Frank Beacham's Journal

Mexico and the United States began the first telephone service between the two countries on this day in 1927 — 95 years ago

Mexico and the United States began the first telephone service between the two countries on this day in 1927 — 95 years ago.

President Calvin Coolidge and his Mexican counterpart, Plutarco Elías Calles, exchanged pleasantries via telephone to celebrate the start of new telephone service between the two countries. Previously, a dispute over land rights in Mexico had soured relations.

Both leaders needed interpreters, but they each saw promise in the communications advancement. Calles hoped it would aid “an era of good will and mutual understanding, which cannot fail to put an end to all those needless misunderstandings.”

The American president praised the engineers who completed the critical piece of infrastructure that made the call possible — a telephone line system more than 780 miles long linking Mexico City with Laredo, Texas.

The music at the festivities celebrating the telephone connection was also notable. Mexico’s national anthem was played for Coolidge in Washington. In Mexico City, “The Star Spangled Banner” was performed at the National Palace for the first time since 1846.

The same year commercial transatlantic telephone service also began. And, the first AT&T videophone call was also made that year between Washington, D.C and New York City by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.

Thanks New York Times!

On September 22, 1953 — 69 years ago today — the first four-level (or "stack") interchange in the world opened in Los Angeles at the intersection of the Harbor, Hollywood, Pasadena and Santa Ana freeways

On September 22, 1953 — 69 years ago today — the first four-level (or "stack") interchange in the world opened in Los Angeles at the intersection of the Harbor, Hollywood, Pasadena and Santa Ana freeways.

It was, as The Saturday Evening Post wrote, "a mad motorist's dream" — 32 lanes of traffic weaving in eight directions at once.

Today, although the four-level is justly celebrated as a civil engineering landmark, the interchange is complicated, frequently congested and sometimes downright terrifying. As its detractors are fond of pointing out, it's probably no coincidence that this highway octopus straddles not only a fetid sulfur spring but also the former site of the town gallows.

Before the L.A. four-level was built, American highway interchanges typically took the form of a cloverleaf, with four circular ramps designed to let motorists merge from one road to another without braking. But cloverleafs were dangerous, because people merging onto the highway and people merging off of the highway had to jockey for space in the same lane.

Four-level interchanges, by contrast, eliminate this looping cross-traffic by stacking long arcs and straightaways on top of one another. As a result, each of their merges only goes in one direction — which means, at least in theory, that they are safer and more efficient.

When the iconic Hollywood-Harbor-Pasadena-Santa Ana four-level was born, it was the most expensive half-mile of highway in the world, costing $5.5 million to build. (Today, highway engineers estimate, $5.5 million would pay for just 250 feet of urban freeway.)

Roadbuilders disemboweled an entire neighborhood — 4,000 people lost their homes — and excavated most of the hill it stood on, dumping the rubble in the nearby Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium stands today.

Though its design has inspired dozens of freeway interchanges across the United States, many Angelenos dread their encounters with the four-level. It's as crowded (500,000 drivers use it every day), stressful and treacherous as the cloverleafs of yesteryear.

Welcome to the car culture, which can be attributed to those “futurists” who created this monster in the last century.

Thanks History.com

As twilight faded over Pasadena, California on September 9, 1894, an artificial sun flickered to life for the first time

As twilight faded over Pasadena, California on September 9, 1894, an artificial sun flickered to life for the first time.

High above town in the San Gabriel Mountains stood a wonder of the new electric age: a 60-inch General Electric searchlight, by many accounts the largest light in the world. This massive projector first dazzled audiences at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Now it would perform its nightly spectacle in the mountains above Los Angeles.

Up above, on the summit of Thaddeus Lowe's Echo Mountain resort, tourists wrapped themselves in blankets and huddled around the searchlight as its operator fired it to life. When running at 200 amperes — a current generated by a Pelton water wheel in a nearby canyon — the carbon arc lamp burned with the intensity of 90,000 to 100,000 candles.

A massive reflecting lens mirror, built in France, magnified that blaze to 375 million candlepower. This dazzling beam blanched the flatlands below. It wandered the streets of Pasadena. It streamed through the windows of San Gabriel farmhouses with the ardor of day.

Lowe's publicist claimed you could read a newspaper under its light from 35 miles away. It was definitely visible 60 miles away on Catalina Island, a hot white dot hovering just above the horizon.

Some watched the show with amusement. Children lit signal fires or flashed red lights to attract the operator's attention. The mischievous ones bounced the sunbeam back with hand-held mirrors. Others reacted with alarm. Horses startled. Roosters crowed. Lovers cursed.

In an 1895 dispatch, author Grace Ellery Channing recalled the scene atop Echo Mountain: “Now its tunnel of light went sweeping across the plain below, resting here and there where a red light signaled for a visit. Down below that beam had almost dazed us with its brightness; here we could stare into the very eye of the monster without blinking, for the rays do not focus so near.

“Away, back and forth, went the finger, now stretching out into a full hand of light, now narrowing to so fine a line that it could be but barely perceived…But the prettiest thing of all was to watch the stream of bats and insects across the golden beam. As these entered it they, too, became golden, so that there as a continual flight of golden wings and shapes darting from the dark into the dark, with a golden moment's apotheosis between.”

The searchlight was just one of the modern marvels collected by Lowe, a pioneering aeronaut who had commanded the Union Army's Balloon Corps during the Civil War. At Echo Mountain, his "White City," Lowe placed an observatory with a 16-inch refracting telescope and hired a renowned astronomer to manage it.

He is best remembered for his Mount Lowe Railway, the world's first-all electric mountain railroad, which climbed 3,000 feet into the San Gabriels over white-knuckle cliffs and a soaring, 1,300-foot funicular. But nothing signaled the dawn of a new electric age in the Southland like Lowe's searchlight, its sun-shaft overthrowing the dark of night.

Photo courtesy of the Mount Lowe Preservation Society

On this day in 1882 — 140 years ago — a section of New York City began to glow as the sun went down

On this day in 1882 — 140 years ago — a section of New York City began to glow as the sun went down.

That afternoon, an employee of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had flipped the main circuit breaker at Thomas Edison’s first power plant on Pearl Street, bringing light to 800 bulbs in a 50-block area downtown.

According to The New York Times, “it was not till about 7 o’clock, when it began to grow dark, that the electric light really made itself known and showed how bright and steady it is.”

The Times described “the light was soft, mellow and grateful to the eye.”

It went on to say: “The electric lamps in The Times Building were as thoroughly tested last evening as any light could be tested in a single evening and tested by men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp, and the decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas.”

The plant was located at 255-257 Pearl Street on a site measuring 50 by 100 feet, just south of Fulton Street. It began with one direct current generator, serving an initial load of 400 lamps at 85 customers. By 1884, Pearl Street Station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 lamps.

The station was originally powered by custom-made Porter-Allen high-speed steam engines designed to provide 175 horsepower at 700 rpm, but these proved to be unreliable with their sensitive governors. They were removed and replaced with new engines from Armington & Sims that proved to be much more suitable for Edison's dynamos. The station burned down in 1890, destroying all but one dynamo that is now kept in the Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

In 1929, the New York Edison Company constructed three scale working models of the station. When a button was pushed, a motor turned the engines, generators and other equipment in the model. A set of lamps connected to labelled buttons identified the various areas of the building.

The models still exist and are on display at the Smithsonian Institution Behring Center in Washington, at the Consolidated Edison Learning Center in Long Island City, New York and at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Thanks New York Times!

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — Thomas Edison received a patent for his movie camera, the Kinetograph

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — Thomas Edison received a patent for his movie camera, the Kinetograph.

Edison had developed the camera and its viewer in the early 1890s and staged several demonstrations. The camera was based on photographic principles discovered by still-photograph pioneers Joseph Nicephone Niepce and Louis Daguerre of France.

In 1877, inventor Edward Muybridge developed a primitive form of motion pictures when Leland Stanford, the governor of California, invited him to develop photo studies of animals in motion. Muybridge developed an ingenious system for photographing sequential motion, setting up 24 cameras attached to trip wires stretched across a racetrack.

As the horse tripped each wire, the shutters snapped. The resulting series of photos could be projected as something resembling a motion picture. This breakthrough in the early 1870s inspired another student of animal motion, Etienne Jules Marey of France, to develop in 1882 a rotating camera rather like a rifle, where different pictures were taken in a rapid sequence by a rotating cartridge.

Unlike these earlier cameras, Edison's Kinetoscope and Kinetograph used celluloid film, invented by George Eastman in 1889.

In February, 1893, Edison built a small movie studio that could be rotated to capture the best available sunlight. He showed the first demonstration of his films in May, 1893. It featured three of his workers pretending to be blacksmiths.

The invention inspired French inventors Louis and August Lumiere to develop a movie camera and projector, the Cinematographe, that allowed a large audience to view a film. Several other cameras and projectors were also developed in the late 1800s.

In 1898, Edison sued American Mutoscope and Biograph Pictures, claiming that the studio had infringed on his patent for the Kinetograph. He had entrusted the development of the machine to his assistant, W.L.K. Dickson, who left Edison's company in 1895 and helped found Biograph.

However, in 1902, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that although Thomas Edison had patented the Kinetograph, he only owned rights to the sprocket system that moved perforated film through the camera, not the entire concept of the movie camera.

In 1909, Edison and Biograph joined forces with other filmmakers to create the Motion Pictures Patents Company, an organization devoted to protecting patents and keeping other players from entering the film industry.

In 1917, the Supreme Court dissolved the trust, and the Edison Company left the film industry the same year.

Thanks History.com

Above, Thomas Edison demonstrates his motion picture technology.

In the movies, the famous hotline between the United States and Russia was a red telephone. But, as might be expected, that was just myth

In the movies, the famous hotline between the United States and Russia was a red telephone. But, as might be expected, that was just myth.

The real hotline, a vestige of the Cold War, began operating with a test message on this day in 1963 — 59 years ago.

It was put in place to cut the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation, after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 put the world on the brink of disaster. At the time, messages between President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had taken hours to be delivered through regular diplomatic channels.

The famous hotline was actually a Teletype machine that transmitted 60 words a minute. The cable lines went through networks in the Pentagon and the Soviet Defense Ministry that could hook into the White House and the Kremlin.

The first message from Washington contained all the letters of the alphabet as well as digits: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890.” The Russians sent a poetic description of Moscow’s sunset.

In 1984, the hotline was upgraded to a fax system, so that maps, charts, texts and photographs could be viewed. Today, it’s a computer network with a secure email system.

Since then, the hotline, which has been used several times, has been expanded to other nations, including China.

Thanks New York Times!

The actual "Hotline"

Léon Theremin was born 126 years ago today

Léon Theremin was born 126 years ago today.

A Russian and Soviet inventor, Theremin is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments. It was the first such instrument to be mass produced.

Theremin is also the inventor of interlace, a technique of improving the picture quality of a video signal, widely used in video and television technology. His invention of "The Thing,” an espionage tool, is considered a predecessor of RFID technology.

Born Lev Sergeyevich Termen in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1896 into a family of French and German ancestry, Theremin started to be interested in electricity at the age of seven. By 13, he was experimenting with high frequency circuits.

As Theremin pursued his inventions, he worked in diverse fields. While adapting a dielectric device by adding circuitry to generate an audio tone, Theremin noticed the pitch changed when his hand moved around.

In October, 1920, Theremin first demonstrated the instrument that is known as the Theremin. By November, he had given his first public concert with the instrument, now modified with a horizontal volume antenna replacing the earlier foot-operated volume control.

After being sent on a lengthy tour of Europe starting 1927 — including London, Paris and towns in Germany — during which he demonstrated his invention to full audiences, Theremin and his first wife, Katia, found his way to the United States, arriving in December, 1927. He performed with the Theremin backed by the New York Philharmonic in 1928. He patented his invention in the United States in 1928 and subsequently granted commercial production rights to RCA.

Theremin set up a laboratory in New York in the 1930s, where he developed the Theremin and experimented with other electronic musical instruments and other inventions. These included the Rhythmicon, commissioned by the American composer and theorist, Henry Cowell.

In 1930, ten “Thereminists” performed on stage at Carnegie Hall. Two years later, Theremin conducted the first-ever electronic orchestra, featuring the Theremin and other electronic instruments including a "fingerboard" Theremin which resembled a cello in use.

Theremin's mentors during this time were some of society's foremost scientists, composers and musical theorists, including composer Joseph Schillinger and physicist (and amateur violinist), Albert Einstein. At this time, Theremin worked closely with fellow Russian émigré and Theremin virtuoso, Clara Rockmore.

Theremin abruptly returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. At the time, the reasons for his return were unclear. Many years later, it was revealed that Theremin had returned to his native land due to tax and financial difficulties in the United States.

However, Theremin himself once told Bulat Galeyev that he decided to leave himself because he was anxious about the approaching war. Shortly after he returned, he was imprisoned in the Butyrka prison and later sent to work in the Kolyma gold mines.

Although rumors of his execution were widely circulated and published, Theremin was, in fact, put to work in a sharashka (a secret laboratory in the Gulag camp system), together with Andrei Tupolev, Sergei Korolev and other well-known scientists and engineers. The Soviet Union rehabilitated him in 1956.

Theremin died in Moscow in 1993 at age 97.

The theremin was used in movie soundtracks such as Miklós Rózsa's soundtracks for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. Bernard Herrmann used the instrument for sound on The Day the Earth Stood Still and it was used for the theme song for the ITV drama, Midsomer Murders. These films led to the theremin’s association with a very eerie sound.

Theremins are also used in concert music (especially avant-garde and 20th and 21st century new music) and in popular music genres such as rock. Psychedelic rock bands in particular, such as Hawkwind, have often used the Theremin in their work.

Here, Léon Theremin demonstrates his strange machine

Lee de Forest was born 149 years ago today

Lee de Forest was born 149 years ago today.

An inventor, self-described "Father of Radio" and a pioneer in the development of sound-on-film recording used for motion pictures, de Forest had over 180 patents. However, he also had a tumultuous career — boasting that he made and then lost four fortunes.

He was also involved in several major patent lawsuits, spent a substantial part of his income on legal bills. He was even tried (and acquitted) of mail fraud.

His most famous invention, in 1906, was the three-element "grid Audion," which provided the foundation for the development of vacuum tube technology. His inventions made possible radio broadcasting, long distance telephone lines and talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.

De Forest's father was a Congregational Church minister who hoped his son would also become a pastor.

In 1879, the elder de Forest became president of the American Missionary Association's Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, a school "open to all of either sex, without regard to sect, race or color," and which educated primarily African-Americans.

Many of the local white citizens resented the school and its mission, and Lee spent most of his youth in Talladega isolated from the white community, with several close friends among the black children of the town.

On this day in 1835 — 187 years ago — the first in a series of six articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared in the New York Sun newspaper

On this day in 1835 — 187 years ago — the first in a series of six articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared in the New York Sun newspaper.

Known collectively as "The Great Moon Hoax," the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day.

Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January, 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats.

The articles also offered vivid description of the moon's geography, complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing rivers and lush vegetation.

The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new "penny press" papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was exciting stuff and readers lapped it up.

The only problem was that none of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University.

Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.

Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. The craze over Herschel's supposed discoveries even fooled a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to New York in search of the Edinburgh Journal articles.

After Sun employees sent them back and forth between the printing and editorial offices, hoping to discourage them, the scientists returned to New Haven without realizing they had been tricked. On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a hoax. People were generally amused by the whole thing, and sales of the paper didn’t suffer.

The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The merger folded in 1967. A new New York Sun newspaper was founded in 2002, but it has no relation to the original.

The tradition still continues today. It’s now called “Fox News.”

Thanks History.com

On this day in 1899 — 123 years ago — the first ship-to-shore wireless message was sent by Lightship 70 to a coastal receiving station at the Cliff House in San Francisco

On this day in 1899 — 123 years ago — the first ship-to-shore wireless message was sent by Lightship 70 to a coastal receiving station at the Cliff House in San Francisco.

“Sherman is sighted,” the message said, referring to the troopship, Sherman, which was returning a San Francisco regiment from the battlefields of the Spanish-American War. “’Frisco and Oakland has been roaring since last evening, when the Sherman was sighted,” Jack London later wrote to his friend, Cloudesley Johns.

Across miles of choppy, fog-choked seas, the boat’s message was relayed through wireless telegraphy. The wireless transmission marked the first use outside England of this technology — still in its infancy.

The name most closely associated with the invention of wireless telegraphy — what we now know simply as radio — is Guglielmo Marconi, but as with so many technologies, there were a number of hands stirring the pot, chief among them Heinrich Hertz, Alexander Popov and Nicola Tesla. Marconi’s claim to primacy was no doubt helped by the fact that he obtained the British patent for wireless in 1896, when Britannia still ruled the waves.

Radio communication at sea quickly evolved into an indispensable safety aid for mariners. By the early 20th century ships were able to communicate with each other as well as with shore-based stations. The Japanese navy used radio communication to scout the Russian fleet during the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, a crushing Japanese victory and a turning point in the Russo-Japanese War.

The failure of radio communication played a major role in the Titanic disaster in 1912. The lone radio operator aboard the Californian had switched off his set for the night (as was common aboard vessels carrying a single operator) and never received the Titanic‘s distress signals. Had someone been at his post, the Californian — by far the closest ship to the stricken liner — could have arrived soon enough to save many of the lives that were lost.

In this 1901 photo, Guglielmo Marconi reads signals on a tape recorder (left) with a 10-inch spark coil used for ship-to-shore radio tests.

Thanks Wired and the New York Times!