Memorial Day Parade Comes to Stratford: Photos

Stratford veterans wave at onlookers from atop an eagle-adorned float.

Members of the Stratford High band.

Students from Wilcoxson Elementary School carry the fifty states across Stratford.

Cub scouts ride down the street in their pine-box derby racers.

The line of parade marchers passes under the train tracks.

The parade is an advertising opportunity for some local businesses.

Street vendors spend every Memorial Day trekking up and down the streets.

The Creek tribe’s representatives toss candy to children waiting on the sidelines.

The Kickapoo tribe’s bubble machine.

Kids scramble for candy as the parade moves on.

All photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia

Predictions, Patents and Politics in the Birth of News Radio

During his lifetime, science fiction writer Jules Verne dreamed up many futuristic technologies that could be used to explore new territories and expand the social progress of the human race. Over and over again, his imagined inventions became reality, often being used in an uncannily similar fashion to the way that he first described them.

One of Verne's most interesting conceptions was that of a new kind of news delivery system that involved reporters reading the news directly to their audiences – what we would now recognize as live news broadcasting. At the time he wrote about this upcoming technique, he placed it a thousand years into the future.

Little did he realize that several inventors were already on the cusp of creating the devices that would lead to the era of radio broadcasting. It would take less than half a century before newsrooms around the world were doing almost exactly what Verne had described. Radio technology would become so popular, in fact, that it would lead to a 40-year battle between two intellectual heavyweights over patent filings that would determine who got credit for the invention.

In 1889, Verne published a fanciful essay in the Forum titled “In the Year 2889” that walked the reader through a day in the life of a news baron named Fritz Napoleon Smith who owned the world's largest daily “paper,” the Earth Chronicle. Smith was so successful in part because he had developed a novel system for delivering the news to subscribers:

“Instead of being printed, the Earth Chronicle is every morning spoken to subscribers, who, in interesting conversations with reporters, statesmen, and scientists, learn the news of the day. Furthermore, each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they can at a very trifling cost learn all that is in the paper of the day at any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere.”

Image courtesy of wondersmith.com/scifi

Verne wrote that Smith had created this system of news delivery in his own era with the aid of “telephony,” which had been developed only one hundred years previously. In both the mode of delivery and the amount of time it would take to become reality he was mistaken.

Alexander Graham Bell had already spoken through the first working telephone to his associate, Thomas Watson, in March of 1876. Verne no doubt knew about the breakthrough, as over a decade had already passed by the time of his story. Although he did not specify how his version of telephony worked, it seems likely that Verne thought of it as a strictly “wired” technology, since that was still the primary way in which electrical impulses were being transmitted at the time.

Indeed, the New York Times reported in 1880 that new uses were being found for the telephone on a constant basis. One such use was involved reporters in Parliament for the London Times reading their reports directly to the compositor in the print office. “As the reporter in Parliament reads,” the article said, “the compositor in the printing office sets the type.”

It would not be a great leap from person-to-person calls to what might be termed a live “conference call” with reporters. Moreover, if Verne had been aware of the ambient way in which radio waves propagate, he is less likely to have posited that the news service could control subscriptions – anyone with a receiver can listen in on radio transmissions for free, rendering Verne's proposed business model obsolete.

There were people working on wireless systems around the time of Verne's publication, though. Nikola Tesla was one such inventor; Guglielmo Marconi was another. These two men would both file patents at the end of the nineteenth century for the key components of the radio.

U.S. Patent No. 645,576, for a “System of Transmission of Electrical Energy” was filed by Tesla in 1897 and approved on March 20, 1900. In it, he described a series of discoveries that he and other engineers had made about the ability of electrical impulses to pass unobstructed through the air. By devising a novel transmission-receiver apparatus with tightly wrapped conducting coils, he found that he was able to make use of this mode of electrical transport. He wrote:

“Expressed briefly, my present invention, based upon these discoveries, consists then in producing at one point an electrical pressure of such character and magnitude as to cause thereby a current to traverse elevated strata of the air between the point of generation and a distant point at which the energy is to be received and utilized.”
Tesla also noted that the devices could be rendered portable. He immediately saw a number of possible applications for his device, including to “transmit intelligible messages to great distances.”

Meanwhile, over in England, Marconi was working on a similar invention. Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company received its first patent 1896. But when he brought it to the United States in November of 1900, he was rejected by the Patent Office because of Tesla's previous filing. He continued to file revised versions, which were all thrown out.

But Marconi wasn't beat yet. He made connections with investors, including Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, who put their substantial weight behind Marconi's company on the stock market. The Patent Office reversed its decision on Marconi's patent without explanation in 1904, and he went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1911. Tesla sued Marconi in retaliation in 1915.

It was not until 1943 – after Tesla had died – that he finally won recognition for his invention. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent, in part because Marconi's company was suing the U.S. Government for use of its patents during World War I.

Whether by Tesla or Marconi, the radio had been born. However, its potential in the news world – the application that Verne had envisioned – did not come to pass until several decades after the patent battles had begun.

Then, on November 2, 1920, radio manufacturer Westinghouse's KDKA station used the Associated Press's election returns to broadcast the results of the presidential race between Republican Warren G. Harding and Democrat James Cox from the top of the Pittsburgh Post's building. It was the fulfillment of Verne’s prophecy, a mere thirty years after he predicted it.

Within another decade, the radio phenomenon would be in full bloom. By the end of the century, newsrooms all over the world would look much like Smith’s, with reporters at stations reading live events out to the world as they happened. The news industry would also be populated with a myriad of technologies that Verne never predicted: television and the Internet would dominate the field, producing copious amounts of content for the world’s eager news consumers. In an ironic twist, telephones themselves eventually went wireless; today they represent a burgeoning new platform for news media. Radio, too, thrives among the milieu. Indeed, the world of 2011 is much richer than the world of 2889 that Verne imagined.

Posting More of Less

I never intended this blog to be a professional endeavor. I created it for finished thoughts, essays, and tidbits that didn’t fit neatly elsewhere.

As a result, my posting is sporadic. Most months, I might add two or three pieces. So far in 2011, there were no updates for February or April.

Thinking about this has led me to a now-common conundrum. As a writer, I prefer to toil in privacy, revising and retooling until the work is as precisely organized I can manage. But if I want to be noticed in the digital culture, I need to be putting out more material in places like this more regularly.

More material doesn’t mean better material; even the best blogs sacrifice finely tuned artful writing for roundups, updates, and links. It doesn’t mean that they’re badly written, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re useless. But they do exhibit an “unfinished” quality that was largely discouraged in the days of print culture.

Scarce resources used to restrict authors and publishers from putting anything out that hadn’t been vetted by multiple parties. That’s changing now that everyone with an Internet connection can type up unending missives for free.

The rise of Internet speech has cluttered the field for professional writers of all sorts, making competition stiffer and creating a feedback loop that increases demand for content.

There’s a limit to how much one person can do; past a certain point, even the best writer’s work will begin to suffer if he or she is too stretched.

Many of us cut corners to meet the new demands: a journalist spins one story into five different versions for various platforms. An author blogs parts of the book that he or she is working on, thus drumming up interest in advance of its release.

But most of this content would have been considered a kind of offal in an earlier era. The repetitions, reconfigurations and drafting all used to be part of the private process that would, after much effort, result in a finished public piece. Most of the time, those earlier notes and drafts would get tossed or filed on a dusty back shelf. Today they are front and center – and will be open to scrutiny for as long as the web lasts.

I’ve resisted contributing to this milieu partially because my thinking follows the print paradigm; I want my work to be the best it can be before anyone sees it (except perhaps a trusted advisor or relative).

Perhaps I should change my methodology, though. It may be too twentieth century.

On Wings of Wax

Flowers for Algernon, Awakenings, and Man's Brief Moments in the Sun

A comparison between the thematic arc of Daniel Keyes's fictional story Flowers for Algernon and the real-life accounts of post-encephalatic patients written by Dr. Oliver Sacks in Awakenings. This was originally given as a presentation for a course in science fiction as literature.

Tips on Arguing: Quote Mining

Quote mining is the alteration of the meaning of a person’s quote by taking it out of context or removing sections of the quote. It’s a disingenuous way to make it look like something someone said supports your position when, in fact, it does not.

Quote mining is easy to do if you’re creative about it. Consider the following passage:

“One day when we were kids, Charlie spent the afternoon stepping on ants in the driveway. He came into the house that evening with a guilty expression on his face. When his mother asked what was wrong, he admitted, ‘I’m a horrible person. I committed murder today! Poor ants.’”

In context, this passage is about an innocent child coming to terms with the world beyond himself.

Suppose now that you wanted to make Charlie seem more nefarious. By cutting out just a few choice sections, you could twist the meaning:

"He [Charlie] came into the house that evening with a guilty expression on his face. When his mother asked what was wrong, he admitted, ‘I’m a horrible person. I committed murder today!'"

Technically, the new quote is correct - the words are the same as the original. But notice how choosing to remove certain contextualizing phrases has corrupted our understanding of Charlie as a "murderer."

Academic creationists have become notorious for quote mining - so much so that the term came into popular language among scientists in the 1990's to describe how their own quotes were being dishonestly used to suggest that they had doubts about the validity of evolutionary science.

In 1996, biochemist and high-profile creationist Michael Behe published a popular book called Darwin's Black Box, which argued among other things that evolution could not account for certain biological structures, such as the bacterial flagellum. These parts, he claimed, were "irreducibly complex" - that is, if you removed any one piece, the whole thing would cease to function (a presumption that was promptly debunked by other biologists).

Behe tried to shore up his case by including numerous quotes in his book from evolutionary scientists that seemed to show how shaky the science of evolution was. On page 29, he quoted from a paper co-authored by Professor of Evolutionary Biology Jerry Coyne:

"We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak."

Coyne responded quickly. In the February 1997 issue of the Boston Review, he wrote, "I went back to see exactly what Orr [Coyne's co-author] and I had written. It turns out that, in the middle of our sentence, Behe found a period that wasn't there."

What the paper had originally said was: "Although a few biologists have suggested an evolutionary role for mutations or large effect (Gould 1980; Maynard Smith 1983: Gottlieb, 1984; Turner, 1985), the neo-Darwinian view has largely triumphed, and the genetic basis of adaptation now receives little attention. Indeed, the question is considered so dead that few may know the evidence responsible for its demise.

"Here we review this evidence," the paper continued. "We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak, and there is no doubt that mutations of large effect are sometimes important in adaptation."

Coyne added, "By inserting the period (and removing the sentence from its neighbors), Behe has twisted our meaning. Our discussion of one aspect of Darwinism--the relative size of adaptive mutations--has suddenly become a critique of the entire Darwinian enterprise. This is not sloppy scholarship, but deliberate distortion."

Quote mining is effective because few people ever go back to read the original sources. It's easy to do, since all quotes require selecting certain sentences to keep and others to omit. The goal, however, should always be accuracy. Mining for quotes does disservice to the reader, misrepresents the person being quoted, and makes the quote miner look more like a dishonest ditch digger.