.
So much for Virilio's discussion of color film as the spoils of war (Virilio, 1989, p. 8). Incidentally, this was not only true for Veit Harlan, but also for Eisenstein, whose Ivan the Terrible had to make do with captured German Agfacolor film. The transfer of technologi- cal advances in two phases (from America to Europe and then from Europe to West Asia), which has since become typical, thus took shape long before Gorbachev.
In addition to these historical notes, however, some technical- systematic remarks must also be devoted to color film, and I will once again attempt to formulate this so generally that it will also be true for color television. This is easy from a technical perspective, because the black-and-white television from World War II already had the technical elements of color television.
I cannot compete with Goethe and deliver a historical theory of colors. Still, the most important steps leading from color photo- graphy to color film to color television must be mentioned. It has already been said that painters always had to deal with colors, and
203
? ? ? ? OpTiCAL MEDIA
signs of color deterioration over time became photography through positivization. But there was no economy of colors ill painting, as this did not become necessary until the development of color ink and color photography. In other words, the number of colors that a painter used to produce a mixed color on his palette was entirely up to his discretion. However, in 1611, an entire century before Newton's analysis of the light spectrum, the Venetian Antonius de Dominis established the key principle that all colors can be mixed from red, green, and violet - the three primary colors. This additive synthesis made it possible to print copperplate engravings no longer only next to one another - as was already the custom with Gutenberg and his colleague Schoffler - but also over one another. Bold colors (on broadsheets) were replaced by infinitely graduated and perfectly overlapping color values, which were standardized in the late nine- teenth century (after the discovery of chemical-artificial aniline dyes, the basis of IG Farben). With Senefelder's lithography, at the latest, three-color printing could commit all desired color nuances to paper. Four-color printing, which has since become the technical standard, also only uses three colors; the fourth printing plate is not colored, but is rather only black or grey, and its task is to differentiate bright- ness values (such as between pastel red and dark red of the same tint).
This economy of materials had important consequences for physi- ological optics, as it defined not arts but rather the first technical media. In the same years that Goethe spent dreaming of a poetic- aesthetic theory of colors, the Englishman Thomas Young developed first, his theory of the interference of light and second, his hypothesis that the eye also functions like a three-color print. Simply because it is completely improbable that the eye would have enough room to contain receptors for an infinite number of different colors, it was necessary to postulate the existence of sensors first for red, second for green, and third for violet. As far as I know, this has never been demonstrated on a living human eye, but in 1967 the Nobel Prize in Physiology went to three doctors who had proved that the cones of human-like vertebrates were limited to RGB (as the technicians say), while the rods can only distinguish between light and dark. Physiologically, therefore, every color signal is a mixture of different amounts of three tints plus a brightness or saturation value. Techno- logically, television - as electrified four-color printing - will derive from this its separation between chrominance (or color value) and luminance (or brightness value).
The first person to convert the new color physiology into technol- ogy again was none other than James Clark Maxwell, to whom we
204
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
owe the general field theory of magnetism and electricity - the prin- ciple of all wireless radio communication - and the clarification that visible light does not consist of elastic vibrations, but rather it is only a special case of that electromagnetic spectrum. In 1861, Maxwell took black-and-white photographs of the same object, colored them in the three primary colors, and successfully projected the images over one another. This would later become the basic circuit of both color film and color television, and it had consequences for painters and technicians.
To begin correctly with the technicians: in 1868, the "ingenious [photographer] Ducos du Hauron" connected the physiology of Young (and Helmholtz) with the media technology of Maxwell (Bruch, 1967, p. 35). He literally suggested: "Small points and lines in the three primary colors red, green, and blue are placed next to each other on a plate so closely that they all merge into the same blended white at the same time. When the elements of all three colors are equally bright, they cover the same parts of the surface; when one color is less bright, more elements are taken from this color and they become larger" (Bruch, 1967, p. 35).
Ingenious blueprints rarely creep up so softly. First, Ducos du Hauron reversed the entire working principle of painting by replac- ing the subtractive color synthesis of a painter's palette, where the mixing of all colors together results in black, with Newton's and Maxwell's additive synthesis, where the sum of all colors results in white. Because there are no white phosphorescent materials in nature, incidentally, the white that has appeared on black-and-white screens since 1930 is also in technological reality a meticulously bal- anced mixture of complementary colors, whose addition results in this white. Second and possibly even more importantly, Ducos du Hauron hegan the digitization of color images. Just like the recently invented telegraph, he built colored areas out of "dots and dashes," which in the eye became the illusion of an apparently uniform colored area. Young's model, which broke the eyes down into nothing but discrete rods and cones for primary colors, was thus transferred to a picture or medium that could simulate human eyes and show them how to perform.
Painters only needed to transfer this technical model of vision to their canvases, through the mediation of a certain Chevreuil, and Europe's last object-oriented art movement was born. The so-called pointillists - Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, and so forth actually built their landscape pictures out of nothing but points in the primary colors, which then within the eye, and indeed sensationally through
205
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
additive synthesis, blurred into blended pamts. This last competition between fine arts and optical media was followed only by abstract painting.
There was only one artist at the tIme who drew techmcal rather than aesthetic conclusions from these digitized colors: Charles Cros, who was a lyricist, painter, bohemian, and tinkerer all at the same time. He had already accurately described the phonograph shortly before Edison, and he also described the first method of making color photographs. After Young and Ducos du Hauron, all that remamed necessary for color storage was the development of emulsions, which contain static, dispersed receptors for all three primary colors just like the eye. This is precisely what Cros proposed, although Edison said that he "was inconsistent, sought immortality at one time as poet and at other times strove for the painter's laurels, and thus he lacked that peculiar ability of concentration and inner composure, without which nothing great and permanent can be created" (Eder, 1978, p. 651). To put it more simply: the money from color photography was made by others.
In order to get to television, I will not bother tracing the lengthy history leading up to the mass production of Agfacolor in 1941. To put it briefly, it consisted simply in the commercialization of the theories and experiments we have already discussed. In the first phase, the rule already given concerning silent film still applied: silent black-and-white film was neither silent nor black-and-white. First, the technique of film tinting was developed on the basis of Maxwell's experiment: black-and-white films were simply dyed in uniform, monochromatic colors such that love scenes were depicted in pink, a yearning for nature was expressed through the color blue, etc. Second, there were attempts to color the thousands of frames in an entire film by hand, which was lavish, expensive, and rare - like
impressionists painting the Cathedral of Chartres in all the changing shades of color of an entire day. Third, in 1897 the Berliner Hermann Issensee applied for a patent for color cinematography, which in the spirit of pointillism showed three differently colored frames one after the other in rapid succession, and these colors blended together at the extremely high frame rate of 120 hertz (Bruch, 1987, p. 19). Fourth, it is important to keep in mind that black-and-white films were never perfect before the developmeut of panchromatic films, because the emulsion responded to the individual primary colors with varying degrees of intensity and these imbalances could only be adjusted through the use of expensive carbon arc lamps or sunlight (Monaco, 1977, p. 96).
206
? OPTICAL MEDIA
In any case, you can see that it still took a long time after the introduction of sound film to erase the last difference between simu- lation and reality. As I said before, World War II was the first war in color. At the end of the war, the first color film material was provided to the propaganda companies that had been systematically established in all of the armies (see Barkhausen, 1982). In contrast to World War I, these propaganda companies were ordered to take part in the combat with weapons, and in contrast to Griffith or Messter they were consequently forbidden simply to reconstruct battle scenes. Unlike war correspondents on the radio, who were only equipped with transmitters, and unlike journalists, who were only equipped with typewriters (see Wedel, 1962), film could supply a multimedia show of color and sound, word and noise.
For this reason, the introduction of stereo sound and widescreen after the war was only a small step that enabled color film to be able to deceive the three-dimensionality of ears and eyes. In World War I, varions professors, physicists, and musicologists had attempted to use perspective to detect invisible enemy artillery by artificially extending the range of vision or hearing. One of them, the French physicist Henri Chretien, transferred his military detection technique to the civilian trick of horizontally compressing film images during recording to squeeze more optical information into Edison's stan- dard format. During playback, however, this deformation would once again be equalized (Virilio, 1989, p. 69; Monaco, 1977, p. 87). Widescreen film was thus born, and it would be cinema's last life saver before the competition of television became overpowering. Up to now, the horizontal viewing angle of slipper cinema has been beneath contempt, but widescreen, cinemascope, and stereo sound can no longer change the fact that for us the highest purpose of film is already in the past. Strictly according to McLuhan's law, film has devolved into an evening program content filler for another medium: television.
3. 3 Television
Unlike film, which simply inherited all the complexities of the image as accoutrements, television is a high-tech object. Therefore, we can and must link together many of the technical explanations that have already been given. It will be impossible, however, to draw any connections between television and literature or fantasies. Unlike film, there were no dreams of television prior to its development. In
207
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
1880, when the British humor magazine Punch published a carica- ture showing people watching television in the future, the principle underlying the technology had already been fixed. And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem ofElectrical Tele- vision in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.
It should also be clear that the history of the development of televi- sion was the first realization through electronics of all of the functions named in Shannon's information theory. First, it was a fully elec- tronic converter of images into currents, and thus a television signal source. Second, it was a fully electronic transmission circuit, and thus a television channel. Third, it was a fully electronic converter of current into images, and thus a television receiver. Its fourth function, which only developed much later, was also to serve as an electronic image storage device. The technical specifications were so complex because the digital processing of optical signals is two-dimensional; it must be able to cope with the square of the amount of information processed by records or radio transmitters.
Since 1840, however, the single electrical news channel was teleg- raphy, which had been standardized by Morse. It was a channel, therefore, that was just as linear as alphabet and letterpress - the media it had displaced. Just as letters are read one after the other, so too were the dots and dashes of Morse code transmitted one after the other through isolated copper-cored cables. On the other hand, Siimmerring's attempt to transmit the 26 letters and ten numbers over 36 parallel wires during the war of 1809 proved to be much too expensive and prone to interference. "A Gennan idea/) Napoleon reportedly said about Siimmerring's telegraphs. In contrast to film, therefore, the problem of television from the very beginning was how to make a single channel dimension from two image dimen- sions, and how to make a single time variable from convertible surfaces.
It was no coincidence that the principle answer was found by
Alexander Bain, a Scottish philosopher and printer. Because the print-
ing of writing processed data streams in a linear fashion, while the
printing of images broke these surfaces down into dots, Bain was able Col to suggest that images should be principally conceived as rectangular
grids, and that the individual raster elements should be transmitted point by point. In principle, therefore, images became discrete quan- tities of data, like telegrams. In strict opposition to photography,
208
? OPTICAL MEDIA
which prided Itself on its analogy to nature, and m partlal contrast to film, which consisted of a discontinuous or discrete sequence of many analog photographs, television began as radical cutting: it not only cut up movements in time, but it also disintegrated connections or shapes into individual points in space. The symbolic thus now triumphed where once the imaginary had ruled over perception and consequently also painting. And the fact that these individual points are today called pixels or "last elements" already shows how close television was to Young and Ducos du Hauron's theories concerning colored dots. This proximity had only to be realized.
It happened in 1883, even before the development of the feature film, when a 23-year-old physics student made a useable and patented television circuit based on Bain's principle. Paul Nipkow studied here in Berlin with Helmholtz, whose important experiments with sounds, voices, and colors laid the groundwork for the invention of the telephone and the gramophoue. But while Helmholtz received an imperial physical-technical institute as a gift from Werner von Siemens, the telegraph industrialist, his student Nipkow remained in classic Mecklenburg poverty. In 1883, therefore, he spent Christmas Eve in his dormitory room in front of a small Christmas tree with the candles burning, a cheap petroleum lamp, and a German National Post Service telephone that one of his few friends had misappropri- ated as a private gift for himself. From this misuse of an imperial device emerged - on the last Christmas in the history of the world, if you will - not an entertainment medium, as our current misunder- standing might assume, but rather a channel in Claude Shannon's literal sense of the word. As it says in Nipkow's patent specifications,
"the purpose of the apparatus described here is to make an object at 'location A visible at any location B" (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
The idea of this image transmission occurred to Nipkow either at the sight of the Christmas tree candles, which flicker, or at the sight of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had first invented: if human voices were transmissible, why should it not also be possible to transmit the corresponding face? According to Bain, the image would then have to be cut up into individual points, which would be transmitted to a receiver using a telephone cable and would then be reassembled once again as a flickering image; as a good student of Helmholtz, however, Nipkow also knew about the inertia of the eye and its unconscious ability to filter out the image flicker either physiologically through the after-image effect already employed by film, or more generally or mathematically through the integration of individual pixels.
209
? OPTICAL MEDIA
The sender of such a system stood (ill his own words) "automati- cally" in Nipkow's mind's eye (if the literary quotation "mind's eye" had not become obsolete under the conditions of television). The so- called Nipkow disk - a metal disk that rotates around its axis - stood between the image source and the transmitting channel, and its sale function was to carry nothing but holes. When the disk turned, the holes arranged in spirals generated a visual axis of changing points on the image, which activated a fixed selenium cell that reacts to fluctuations of light with oscillating current, as already emphasized with sound film. The number of holes in the Nipkow disk corre- sponds to the desired number of lines in the television image, as Klaus Simmering points out:
As the disk turns, one pixel after the other wanders in an approxi- mately straight line over the screen, thus delineating an image line. H one point disappears on the left edge, the next point in the spiral, which shifts roughly one line space towards the center [of the disk], reaches the right edge and subsequently begins delineating the follow- ing line. The distance between the holes thus corresponds to the width of the screen, and the difference between the distance of the first and last holes from the center of the disk defines the height of the screen, which necessarily assumes a more or less trapezoidal form. (Simmering, 1989, p. 13)
To put it more simply: Nipkow imposed the discrete line form of a book or telegram onto images with sweeping success.
The inventor was less successful on the receiver side. What was missing was a method of converting the weak current produced by the photocell back into visible light, which in turn would have then been cut up by a Nipkow disk and projected as a two-dimensional image. Above all, Nipkow did not waste much thought on how to ensure that the continuous stream of electrical pixels on the receiver side would construct precisely the same lines as on the transmitter side. For example, if a 20-line television were reproduced with line 1 as line 19, line 2 as line 20, but line 3 as line 1, the imaginary of pattern recognition, on which Nipkow's video phone entirely depended, would have greatly suffered. In other words, the patent awarded by the imperial patent office in Berlin on January 6, 1884 did not provide a solution for a synchronization problem, and because this problem occurred between the transmitter and the receiver it was even more dramatic than the synchronization problem of image and sound with sound film.
210
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Nlpkow's third handIcap was the mechanics of Image scanning and image reconstruction. The electrical channel had the advantage of moving at the same absolute speed as the optical data itself; the selenium cell also kept pace, although it was admittedly slower than later Kerr cells (Simmering, 1989, p. 15); however, the rotating disks at both ends of the system were hopelessly slow and obsolete.
For this reason, Nipkow never thought about his Christmas idea agam nntil his old age, when imperial German broadcasting dragged him once more mto the spotlight of Berlin radio shows as a pioneer of German technology. One year after his patent, he joined the Berlm Railway Signal Company as a constructor, and for the next 30 years he constructed nothing but security equipment and signalling devices. He thus exchanged electrical high-frequency television signals, which were not yet technically feasible, for mechanical railway signals, and during the years of this regression he even forgot that he had applied for a television patent at all (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
Others fared no better than the patent holder. The processing of moving images in real time practically never succeeded with Nipkow disks; it only sncceeded in later practice when real time played no role. In 1928, long before the Federal Criminal Police Office's computer sur- veillance, the Imperial Criminal Police were already able to slowly scan wanted posters and fingerprints, broadcast them with electrical speed, and then convert them slowly back into images again at distant police stations. Television in Germany thus did not begin with entertainment
broadcasts; the states first learned how to secure evidence from across the country, which has led to remarkable arrests even quite recently.
But back to Nipkow's patent. I am sure you already anticipated that his three weak points were not corrected until the development of the tube. First, the tube enabled the virtually unlimited amplifica- tion of low-frequency currents, like those supplied by selenium cells after images are scanned. Second, the tube, at least in principle, made it possible to turn Nipkow's wire-bound video telephony into televi- sion, which like radio also transmits high-frequency wireless signals. By modulating the low-frequency pixel fluctuations, which cannot be radiated as such from any antenna, with a high carrier frequency, the television transmitter is complete. Third, the tube originated as the Braun tube even before it served the functions of amplification and feedback. Braun's oscilloscope could not only convert current immediately into light, thus avoiding all of the light bulbs that were still necessary for Nipkow, but it could also direct the luminous electron beam to arbitrary points on a screen using electromagnets, thus forming truly digital images out of nothing but points of light.
211
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
In 1897, Braun had made alternating current visible with his oscIl- loscope, but he was not interested in transmitting images, as I have said. In 1908, on the other hand, Campbell-Swinton proposed the installation of a revolutionary television system with a Braun tube on the transmitter side as well as the receiver side. The image to be recorded was supposed to be projected on the screen of a Brann tube, which was covered with a mosaic of inertia-free photocells. The elec- tron beam of the tube was supposed to read out the electrical charge generated by the light falling on the photocells, thus converting it into oscillating current. On the receiver side, anotlier Braun tube would then perform the reverse process by converting this current back into visible images (Simmering, 1989, p. 25).
in order to send radio or television signals. In the first step, after they are converted to electricity, the acoustic or optical data signals are variably increased through low-frequency amplification. In the second step, the data signals become transmissible without wires over variable distances by modulating them on a high carrier frequency.
As the basic circuit of microphones and radio transmitters, this was already clear in 1913. But World War I provided new applications for the technology and the means for its mass production. Trenches brought an end to the possibility of commanding soldiers from a
192
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
distance through optical or acoustic signals, yet this was precisely why a need for electronic feedback between invisible fronts and equally invisible control centers emerged. The first radio transmitters only served to entertain radio operators with music in exceptional cases, and eventually this was officially forbidden as a "misuse of army equipment. " But to a greater degree they were used to manu- facture feedback loops between ground personnel and reconnaissance flyers, who were told over the radio which enemy objects were invis- ible from the ground and still needed to be photographed or filmed.
This high-frequency military technology led to the worldwide explosion of electronics companies. Five years later, and again through the misuse of army equipment, the national radio institu- tions of Europe and the commercial stations of the USA emerged, and this was followed a decade later by the first television transmitter.
But low-frequency military technology also had consequences for entertainment electronics. The triumph of amplifier tubes allowed electronics companies to revolutionize Edison's and Berliner's old- fashioned mechanical sound recording technology. AT&T in the USA and Siemens & Halske in Germany wired a record player with a pick-up and electrically controlled speakers. This also resolved the problem that Edison's sound recording system failed to remedy in the Black Mary studio. The trumpet of the phonograph worked only when it was held directly in front of the actors' mouths, and it could thus embarrassingly be seen in the film that was being made at the same time. Tube amplifiers first made media acoustics into a sixth sense that could match up to the sixth sense called the camera.
Sound film was developed simultaneously in Germany and in the USA immediately after World War I, but it is completely senseless, at least on the American side, to list the individual inventors by name. It is enongh to know that Warner Brothers was in serious financial trouble compared to the competition, and for this reason they reached for the life saver of sound film. The leading American electronics laboratory, AT&T's Bell Labs, gave the technically clue- less Sam Warner a hand. After the record had been electrified, AT&T was also able to offer Warner Brothers a special model: a huge record that could be synchronized with the silent film and broadcast in the cinema hall using an amplifier and loudspeaker. This vitaphone system was and remained a patent of Western Electric.
For this reason, it was useless to interpret or explain films any more. Becanse the content of a medinm is always another medium, sonnd films simply enhanced the reputation of the electronics compa- nies that had made them possible. The first sound film in 1929 was
193
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
not called The Jazz Singer by chance. A Jewish ex-chOIrboy, who had sung with religious wise men in synagogues in New York as a child, defects to the American media after puberty and becomes a jazz singer (at least that is what white people called it in 1929). It breaks the heart of his pious father, who had not yet been disabused of his Mosaic faith by the melting pot of New York. The jazz singer is in the middle of a concert when he receives the news that his father is dying - let us say of heart failure - and he strikes up an old Jewish song that brings the entire audience to tears. Let us rather say: the recently electrified record companies, which are on the hunt behind the backs of all concert-goers, have a new hit in record sales. The Jazz Singer implies, therefore, that with the introduction of sound film Hollywood became a branch of electrical companies like Western Electric or General Electric, which possessed both record companies and radio stations at the same time and which, in turn, were only branches of large banks like Rockefeller or Morgan (Faulstich, 1979, p. 160).
In Germany, the development of sound film proceeded more sys- tematically and on a much smaller scale. After losing the war, there was hardly any money, and instead demobilized army radio equip- ment stood around everywhere in 1919. In only four years, the signal corps had increased from 3,000 to almost 300,000 men. But even with misused army equipment, it was still possible to develop the very first sound film system without the use of records.
The developers of this wondrous work called it Tri-Ergon, which seems reminiscent of the triode tube but was actually intended to combine the names of the three developers - Hans Vogt, Joseph Masolle, and Dr. Joseph Engl - into a single anonymous "work of three. " Luckily Vogt, the main player, left his memories to the German Museum in Munich. His "first contact with silent film" took place in 1905, when he was a 1S-year-old peasant boy and he saw documentary films from the ongoing Russo-Japanese war in the cin- ematograph. "Eight years later," when he was already serving in the imperial navy at the experimental radiotelegraphy station in Kiel, the German auteur film had replaced the documentary cinematograph. Vogt enjoyed the "beautiful, highly dramatic" film The Student of Prague, as Evers and Seeber had just filmed it. However, there were two things that disturbed the young radio technician, who had been entrusted with the latest AEG tubes: "in close-ups, the lips of the actors moved like ghosts," and "the comments of the explainer ruined the atmosphere" (Vogt, 1964, p. 7). As is usual with autobiog- raphies, Vogt claims that he would have immediately invented a new
194
? OPTICAL MEDIA
media system If only World War I had not broken out. Four years later, partly at the front and partly at the high-frequency laboratory of a certam Dr. Seibt in Berlin, Vogt took part in the ether war:
Soon I was active on the water, air, and earth fronts, soon again in the Berlin laboratory. A medium for communicating with buried trenches had to be created and tested. Radio direction finders and radio stations for the weather contingent zeppelins. The sad end of the war came. (Vogt, 1964, p. 7)
Vogt overcame this sadness while unemployed in postwar Berlin by once again returning to his film idea. With world war technology and know-how, it must have been possible to combine both of the media of the pre-war period - moving images without sound and constant noise without image - into the multimedia system of sound film. For this reason, the first thing that the Tri-Ergon people did was to establish technical specifications with systematic clarity:
We take the following principles as the basis of our work:
1. The same film that carries the image must also serve as a sound carrier.
2. The sound must be recorded and reproduced through photo-
graphic processes.
3. All of the equipment necessary for sound recording, amplifica-
tion, transmission, storage, reproduction and playback are not
permitted to deform the original sound print. (Vogt, 1964, p. 11)
The most difficult part of this project was naturally amplification. Sound signals are initially so weak that at best they can make a hog's bristle vibrate, like Scott's phonautograph. Accordingly, the Tri-Ergon people first had to develop a tube amplifier that reacted "with a repro- ducible steepness of approximately six milliamperes of anode current change per volt of grid voltage change" (Vogt, 1964, p. 16). It turned out that a very similar tube amplifier had already been developed at Siemens by the great Dr. Schottky, to whom today's transistor tech- nology owes all Schottky diodes. Patent rights thus no longer applied, but the Tri-Ergon people had still resolved their fundamental problem.
Only Tri-Ergon had now become a system project comparable perhaps only to Edison's electrification of theaters, streets, and resi- dential homes. It could no longer be managed through individual inventions, but rather it required an entire chain reaction of new developments. After the solution of the amplifier problem, there
195
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
was still the task on both the transmItter and the receiver side of transforming an acoustic signal into an optical signal that would be compatible with the filmstrip. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl solved this problem in a way that already prefigures the merging of sound and television technologies: because electricity had become the medium of all possible media or sensory channels, the sound signal could first be converted into current through a newly developed, highly sensi- tive, and inertia-free microphone, whose noise had been minimized compared to the old carbon button microphone. This current, which was still amplified by the new tube, then regulated a glow-discharge lamp, whose oscillations were visible and thus filmable when they were in the high-frequency range of up to 100 kHz (Vogt, 1964, p. 20). Despite their name, therefore, soundtracks are not sounds at all, but rather they are varyingly bright and varyingly wide images of the vibrations that sounds or noises physically are, which makes them extremely close to the Braunian tube.
And because the receiver side of a media system - according to Shannon's information theory - implements the inverse mathemati- cal function of the transmitter side, the three Tri-Ergon developers constructed a selenium cell for their film projectors, which was also crucial for television. Selenium cells converted light into electricity again, which then in turn only had to be converted to the cinema sound system - and this was the historical reason why sound film engineers also included a few early television engineers, like Mihaly or Karolus. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl completed their technical speci- fications most elegantly: namely, they built the first electrostatic loud- speaker, which at that time conld fill the entire cinema with sound and which is still ideal for headphones and stereos today. With this static loudspeaker, Edison's entire mechanics of sound storage was replaced by an electronic control.
So far, so good. Tri-Ergon had done its work and integrated an entire chain of new developments into a single media system. On February 22, 1920, the sound of a harmonica and the noteworthy word "milliampere" could be heard in a playing film for the first time (Vogt, 1964, p. 37). One year later, shortly after midnight, this contemptible yet wonderful word from the mouth of a technician was replaced with a female speaker "in close-up" reciting the poem Heather Rose by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Vogt, 1964, p. 38). This would have pleased Miinsterberg, who claimed that film techni- cally liquidates all classical-romantic substitute sensuality, such as the virtual reality of that rose, which as you know represents a virgin shortly before her defloration.
. ? . 1
196
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
However, those sorts of successes did not yet make the new multimedia system a commercial success. As the Tri-Ergon people presented their technical Gesamtkunstwerk to the director of a large electrical company, which to my mind could only have been Siemens, their absolutely correct argument was that a systematically developed chain of tube amplifiers, microphones, and loudspeakers could support sound film as well as civilian wireless telephony - in today's words, therefore, entertainment radio. The director's counter- argument was that no listener "would spend good money for some- thing that comes into his house for free like air and light" - in other words, no one would make Siemens happy by paying radio license fees (Vogt, 1964, p. 47).
In September 1922, the silent film industries reacted accordingly to the first public demonstration of sound film. From the viewpoint of their financial area of competence the Berliner Borsenzeitung briefly wrote: "The extent to which talking films are really the future, however, remains to be seen. It should not be forgotten that the talking film loses its internationality, and it must always remain limited to smaller works, as large films are only profitable on the world market" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
When Hans Vogt told this counter-argument to his wife, she came up with an idea that led to the Tri-Ergon people's siugle lucrative patent: the Gisela patent. Gisela Vogt proposed, namely, "to over- come speech difficulties in the future by making consecutive record- ings of each sound film scene in the studio in multiple idioms, in the primary cultural languages" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
With this new principle of synchronization, which had been con- ceived by a woman, the multimedia system was perfect. By rights, it would have had to wipe ont the cinema equipment that had already been established, but the three amateurs were not able to also finance this mnlti-billion dollar replacement. It was clear that the conver- sion of silent film to sound film was only the first in an entire series of conversions that would turn the existing media system operating worldwide completely inside out without interrupting its efficiency or its finances. The same holds true for television systems or technical wars in general, both in the recent past and in the future.
In the case of sound film, it is easy to predict the outcome of this immense need for capital: as in the USA, the German film industry also fell into the hands of electrical concerns like Siemens and AEG, which got involved in lawsuits with the American patent holders for years until the worldwide marlcets were divided up, as usual, and UFA was taken over by Deutsche Bank and Hugenberg. And one
197
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
fine day, after the inconsequential Tri-Ergon patents had long been sold in Switzerland, an American film giant conceived of the idea of commercially surpassing Warner Brothers and their vitaphone system. William Fox, who had first made money, as I said, with Edison's automatic kinetoscopes, bought the Tri-Ergon patents and converted them into a completely auto-referential form of film publicity: Fox's Movietone talking newsreels, the first sound documentary film.
However, all of the international networks between companies and banks, or between Zurich and Hollywood, could not alter the fact that sound film - in contrast to silent film - does not constitute an international medium. The Gisela patent is and remains a com- promise. As long as people continue to speak American or German, and have thus not yet defected to a worldwide standardized computer language like Algol, C or Ada, sound film will continue to serve as national propaganda in so-called national languages. This is rather inconsequential today, in the age of the computer, as the greatness of film is now a thing of the past and only computer languages still count. But because the English themselves refused at that time to recognize the dialect of Hollywood and California as English (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 612), sound film virtually appeared to form nations, just like the radio of that time. It thus restricted the com- panies of the interwar period to national language borders, which also committed them to the possibility of a second world war. Our film history must therefore turn to this war.
It should be emphasized beforehand that the difficulties of sound film synchronization also have an internal technical-aesthetic aspect. The numerous conversions between sound, image, and electricity that are necessary for this process already indicate that acoustic and optical signals are naturally less compatible. For precisely this reason, sound film was the first model case of a multimedia system long before television - if this term is understood as a system that manufactures not natural or physiological but rather technical con- nections. Sound film thus had to bridge two fundamental differences between optics and acoustics, which can briefly be explained.
First, acoustic signals only depend on a single independent vari- able: time (provided that stereophonic sound effects are disregarded, of course). Every musical signal is the momentary amplitude of a complex yet solitary vibration in time. As moving images, film, and television also depend on time. However, they also depend on two spatial coordinates: the height and width of each individual pixel (apart from 3-D experiments, the third spatial coordinate of depth
198
? OPTICAL MEDIA
can be ignored in the same way that stereophonic sound can be dis- regarded when making sound recordings). A one-dimensional vibra- tion or line is thus adequate for sound recording, whereas optical media principally require two-dimensional signal processing. When calculated by the technical-economic standards of engineers, this means that the amount of information to be processed is raised to tbe second power. For this reason, the image fills almost the entire celluloid of a sound film, whereas a band at the edge of the image is sufficient for the optical soundtrack, which in principle could even
be implemented as a simple line.
Second, the acoustics compensate for this simplicity by functioning,
since Edison's days, as an analog medium. In every given moment, the stored technical signal corresponds to the precise amplitude of the recorded sound signal. Until the introduction of audiotape, as I said before, this continuous image of continuous vibrations made it unimaginable and unfeasible to cut the soundtrack into pieces and then rearrange these clips arbitrarily, as is customary with film montage. According to the Breslau radio play pioneer Friedrich Bischoff, when the first radio play directors received the strange assignment to invent a new art form they in desperation chose the feature film as their specific model. Their quasi-cinematic radio play tricks even included slow dissolves and fades, which the new radio art borrowed from films. On the other hand, abrupt cuts and montages, which Andre Malraux called the operating principle of film, did not find their way into the emerging radio play.
By the same token, film and television are discrete processes that deal with nothing but individual frames or pixels, because optical storage is impossible even today. Even electronic switches work far too slowly to store or process light as the mixture of frequencies that it physically is. As is well known, audible sound ranges from approximately 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and that is why it was so easily conquered by low-frequency technology. Visible light is ten billion times faster and ranges from 700 to 380 terahertz. These are numbers with 14 zeroes, which is roughly 8 zeroes beyond the switching time of today's standard electronics, and therefore no medium could even come close. For this reason, film and television do not store light itself but rather only its photochemical effects (as we have already thoroughly discussed), which can then be stored and played back every twenty-fifth of a second, that is, in the low-frequency range. A compact disc that would sample sound events not at the usual 40,000 times per second but rather as slow as film or television would be a unique disaster for the ears.
199
? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
The problems of television and sound film can only be understood on the basis of these physical principles of media technology. The Tri-Ergon process had to be capable of transporting the film images jerkily as a discrete signal, while simultaneously reading the optical soundtrack continuously as an analog signal.
To soften this collision between digital and analog, the Tri-Ergon people developed a new film transport system. Before and after a frame was projected, the celluloid went into a waiting loop, which compensated for the static images during the projection time. Behind the second waiting loop, the film roll continued running the entire time without any interruption, which also made it possible to read the soundtrack as an undisturbed continuum.
The mechanical solution to this problem also had a systematic side. Through millisecond-precise coupling between image and sound, sound film had carried out Messter's standardization proposals for the first time, which means that it had also required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images. Otherwise, a film star with a soprano voice would have been able to sound like a bass and a film star with a bass voice like a eunuch. You all know
such sound manipulations from tape recorders that run too quickly or too slowly.
In the days of silent film, on the other hand, time loops and time lapses were not technical-experimental exceptions but rather daily practices in order to sell as many meters of celluloid as possible to a paying audience. For the first time, therefore, sound film opened up an absolute difference between experimental films and feature films. Real-time processing of tbe visuals first became genuinely verifiable through the ear and the acoustics. For this reason, sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics.
To begin with, many performing artists became unemployed in the middle of the global economic crisis. In 1929, a flyer with the following headlines in bold print was circulated in German moving picture theaters, as they were still so beautifully called (I have left out the fine print):
To the public!
Attention! Sound film is dangerous!
Sound film is kitsch!
Sound film is economic and spiritual murder!
Sound film is bad conservative theater at higher prices! Therefore:
Demand good silent films!
200
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Demand orchestral accompaniment with musicians! Demand stage exhibitions with artists!
Reject sound film! (quoted in Greve et aI. , 1976, p. 287)
This social-revolutionary pamphlet, written in the style of the Com- munist Party or the Nazi Party, was of course signed by the Inter- nationale Artisten-Loge, the performers union, and the Deutscher Musiker-Verhand, the musicians union. These unions were some- what Justified, as the epoch of easy and therefore pointless theater or literary adaptations had indeed begun, bnt they were unable to comprehend a technology that entirely dispenses with acceptance or rejection, needs or fears. Circus artists and musicians were therefore just about as intelligent as many theorists, from Miinsterberg to Bela Balazs, who praised silent film as a self-contained art form and harshly called the possibility of adding a soundtrack absurd. Only theorists, at least at that time, were less frequently unemployed.
The second point is reminiscent of a real historical joke that sound film played on a famous silent film star. John Gilbert had enchanted America's screens and women for 11 long years without having to betray the secret of his voice. However, in 1929 Gilbert's first sound film made what I have presented to you as a technical possibility literally or physiologically true: even without time-axis manipulation or sound time lapse, Gilbert's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse or a eunuch. Immediately after the premiere of this film, the star was a dead man in his own lifetime. Only Garbo threw a pair of roses into his grave (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 607).
The total securing of evidence through which people are registered by multimedia systems can also have a rebound effect on people themselves.
Sound film changed the standard of voices and even more noticeably that of movements. As you all know, all of the expressionistic gestures employed by silent film actors for 30 years, which had barely made up for the lack of words and simulated the superimposed intertitles, disappeared; in facial expressions and ges- tures, sound film asserted a verifiable ordinariness. The crude time of small people - in other words, Hollywood cinema - could begin. For reasons that were less democratic than technical, it became practi- cally impossible to cut or interrupt people in the middle of speaking, unlike the old days of silent film when the actors were inaudible. Even today, we must patiently watch and listen in front of the screen until no one in the studio has anything more to say. Expressionistic gestures, which had been developed as the last defense against cuts, film doubles, and trick film shocks, thus gave way to a new movement
201
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
style, as the inability to cut acoustic events also dictated the optical
events.
Funnily enough, one of the last German silent films, which had actually been made in the era of sound film, illustrated the difference between the two media within the plot as the difference between two generations. Using expressionistic silent film gestures, Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) depicted an old, poverty-stricken professor who dreams only theoretically of moon rockets. In contrast, the young engineers, who turned this theory into blitzkrieg technology at practically the same time as the real Wernher von Braun, are depicted with the economical gestures of sound film, the new objectivity, and the Wehrmacht.
We can leave the content of sound films to themselves, because according to McLuhan's law the content of any medium is always only another medium. And thus, to adapt de Sade freely, we can bring the history of film with one final exertion to an end. With key words like rocket technology and Wehrmacht, a third subchapter has opened whose title, in a modification of a Foucault book, should be called: From the Birth of Media Technologies to the Color of the World War.
3. 2. 5 Color Film
In short, World War II was colorful. The reason was actually because the chief sponsor of the German film industry was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, who had declared war on black-and-white film. In the name of total war or total simulation, World War II eliminated the last remaining differences between fiction and reality, and thus all the ways in which so-called artworks and so-called empiricism have been differentiated from time immemorial. After 1944, for example, German tank crews could no longer operate during the day due to allied air superiority, and they were equipped with night-vision devices that not only put Herschel's discovery of infrared light into practice, but also realized various dreams from a thousand and one nights. Conversely, Sir Watson-Watt provided the English air force with the first operational radar system in the world, which improved on Ritter's discovery of invisible ultraviolet light by extending it towards even higher light frequencies. If it was possible to see colors beyond even the visible color spectrum, such as infrared or radar waves, then visible colors were not permitted to remain hidden. The end of silent film as a consequence of World War I was thus followed by the development
202
? OPTICAL MEDIA
of color film as preparation for World War II. The Redness of Red in Technicolor, which was the lovely title of a 1960s book, was also the red over London, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
The first attempt to use homemade Agfacolor colors was the film Women Are Better Diplomats, which was banned by Goebbels at the beginning of the war simply because in his eyes the colors were "shameful. " The Wehrmacht, or more precisely the navy, had discov- ered feature films in American Technicolor on captured allied ships and sent them as spoils of war to the propaganda ministry. Among these films, naturally, was Gone with the Wind, the self-promotional color film about the American Civil War and the wonderfully color- ful fires that develop when one burns the wooden palaces of old- fashioned southern slave owners.
The German Agfacolor film followed this brilliant example and was gone with the wind. As usual, the leadership of the Reich con- tacted IG Farben, whose chemicals and poisonous substances were crucial to the war effort, and an optimized Agfacolor finally caught up with the criteria for realistic color set by Technicolor. This war over realistic color was supposed to define the entire history of optical media from 1939 to color television in 1965. But in 1942, Veit Harlan was already able to delight all of fortified Europe, from Cherbourg to Kiev, with his Golden City, a color film that was still primarily a form of publicity for itself. The propaganda minis- ter's strategy, whereby only perfectly made entertainment could raise morale, had once again been put into action.
So much for Virilio's discussion of color film as the spoils of war (Virilio, 1989, p. 8). Incidentally, this was not only true for Veit Harlan, but also for Eisenstein, whose Ivan the Terrible had to make do with captured German Agfacolor film. The transfer of technologi- cal advances in two phases (from America to Europe and then from Europe to West Asia), which has since become typical, thus took shape long before Gorbachev.
In addition to these historical notes, however, some technical- systematic remarks must also be devoted to color film, and I will once again attempt to formulate this so generally that it will also be true for color television. This is easy from a technical perspective, because the black-and-white television from World War II already had the technical elements of color television.
I cannot compete with Goethe and deliver a historical theory of colors. Still, the most important steps leading from color photo- graphy to color film to color television must be mentioned. It has already been said that painters always had to deal with colors, and
203
? ? ? ? OpTiCAL MEDIA
signs of color deterioration over time became photography through positivization. But there was no economy of colors ill painting, as this did not become necessary until the development of color ink and color photography. In other words, the number of colors that a painter used to produce a mixed color on his palette was entirely up to his discretion. However, in 1611, an entire century before Newton's analysis of the light spectrum, the Venetian Antonius de Dominis established the key principle that all colors can be mixed from red, green, and violet - the three primary colors. This additive synthesis made it possible to print copperplate engravings no longer only next to one another - as was already the custom with Gutenberg and his colleague Schoffler - but also over one another. Bold colors (on broadsheets) were replaced by infinitely graduated and perfectly overlapping color values, which were standardized in the late nine- teenth century (after the discovery of chemical-artificial aniline dyes, the basis of IG Farben). With Senefelder's lithography, at the latest, three-color printing could commit all desired color nuances to paper. Four-color printing, which has since become the technical standard, also only uses three colors; the fourth printing plate is not colored, but is rather only black or grey, and its task is to differentiate bright- ness values (such as between pastel red and dark red of the same tint).
This economy of materials had important consequences for physi- ological optics, as it defined not arts but rather the first technical media. In the same years that Goethe spent dreaming of a poetic- aesthetic theory of colors, the Englishman Thomas Young developed first, his theory of the interference of light and second, his hypothesis that the eye also functions like a three-color print. Simply because it is completely improbable that the eye would have enough room to contain receptors for an infinite number of different colors, it was necessary to postulate the existence of sensors first for red, second for green, and third for violet. As far as I know, this has never been demonstrated on a living human eye, but in 1967 the Nobel Prize in Physiology went to three doctors who had proved that the cones of human-like vertebrates were limited to RGB (as the technicians say), while the rods can only distinguish between light and dark. Physiologically, therefore, every color signal is a mixture of different amounts of three tints plus a brightness or saturation value. Techno- logically, television - as electrified four-color printing - will derive from this its separation between chrominance (or color value) and luminance (or brightness value).
The first person to convert the new color physiology into technol- ogy again was none other than James Clark Maxwell, to whom we
204
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
owe the general field theory of magnetism and electricity - the prin- ciple of all wireless radio communication - and the clarification that visible light does not consist of elastic vibrations, but rather it is only a special case of that electromagnetic spectrum. In 1861, Maxwell took black-and-white photographs of the same object, colored them in the three primary colors, and successfully projected the images over one another. This would later become the basic circuit of both color film and color television, and it had consequences for painters and technicians.
To begin correctly with the technicians: in 1868, the "ingenious [photographer] Ducos du Hauron" connected the physiology of Young (and Helmholtz) with the media technology of Maxwell (Bruch, 1967, p. 35). He literally suggested: "Small points and lines in the three primary colors red, green, and blue are placed next to each other on a plate so closely that they all merge into the same blended white at the same time. When the elements of all three colors are equally bright, they cover the same parts of the surface; when one color is less bright, more elements are taken from this color and they become larger" (Bruch, 1967, p. 35).
Ingenious blueprints rarely creep up so softly. First, Ducos du Hauron reversed the entire working principle of painting by replac- ing the subtractive color synthesis of a painter's palette, where the mixing of all colors together results in black, with Newton's and Maxwell's additive synthesis, where the sum of all colors results in white. Because there are no white phosphorescent materials in nature, incidentally, the white that has appeared on black-and-white screens since 1930 is also in technological reality a meticulously bal- anced mixture of complementary colors, whose addition results in this white. Second and possibly even more importantly, Ducos du Hauron hegan the digitization of color images. Just like the recently invented telegraph, he built colored areas out of "dots and dashes," which in the eye became the illusion of an apparently uniform colored area. Young's model, which broke the eyes down into nothing but discrete rods and cones for primary colors, was thus transferred to a picture or medium that could simulate human eyes and show them how to perform.
Painters only needed to transfer this technical model of vision to their canvases, through the mediation of a certain Chevreuil, and Europe's last object-oriented art movement was born. The so-called pointillists - Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, and so forth actually built their landscape pictures out of nothing but points in the primary colors, which then within the eye, and indeed sensationally through
205
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
additive synthesis, blurred into blended pamts. This last competition between fine arts and optical media was followed only by abstract painting.
There was only one artist at the tIme who drew techmcal rather than aesthetic conclusions from these digitized colors: Charles Cros, who was a lyricist, painter, bohemian, and tinkerer all at the same time. He had already accurately described the phonograph shortly before Edison, and he also described the first method of making color photographs. After Young and Ducos du Hauron, all that remamed necessary for color storage was the development of emulsions, which contain static, dispersed receptors for all three primary colors just like the eye. This is precisely what Cros proposed, although Edison said that he "was inconsistent, sought immortality at one time as poet and at other times strove for the painter's laurels, and thus he lacked that peculiar ability of concentration and inner composure, without which nothing great and permanent can be created" (Eder, 1978, p. 651). To put it more simply: the money from color photography was made by others.
In order to get to television, I will not bother tracing the lengthy history leading up to the mass production of Agfacolor in 1941. To put it briefly, it consisted simply in the commercialization of the theories and experiments we have already discussed. In the first phase, the rule already given concerning silent film still applied: silent black-and-white film was neither silent nor black-and-white. First, the technique of film tinting was developed on the basis of Maxwell's experiment: black-and-white films were simply dyed in uniform, monochromatic colors such that love scenes were depicted in pink, a yearning for nature was expressed through the color blue, etc. Second, there were attempts to color the thousands of frames in an entire film by hand, which was lavish, expensive, and rare - like
impressionists painting the Cathedral of Chartres in all the changing shades of color of an entire day. Third, in 1897 the Berliner Hermann Issensee applied for a patent for color cinematography, which in the spirit of pointillism showed three differently colored frames one after the other in rapid succession, and these colors blended together at the extremely high frame rate of 120 hertz (Bruch, 1987, p. 19). Fourth, it is important to keep in mind that black-and-white films were never perfect before the developmeut of panchromatic films, because the emulsion responded to the individual primary colors with varying degrees of intensity and these imbalances could only be adjusted through the use of expensive carbon arc lamps or sunlight (Monaco, 1977, p. 96).
206
? OPTICAL MEDIA
In any case, you can see that it still took a long time after the introduction of sound film to erase the last difference between simu- lation and reality. As I said before, World War II was the first war in color. At the end of the war, the first color film material was provided to the propaganda companies that had been systematically established in all of the armies (see Barkhausen, 1982). In contrast to World War I, these propaganda companies were ordered to take part in the combat with weapons, and in contrast to Griffith or Messter they were consequently forbidden simply to reconstruct battle scenes. Unlike war correspondents on the radio, who were only equipped with transmitters, and unlike journalists, who were only equipped with typewriters (see Wedel, 1962), film could supply a multimedia show of color and sound, word and noise.
For this reason, the introduction of stereo sound and widescreen after the war was only a small step that enabled color film to be able to deceive the three-dimensionality of ears and eyes. In World War I, varions professors, physicists, and musicologists had attempted to use perspective to detect invisible enemy artillery by artificially extending the range of vision or hearing. One of them, the French physicist Henri Chretien, transferred his military detection technique to the civilian trick of horizontally compressing film images during recording to squeeze more optical information into Edison's stan- dard format. During playback, however, this deformation would once again be equalized (Virilio, 1989, p. 69; Monaco, 1977, p. 87). Widescreen film was thus born, and it would be cinema's last life saver before the competition of television became overpowering. Up to now, the horizontal viewing angle of slipper cinema has been beneath contempt, but widescreen, cinemascope, and stereo sound can no longer change the fact that for us the highest purpose of film is already in the past. Strictly according to McLuhan's law, film has devolved into an evening program content filler for another medium: television.
3. 3 Television
Unlike film, which simply inherited all the complexities of the image as accoutrements, television is a high-tech object. Therefore, we can and must link together many of the technical explanations that have already been given. It will be impossible, however, to draw any connections between television and literature or fantasies. Unlike film, there were no dreams of television prior to its development. In
207
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
1880, when the British humor magazine Punch published a carica- ture showing people watching television in the future, the principle underlying the technology had already been fixed. And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem ofElectrical Tele- vision in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.
It should also be clear that the history of the development of televi- sion was the first realization through electronics of all of the functions named in Shannon's information theory. First, it was a fully elec- tronic converter of images into currents, and thus a television signal source. Second, it was a fully electronic transmission circuit, and thus a television channel. Third, it was a fully electronic converter of current into images, and thus a television receiver. Its fourth function, which only developed much later, was also to serve as an electronic image storage device. The technical specifications were so complex because the digital processing of optical signals is two-dimensional; it must be able to cope with the square of the amount of information processed by records or radio transmitters.
Since 1840, however, the single electrical news channel was teleg- raphy, which had been standardized by Morse. It was a channel, therefore, that was just as linear as alphabet and letterpress - the media it had displaced. Just as letters are read one after the other, so too were the dots and dashes of Morse code transmitted one after the other through isolated copper-cored cables. On the other hand, Siimmerring's attempt to transmit the 26 letters and ten numbers over 36 parallel wires during the war of 1809 proved to be much too expensive and prone to interference. "A Gennan idea/) Napoleon reportedly said about Siimmerring's telegraphs. In contrast to film, therefore, the problem of television from the very beginning was how to make a single channel dimension from two image dimen- sions, and how to make a single time variable from convertible surfaces.
It was no coincidence that the principle answer was found by
Alexander Bain, a Scottish philosopher and printer. Because the print-
ing of writing processed data streams in a linear fashion, while the
printing of images broke these surfaces down into dots, Bain was able Col to suggest that images should be principally conceived as rectangular
grids, and that the individual raster elements should be transmitted point by point. In principle, therefore, images became discrete quan- tities of data, like telegrams. In strict opposition to photography,
208
? OPTICAL MEDIA
which prided Itself on its analogy to nature, and m partlal contrast to film, which consisted of a discontinuous or discrete sequence of many analog photographs, television began as radical cutting: it not only cut up movements in time, but it also disintegrated connections or shapes into individual points in space. The symbolic thus now triumphed where once the imaginary had ruled over perception and consequently also painting. And the fact that these individual points are today called pixels or "last elements" already shows how close television was to Young and Ducos du Hauron's theories concerning colored dots. This proximity had only to be realized.
It happened in 1883, even before the development of the feature film, when a 23-year-old physics student made a useable and patented television circuit based on Bain's principle. Paul Nipkow studied here in Berlin with Helmholtz, whose important experiments with sounds, voices, and colors laid the groundwork for the invention of the telephone and the gramophoue. But while Helmholtz received an imperial physical-technical institute as a gift from Werner von Siemens, the telegraph industrialist, his student Nipkow remained in classic Mecklenburg poverty. In 1883, therefore, he spent Christmas Eve in his dormitory room in front of a small Christmas tree with the candles burning, a cheap petroleum lamp, and a German National Post Service telephone that one of his few friends had misappropri- ated as a private gift for himself. From this misuse of an imperial device emerged - on the last Christmas in the history of the world, if you will - not an entertainment medium, as our current misunder- standing might assume, but rather a channel in Claude Shannon's literal sense of the word. As it says in Nipkow's patent specifications,
"the purpose of the apparatus described here is to make an object at 'location A visible at any location B" (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
The idea of this image transmission occurred to Nipkow either at the sight of the Christmas tree candles, which flicker, or at the sight of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had first invented: if human voices were transmissible, why should it not also be possible to transmit the corresponding face? According to Bain, the image would then have to be cut up into individual points, which would be transmitted to a receiver using a telephone cable and would then be reassembled once again as a flickering image; as a good student of Helmholtz, however, Nipkow also knew about the inertia of the eye and its unconscious ability to filter out the image flicker either physiologically through the after-image effect already employed by film, or more generally or mathematically through the integration of individual pixels.
209
? OPTICAL MEDIA
The sender of such a system stood (ill his own words) "automati- cally" in Nipkow's mind's eye (if the literary quotation "mind's eye" had not become obsolete under the conditions of television). The so- called Nipkow disk - a metal disk that rotates around its axis - stood between the image source and the transmitting channel, and its sale function was to carry nothing but holes. When the disk turned, the holes arranged in spirals generated a visual axis of changing points on the image, which activated a fixed selenium cell that reacts to fluctuations of light with oscillating current, as already emphasized with sound film. The number of holes in the Nipkow disk corre- sponds to the desired number of lines in the television image, as Klaus Simmering points out:
As the disk turns, one pixel after the other wanders in an approxi- mately straight line over the screen, thus delineating an image line. H one point disappears on the left edge, the next point in the spiral, which shifts roughly one line space towards the center [of the disk], reaches the right edge and subsequently begins delineating the follow- ing line. The distance between the holes thus corresponds to the width of the screen, and the difference between the distance of the first and last holes from the center of the disk defines the height of the screen, which necessarily assumes a more or less trapezoidal form. (Simmering, 1989, p. 13)
To put it more simply: Nipkow imposed the discrete line form of a book or telegram onto images with sweeping success.
The inventor was less successful on the receiver side. What was missing was a method of converting the weak current produced by the photocell back into visible light, which in turn would have then been cut up by a Nipkow disk and projected as a two-dimensional image. Above all, Nipkow did not waste much thought on how to ensure that the continuous stream of electrical pixels on the receiver side would construct precisely the same lines as on the transmitter side. For example, if a 20-line television were reproduced with line 1 as line 19, line 2 as line 20, but line 3 as line 1, the imaginary of pattern recognition, on which Nipkow's video phone entirely depended, would have greatly suffered. In other words, the patent awarded by the imperial patent office in Berlin on January 6, 1884 did not provide a solution for a synchronization problem, and because this problem occurred between the transmitter and the receiver it was even more dramatic than the synchronization problem of image and sound with sound film.
210
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Nlpkow's third handIcap was the mechanics of Image scanning and image reconstruction. The electrical channel had the advantage of moving at the same absolute speed as the optical data itself; the selenium cell also kept pace, although it was admittedly slower than later Kerr cells (Simmering, 1989, p. 15); however, the rotating disks at both ends of the system were hopelessly slow and obsolete.
For this reason, Nipkow never thought about his Christmas idea agam nntil his old age, when imperial German broadcasting dragged him once more mto the spotlight of Berlin radio shows as a pioneer of German technology. One year after his patent, he joined the Berlm Railway Signal Company as a constructor, and for the next 30 years he constructed nothing but security equipment and signalling devices. He thus exchanged electrical high-frequency television signals, which were not yet technically feasible, for mechanical railway signals, and during the years of this regression he even forgot that he had applied for a television patent at all (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
Others fared no better than the patent holder. The processing of moving images in real time practically never succeeded with Nipkow disks; it only sncceeded in later practice when real time played no role. In 1928, long before the Federal Criminal Police Office's computer sur- veillance, the Imperial Criminal Police were already able to slowly scan wanted posters and fingerprints, broadcast them with electrical speed, and then convert them slowly back into images again at distant police stations. Television in Germany thus did not begin with entertainment
broadcasts; the states first learned how to secure evidence from across the country, which has led to remarkable arrests even quite recently.
But back to Nipkow's patent. I am sure you already anticipated that his three weak points were not corrected until the development of the tube. First, the tube enabled the virtually unlimited amplifica- tion of low-frequency currents, like those supplied by selenium cells after images are scanned. Second, the tube, at least in principle, made it possible to turn Nipkow's wire-bound video telephony into televi- sion, which like radio also transmits high-frequency wireless signals. By modulating the low-frequency pixel fluctuations, which cannot be radiated as such from any antenna, with a high carrier frequency, the television transmitter is complete. Third, the tube originated as the Braun tube even before it served the functions of amplification and feedback. Braun's oscilloscope could not only convert current immediately into light, thus avoiding all of the light bulbs that were still necessary for Nipkow, but it could also direct the luminous electron beam to arbitrary points on a screen using electromagnets, thus forming truly digital images out of nothing but points of light.
211
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
In 1897, Braun had made alternating current visible with his oscIl- loscope, but he was not interested in transmitting images, as I have said. In 1908, on the other hand, Campbell-Swinton proposed the installation of a revolutionary television system with a Braun tube on the transmitter side as well as the receiver side. The image to be recorded was supposed to be projected on the screen of a Brann tube, which was covered with a mosaic of inertia-free photocells. The elec- tron beam of the tube was supposed to read out the electrical charge generated by the light falling on the photocells, thus converting it into oscillating current. On the receiver side, anotlier Braun tube would then perform the reverse process by converting this current back into visible images (Simmering, 1989, p. 25).
