Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had a lot of ingenious ideas, not all of which caught on. His phonovision was an early attempt at video recording, with the signals preserved on phonograph records. His noctovision used infrared light to see objects in the dark, which some experts claim was a precursor to radar.

But Baird earned his spot in history with the televisor. On 26 January 1926, select members of the Royal Institution gathered at Baird’s lab in London’s Soho neighborhood to witness the broadcast of a small but clearly defined image of a ventriloquist dummy’s face, sent from the televisor’s electromechanical transmitter to its receiver. He also demonstrated the televisor with a human subject, who observers could see speaking and moving on the screen. For this, Baird is often credited with the first public demonstration of television.

John Logie Baird [shown here] used the heads of ventriloquist dummies in early experiments because they didn’t mind the heat and bright lights of his televisor. Science History Images/Alamy

How the Nipkow Disk Led to Baird’s Televisor

To be clear, Baird didn’t invent television. Television is one of those inventions that benefited from many contributors, collaborators, and competitors. Baird’s starting point was an idea for an “electric telescope,” patented in 1885 by German engineer Paul Nipkow.

Nipkow’s apparatus captured a picture by dividing it into a vertical sequence of lines, using a spinning disk with perforated holes around the edge. The perforations were offset in a spiral so that each hole captured one slice of the image in turn—known today as scan lines. Each line would be encoded as an electrical signal. A receiving apparatus converted the signals into light, to reconstruct the image. Nipkow never commercialized his electric telescope, though, and after 15 years the patent expired.

The inset on the left shows how the televisor split an image (in this case, a person’s face) into vertical lines. Bettmann/Getty Images

The system that Baird demonstrated in 1926 used two Nipkow disks, one in the transmitting apparatus and the other in the receiving apparatus. Each disk had 30 holes. He fitted the disk with glass lenses that focused the reflected light onto a photoelectric cell. As the transmitting disk rotated, the photoelectric cell detected the change in brightness coming through the individual lenses and converted the light into an electrical signal.

This signal was then sent to the receiving system. (Part of the receiving apparatus, housed at the Science Museum in London, is shown at top.) There the process was reversed, with the electrical signal first being amplified and then modulating a neon gas–discharge lamp. The light passed through a rectangular slot to focus it onto the receiving Nipkow disk, which was turning at the same speed as the transmitter. The image could be seen on a ground glass plate.

Early experiments used a dummy because the many incandescent lights needed to provide sufficient illumination made it too hot and bright for a person. Each hole in the disk captured only a small bit of the overall image, but as long as the disk spun fast enough, the brain could piece together the complete image, a phenomenon known as persistence of vision. (In a 2022 Hands On column, Markus Mierse explains how to build a modern Nipkow-disk electromechanical TV using a 3D printer, an LED module, and an Arduino Mega microcontroller.)

John Logie Baird and “True Television”

Regular readers of this column know the challenge of documenting historical “firsts”—the first radio, the first telegraph, the first high-tech prosthetic arm. Baird’s claim to the first public broadcast of television is no different. To complicate matters, the actual first demonstration of his televisor wasn’t on 26 January 1926 in front of those esteemed members of the Royal Institution; rather, it occurred in March 1925 in front of curious shoppers at a Selfridges department store.

As Donald F. McLean recounts in his excellent June 2022 article “Before ‘True Television’: Investigating John Logie Baird’s 1925 Original Television Apparatus,” Baird used a similar device for the Selfridges demo, but it had only 16 holes, organized as two groups of eight, hence its nickname the Double-8. The resolution was about as far from high definition as you could get, showing shadowy silhouettes in motion. Baird didn’t consider this “true television,” as McLean notes in his Proceedings of the IEEE piece.

In 1926, Baird loaned part of the televisor he used in his Selfridges demo to the Science Museum in London.PA Images/Getty Images

Writing in December 1926 in Experimental Wireless & The Wireless Engineer, Baird defined true television as “the transmission of the image of an object with all gradations of light, shade, and detail, so that it is seen on the receiving screen as it appears to the eye of an actual observer.” Consider the Selfridges demo a beta test and the one for the Royal Institution the official unveiling. (In 2017, the IEEE chose to mark the latter and not the former with a Milestone.)

The 1926 demonstration was a turning point in Baird’s career. In 1927 he established the Baird Television Development Co., and a year later he made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, N.Y. In 1929, the BBC decided to give Baird’s system a try, performing some experimental broadcasts outside of normal hours. After that, mechanical television took off in Great Britain and a few other European countries.

The BBC used various versions of Baird’s mechanical system from 1929 to 1937, starting with the 30-line system and upgrading to a 240-line system. But eventually the BBC switched to the all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI. Baird then switched to working on one of the earliest electronic color television systems, called the Telechrome. (Baird had already demonstrated a successful mechanical color television system in 1928, but it never caught on.) Meanwhile, in the United States, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) attempted to develop a mechanical color television system based on Baird’s original idea of a color wheel but finally ceded to an electronic standard in 1953.

Baird also experimented with stereoscopic or three-dimensional television and a 1,000-line display, similar to today’s high-definition television. Unfortunately, he died in 1946 before he could persuade anyone to take up that technology.

In a 1969 interview in TV Times, John’s widow, Margaret Baird, reflected on some of the developments in television that would have made her husband happy. He would enjoy the massive amounts of sports coverage available, she said. (Baird had done the first live broadcast of the Epsom Derby in 1931.) He would be thrilled with current affairs programs. And, my personal favorite, she thought he would love the annual broadcasting of the Eurovision song contest.

Other TV Inventors: Philo Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin

But as I said, television is an invention that’s had many contributors. Across the Atlantic, Philo Farnsworth was experimenting with an all-electrical system that he had first envisioned as a high school student in 1922. By 1926, Farnsworth had secured enough financial backing to work full time on his idea.

One of his main inventions was the image dissector, also known as a dissector tube. This video camera tube creates a temporary electron image that can be converted into an electrical signal. On 7 September 1927, Farnsworth and his team successfully transmitted a single black line, followed by other images of simple shapes. But the system could only handle silhouettes, not three-dimensional objects.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with electronic television. In 1923, he applied for a patent for a video tube called the iconoscope. But it wasn’t until 1931, after he joined RCA, that his team developed a working version, which suspiciously came after Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s lab in California. The iconoscope overcame some of the dissector tube’s deficiencies, especially the storage capacity. It was also more sensitive and easier to manufacture. But one major drawback of both the image dissector and the iconoscope was that, like Baird’s original televisor, they required very bright lights.

Everyone was working to develop a better tube, but Farnsworth claimed that he’d invented both the concept of an electronic image moving through a vacuum tube as well as the idea of a storage-type camera tube. The iconoscope and any future improvements all depended on these progenitor patents. RCA knew this and offered to buy Farnsworth’s patents, but Farnsworth refused to sell. A multiyear patent-interference case ensued, finally finding for Farnsworth in 1935.

While the case was being litigated, Farnsworth made the first public demonstration of an all-electric television system on 25 August 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. And in 1939, RCA finally agreed to pay royalties to Farnsworth to use his patented technologies. But Farnsworth was never able to compete commercially with RCA and its all-electric television system, which went on to dominate the U.S. television market.

Eventually, Harold Law, Paul Weimer, and Russell Law developed a better tube at their Princeton labs, the image orthicon. Designed for TV-guided missiles for the U.S. military, it was 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as the iconoscope. After World War II, RCA quickly adopted the tube for its TV cameras. The image orthicon became the industry standard by 1947, remaining so until 1968 and the move to color TV.

The Path to Television Was Not Obvious

My Greek teacher hated the word “television.” He considered it an abomination that combined the Greek prefix telos (far off) with a Latin base, videre (to see). But early television was a bit of an abomination—no one really knew what it was going to be. As Chris Horrocks lays out in his delightfully titled book, The Joy of Sets (2017), television was developed in relation to the media that came before—telegraph, telephone, radio, and film.

Was television going to be like a telegraph, with communication between two points and an image slowly reassembled? Was it going to be like a telephone, with direct and immediate dialog between both ends? Was it going to be like film, with prerecorded images played back to a wide audience? Or would it be more like radio, which at the time was largely live broadcasts? At the beginning, people didn’t even know they wanted a television; manufacturers had to convince them.

And technically, there were many competing visions—Baird’s, Farnsworth’s, Zworykin’s, and others. It’s no wonder that television took many years, with lots of false starts and dead ends, before it finally took hold.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2024 print issue as “The Mechanical TV.”

Senate hearings, a post office ban, the resignation of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, and his reinstatement after more than 400 scientists threatened to resign. Who knew a little box of salt could stir up such drama?

What was AD-X2?

It all started in 1947 when a bulldozer operator with a 6th grade education, Jess M. Ritchie, teamed up with UC Berkeley chemistry professor Merle Randall to promote AD-X2, an additive to extend the life of lead-acid batteries. The problem of these rechargeable batteries’ dwindling capacity was well known. If AD-X2 worked as advertised, millions of car owners would save money.

Jess M. Ritchie demonstrates his AD-X2 battery additive before the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

A basic lead-acid battery has two electrodes, one of lead and the other of lead dioxide, immersed in dilute sulfuric acid. When power is drawn from the battery, the chemical reaction splits the acid molecules, and lead sulfate is deposited in the solution. When the battery is charged, the chemical process reverses, returning the electrodes to their original state—almost. Each time the cell is discharged, the lead sulfate “hardens” and less of it can dissolve in the sulfuric acid. Over time, it flakes off, and the battery loses capacity until it’s dead.

By the 1930s, so many companies had come up with battery additives that the U.S. National Bureau of Standards stepped in. Its lab tests revealed that most were variations of salt mixtures, such as sodium and magnesium sulfates. Although the additives might help the battery charge faster, they didn’t extend battery life. In May 1931, NBS (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) summarized its findings in Letter Circular No. 302: “No case has been found in which this fundamental reaction is materially altered by the use of these battery compounds and solutions.”

Of course, innovation never stops. Entrepreneurs kept bringing new battery additives to market, and the NBS kept testing them and finding them ineffective.

Do battery additives work?

After World War II, the National Better Business Bureau decided to update its own publication on battery additives, “Battery Compounds and Solutions.” The publication included a March 1949 letter from NBS director Edward Condon, reiterating the NBS position on additives. Prior to heading NBS, Condon, a physicist, had been associate director of research at Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh and a consultant to the National Defense Research Committee. He helped set up MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, and he was also briefly part of the Manhattan Project. Needless to say, Condon was familiar with standard practices for research and testing.

Meanwhile, Ritchie claimed that AD-X2’s secret formula set it apart from the hundreds of other additives on the market. He convinced his senator, William Knowland, a Republican from Oakland, Calif., to write to NBS and request that AD-X2 be tested. NBS declined, not out of any prejudice or ill will, but because it tested products only at the request of other government agencies. The bureau also had a longstanding policy of not naming the brands it tested and not allowing its findings to be used in advertisements.

AD-X2 consisted mainly of Epsom salt and Glauber’s salt.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Ritchie cried foul, claiming that NBS was keeping new businesses from entering the marketplace. Merle Randall launched an aggressive correspondence with Condon and George W. Vinal, chief of NBS’s electrochemistry section, extolling AD-X2 and the testimonials of many users. In its responses, NBS patiently pointed out the difference between anecdotal evidence and rigorous lab testing.

Enter the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC had received a complaint from the National Better Business Bureau, which suspected that Pioneers, Inc.—Randall and Ritchie’s distribution company—was making false advertising claims. On 22 March 1950, the FTC formally asked NBS to test AD-X2.

By then, NBS had already extensively tested the additive. A chemical analysis revealed that it was 46.6 percent magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) and 49.2 percent sodium sulfate (Glauber’s salt, a horse laxative) with the remainder being water of hydration (water that’s been chemically treated to form a hydrate). That is, AD-X2 was similar in composition to every other additive on the market. But, because of its policy of not disclosing which brands it tests, NBS didn’t immediately announce what it had learned.

The David and Goliath of battery additives

NBS then did something unusual: It agreed to ignore its own policy and let the National Better Business Bureau include the results of its AD-X2 tests in a public statement, which was published in August 1950. The NBBB allowed Pioneers to include a dissenting comment: “These tests were not run in accordance with our specification and therefore did not indicate the value to be derived from our product.”

Far from being cowed by the NBBB’s statement, Ritchie was energized, and his story was taken up by the mainstream media. Newsweek’s coverage pitted an up-from-your-bootstraps David against an overreaching governmental Goliath. Trade publications, such as Western Construction News and Batteryman, also published flattering stories about Pioneers. AD-X2 sales soared.

Then, in January 1951, NBS released its updated pamphlet on battery additives, Circular 504. Once again, tests by the NBS found no difference in performance between batteries treated with additives and the untreated control group. The Government Printing Office sold the circular for 15 cents, and it was one of NBS’s most popular publications. AD-X2 sales plummeted.

Ritchie needed a new arena in which to challenge NBS. He turned to politics. He called on all of his distributors to write to their senators. Between July and December 1951, 28 U.S. senators and one U.S. representative wrote to NBS on behalf of Pioneers.

Condon was losing his ability to effectively represent the Bureau. Although the Senate had confirmed Condon’s nomination as director without opposition in 1945, he was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for several years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover suspected Condon to be a Soviet spy. (To be fair, Hoover suspected the same of many people.) Condon was repeatedly cleared and had the public backing of many prominent scientists.

But Condon felt the investigations were becoming too much of a distraction, and so he resigned on 10 August 1951. Allen V. Astin became acting director, and then permanent director the following year. And he inherited the AD-X2 mess.

Astin had been with NBS since 1930. Originally working in the electronics division, he developed radio telemetry techniques, and he designed instruments to study dielectric materials and measurements. During World War II, he shifted to military R&D, most notably development of the proximity fuse, which detonates an explosive device as it approaches a target. I don’t think that work prepared him for the political bombs that Ritchie and his supporters kept lobbing at him.

Mr. Ritchie almost goes to Washington

On 6 September 1951, another government agency entered the fray. C.C. Garner, chief inspector of the U.S. Post Office Department, wrote to Astin requesting yet another test of AD-X2. NBS dutifully submitted a report that the additive had “no beneficial effects on the performance of lead acid batteries.” The post office then charged Pioneers with mail fraud, and Ritchie was ordered to appear at a hearing in Washington, D.C., on 6 April 1952. More tests were ordered, and the hearing was delayed for months.

Back in March 1950, Ritchie had lost his biggest champion when Merle Randall died. In preparation for the hearing, Ritchie hired another scientist: Keith J. Laidler, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Catholic University of America. Laidler wrote a critique of Circular 504, questioning NBS’s objectivity and testing protocols.

Ritchie also got Harold Weber, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, to agree to test AD-X2 and to work as an unpaid consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.

Life was about to get more complicated for Astin and NBS.

Why did the NBS Director resign?

Trying to put an end to the Pioneers affair, Astin agreed in the spring of 1952 that NBS would conduct a public test of AD-X2 according to terms set by Ritchie. Once again, the bureau concluded that the battery additive had no beneficial effect.

However, NBS deviated slightly from the agreed-upon parameters for the test. Although the bureau had a good scientific reason for the minor change, Ritchie had a predictably overblown reaction—NBS cheated!

Then, on 18 December 1952, the Senate Select Committee on Small Business—for which Ritchie’s ally Harold Weber was consulting—issued a press release summarizing the results from the MIT tests: AD-X2 worked! The results “demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that this material is in fact valuable, and give complete support to the claims of the manufacturer.” NBS was “simply psychologically incapable of giving Battery AD-X2 a fair trial.”

The National Bureau of Standards’ regular tests of battery additives found that the products did not work as claimed.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

But the press release distorted the MIT results.The MIT tests had focused on diluted solutions and slow charging rates, not the normal use conditions for automobiles, and even then AD-X2’s impact was marginal. Once NBS scientists got their hands on the report, they identified the flaws in the testing.

How did the AD-X2 controversy end?

The post office finally got around to holding its mail fraud hearing in the fall of 1952. Ritchie failed to attend in person and didn’t realize his reports would not be read into the record without him, which meant the hearing was decidedly one-sided in favor of NBS. On 27 February 1953, the Post Office Department issued a mail fraud alert. All of Pioneers’ mail would be stopped and returned to sender stamped “fraudulent.” If this charge stuck, Ritchie’s business would crumble.

But something else happened during the fall of 1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower, running on a pro-business platform, was elected U.S. president in a landslide.

Ritchie found a sympathetic ear in Eisenhower’s newly appointed Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, who acted decisively. The mail fraud alert had been issued on a Friday. Over the weekend, Weeks had a letter hand-delivered to Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, another Eisenhower appointee. By Monday, the fraud alert had been suspended.

What’s more, Weeks found that Astin was “not sufficiently objective” and lacked a “business point of view,” and so he asked for Astin’s resignation on 24 March 1953. Astin complied. Perhaps Weeks thought this would be a mundane dismissal, just one of the thousands of political appointments that change hands with every new administration. That was not the case.

More than 400 NBS scientists—over 10 percent of the bureau’s technical staff— threatened to resign in protest. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science also backed Astin and NBS. In an editorial published in Science, the AAAS called the battery additive controversy itself “minor.” “The important issue is the fact that the independence of the scientist in his findings has been challenged, that a gross injustice has been done, and that scientific work in the government has been placed in jeopardy,” the editorial stated.

National Bureau of Standards director Edward Condon [left] resigned in 1951 because investigations into his political beliefs were impeding his ability to represent the bureau. Incoming director Allen V. Astin [right] inherited the AD-X2 controversy, which eventually led to Astin’s dismissal and then his reinstatement after a large-scale protest by NBS researchers and others. National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Clearly, AD-X2’s effectiveness was no longer the central issue. The controversy was a stand-in for a larger debate concerning the role of government in supporting small business, the use of science in making policy decisions, and the independence of researchers. Over the previous few years, highly respected scientists, including Edward Condon and J. Robert Oppenheimer, had been repeatedly investigated for their political beliefs. The request for Astin’s resignation was yet another government incursion into scientific freedom.

Weeks, realizing his mistake, temporarily reinstated Astin on 17 April 1953, the day the resignation was supposed to take effect. He also asked the National Academy of Sciences to test AD-X2 in both the lab and the field. By the time the academy’s report came out in October 1953, Weeks had permanently reinstated Astin. The report, unsurprisingly, concluded that NBS was correct: AD-X2 had no merit. Science had won.

NIST makes a movie

On 9 December 2023, NIST released the 20-minute docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy. The film won the Best True Story Narrative and Best of Festival at the 2023 NewsFest Film Festival. I recommend taking the time to watch it.

The AD-X2 Controversy www.youtube.com

Many of the actors are NIST staff and scientists, and they really get into their roles. Much of the dialogue comes verbatim from primary sources, including congressional hearings and contemporary newspaper accounts.

Despite being an in-house production, NIST’s film has a Hollywood connection. The film features brief interviews with actors John and Sean Astin (of Lord of The Rings and Stranger Things fame)—NBS director Astin’s son and grandson.

The AD-X2 controversy is just as relevant today as it was 70 years ago. Scientific research, business interests, and politics remain deeply entangled. If the public is to have faith in science, it must have faith in the integrity of scientists and the scientific method. I have no objection to science being challenged—that’s how science moves forward—but we have to make sure that neither profit nor politics is tipping the scales.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “The AD-X2 Affair.”

References

I first heard about AD-X2 after my IEEE Spectrum editor sent me a notice about NIST’s short docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy, which you can, and should, stream online. NIST held a colloquium on 31 July 2018 with John Astin and his brother Alexander (Sandy), where they recalled what it was like to be college students when their father’s reputation was on the line. The agency has also compiled a wonderful list of resources, including many of the primary source government documents.

The AD-X2 controversy played out in the popular media, and I read dozens of articles following the almost daily twists and turns in the case in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Science.

I found Elio Passaglia’s A Unique Institution: The National Bureau of Standards 1950-1969 to be particularly helpful. The AD-X2 controversy is covered in detail in Chapter 2: Testing Can Be Troublesome.

A number of graduate theses have been written about AD-X2. One I consulted was Samuel Lawrence’s 1958 thesis “The Battery AD-X2 Controversy: A Study of Federal Regulation of Deceptive Business Practices.” Lawrence also published the 1962 book The Battery Additive Controversy.

In 1993, well before Google Glass debuted, the artist Lisa Krohn designed a prototype wearable computer that looked like no other. The Cyberdesk was an experiment in augmented reality. At a time when computers were mostly beige and boxy, Krohn envisioned a pliable, high-tech garment that fused fashion with function.

Krohn studied art and architectural history at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before completing an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., in 1988. With the Cyberdesk, she tapped into a cultural moment in which artists, techies, writers, and others were celebrating the convergence of humans and machines and eagerly anticipating our cyborg future.

What is Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk?

Although a working prototype of the Cyberdesk was never built, the yellow eyepiece suggested a retinal display.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

The Cyberdesk, made of resin, plastic, metal, and glass, was meant to be worn like a necklace. The four circles along the breastbone are a four-key keyboard with a large trackball at the top center; the user would use the keyboard and trackball to make selections from menus of options. A small microphone lies against the throat, and an earpiece hooks into the left ear. Krohn imagined the yellow tube in front of the right eye as a retinal scan display that would project a laser beam directly onto the back of the eye, creating a screen centered in the user’s field of vision. In the back, there is a port suggestive of some type of neural link. The Cyberdesk was intended to run on energy harvested from the body’s movement and the sun.

A port on the back of the Cyberdesk was intended as a neural link.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

Krohn, along with Chris Myers, a student at the Art Center School of Design, made two models of the Cyberdesk, but it was never turned into a working prototype. The underlying technology wasn’t there yet, although there were engineers who were experimenting with similar ideas. For example, Krohn knew about work on virtual retinal displays at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory, but she didn’t pursue a collaboration.

And so Krohn’s design existed as “strategic foresight, speculative technology, predictive design, or design fiction,” she told me in a recent email. Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which, as she notes on her company’s website, “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

The Cyberdesk wasn’t the only piece of cyborg gear that Krohn designed. In 1988, before the age of smartphones and Web searches, she imagined a wrist computer that combined satellite navigation, a phone, a wristwatch, and a regional information guide. Made of a flexible plastic, it could be folded up and worn as a decorative cuff when not being used as a computer.

Lisa Krohn also designed a flexible wrist computer that could be folded up when not in use. Lisa Krohn

Krohn designed the wrist computer prototype before “wearable” became a common way to refer to a portable device that incorporates computer technology. Futurist Paul Saffo is credited with first using the term “wearable computer” in an article in InfoWorld in 1991. Saffo predicted the first wearables would be worn on the belts of maintenance workers and then be extended to deskless, information-intensive tasks, such as conducting store inventories. He also suggested a game console consisting of a tiny display integrated into sunglasses and paired with a power glove. Nowhere did he consider technology as a fashion accessory, and I suspect he wasn’t even considering women when he made his predictions.

Meanwhile, Steve Mann was working on ideas for mediated vision as a graduate student at MIT. Mann was first inspired to build a better welding mask that would protect the welder’s eyes from the bright electric arc while still allowing a clear view. This led him to think about how to use video cameras, displays, and computers to modify vision in real time. Both Krohn and Mann ran into similar real-world challenges: cellphones, the Internet, civilian GPS, and online databases were still in their infancy, and the hardware was heavy and clunky. While Mann built boxy functional prototypes that he demoed on himself, Krohn imagined more speculative technology.

Each “page” of the Krohn’s phonebook represents a separate function—dial phone, answering machine, and printer. Lisa Krohn, Sigmar Willnauer, and Tony Guido

Krohn also worked on utilitarian business technologies. In 1987, she designed a prototype for the phonebook, an integrated phone with answering machine and printer. Each “page” of the phonebook had its own function, and an electric switch automatically changed to that function as the page was flipped, with instructions printed on the page. That intuitive design was in sharp contrast to most answering machines of the time, which were clunky and not particularly easy to use.

The phonebook was an example of “product semantics,” which holds that a product’s design should help the user understand the product’s function and meaning. At Cranbrook, Krohn studied under Michael and Katherine McCoy, who embraced that theory of design. Krohn and Michael McCoy wrote about that aspect of the phonebook in their 1989 essay “Beyond Beige: Interpretive Design for the Post-Industrial Age”: “The casting of [a] personal electronic device into the mold of [a] personal agenda is an attempt to make a product reach out to its users by informing them about how it operates, where it resides, and how it fits into their lives.”

Lisa Krohn championed cyberfeminism and cyborgs

Lisa Krohn designed the Cyberdesk in 1993, at a time when wearable computers existed mainly in science fiction. Dietmar Quistorf

The Cyberdesk as well as the wrist computer were early examples of designs influenced by cyberfeminism. This feminist movement emerged in the early 1990s as a counter to the dominance of men in computing, gaming, and various Internet spaces. It built on feminist science fiction, such as the writings of Octavia Butler, Vonda McIntyre, and Joanna Russ, as well as the work of hackers, coders, and media artists. Different threads of cyberfeminism developed around the world, especially in Australia, Germany, and the United States. While mainstream depictions of cyborgs continued to tilt masculine, cyberfeminists challenged the patriarchy by experimenting with genderless ideas of cyborgs and recombinants that melded machines, plants, humans, and animals.

The feminist theorist and historian of technology Donna Haraway kindled this cyborgian drift through her 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” published in the Socialist Review. She argued that as the end of the 20th century approached, we were all becoming cyborgs due to the breakdown of lines dividing humans and machines. Her cyborg theory hinged on communication, and she saw cyborgs as a potential solution that allowed for a fluidity of both language and identity. The essay is considered one of the foundational texts in cyberfeminism, and it was republished in Haraway’s 1990 book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

Krohn and McCoy’s 1989 essay also highlighted communication as a central problem in modern design. Mainstream consumer electronics, they argued, had reached a monotonous uniformity of design that favored manufacturing efficiency over conveying the product’s intended function.

Both Haraway and Krohn saw opportunities for technology, especially microelectronics, to challenge the restrictions of the past. By embracing the cyborg, both women found new ways to overcome the limits of language and communication and to forge new directions in feminism.

Cyberdesk 2.0

I had the privilege of meeting Lisa Krohn when she participated in a roundtable on the Cyberdesk at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology. The assembled group, which included curators and conservators from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (each of which has a Cyberdesk prototype in its collection), considered a possible Cyberdesk version 2.0. What would be different if Krohn were designing it today?

In 2023, Krohn reimagined the Cyberdesk. It now incorporates technology that hadn’t been available 30 years earlier, such as sensors to monitor brainwaves, hydration, and stress levels.Duvit Mark Kakunegoda

The group focused their discussion around the idea of “design futuring,” a concept promoted by Tony Fry in his 2009 book of the same name. Design futuring is a way to actively shape the future, rather than passively trying to predict it and then reacting after the fact. Fry describes how design futuring could be used to promote sustainability.

In the case of the Cyberdesk 2.0, a focus on sustainability might lead to a different choice of materials. The original resin provided a malleable material that could mold to the contours of the body. But its long-term stability is terrible. Despite best practices in conservation, the Cyberdesk will likely turn into a goopy mess in the not-too-distant future. (In a previous column, I wrote about a transistorized music box owned by John Bardeen that suffers from the same basic problem of decaying materials, which in curatorial circles is known as “inherent vice.”)

The panelists considered alternatives like biomaterials, and they discussed the entire product life cycle, the challenges of electronic waste, and the mining of rare earth elements. They wondered how the design process and the global supply chain might change if such factors were considered from the start, rather than as problems to be solved later.

These are just a few of the ideas that percolated while historians, artists, curators, and conservators considered the Cyberdesk. Now imagine if a few engineers were also present. To me, that would have been a really worthwhile discussion. Not only can art unlock creative design and push innovations in new directions, it also allows us to reflect on technology in daily life. And artists can learn from engineers about new materials, technologies, and possibilities. Working together, technology and design no longer need the modifiers speculative and predictive. Engineers and artists can create the future reality.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “The Wearable Computer as Bling.”

References​

I first learned about Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk and design theory at the Society for the History of Technology’s conference in Los Angeles in 2023, during the session “Revisiting Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk (1993), a cyberfeminist concept model.”

Both the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have featured their respective Cyberdesks in exhibits and online articles. Note that the difference in the colors—SFMOMA’s is white, while Cooper Hewitt’s is brown—is due to the instability of the plastics and resin, as well as variations in the materials.

As I considered Krohn’s cyborg designs, I couldn’t help but recall Donna Haraway’s classic essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a foundational text in cyberfeminism. Forty years on, we are more cyborgian than Haraway originally posited. Her challenges to traditional notions of identity still resonate with today’s nuanced discussions of gender. Addressing algorithmic bias and generative AI training may be a new frontier for cyberfeminism.

In 1870, William Thomson, mourning the death of his wife and flush with cash from various patents related to the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, decided to buy a yacht. His schooner, the Lalla Rookh, became Thomson’s summer home and his base for hosting scientific parties. It also gave him firsthand experience with the challenge of accurately predicting tides.

Mariners have always been mindful of the tides lest they find themselves beached on low-lying shoals. Naval admirals guarded tide charts as top-secret information. Civilizations recognized a relationship between the tides and the moon early on, but it wasn’t until 1687 that Isaac Newton explained how the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon caused them. Nine decades later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested that the tides could be represented as harmonic oscillations. And a century after that, Thomson used that concept to design the first machine for predicting them.

Lord Kelvin’s Rising Tide

William Thomson was born on 26 June 1824, which means this month marks his 200th birthday and a perfect time to reflect on his all-around genius. Thomson was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and professor of natural philosophy. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1866 for his work on the transatlantic cable, then elevated him to the rank of baron in 1892 for his contributions to thermodynamics, and so he is often remembered as Lord Kelvin. He determined the correct value of absolute zero, for which he is honored by the SI unit of temperature—the kelvin. He dabbled in atmospheric electricity, was a proponent of the vortex theory of the atom, and in the absence of any knowledge of radioactivity made a rather poor estimation of the age of the Earth, which he gave as somewhere between 24 million and 400 million years.

William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, is best known for establishing the value of absolute zero. He believed in the practical application of scientific knowledge and invented a wide array of useful, and beautiful, devices. Pictorial Press/Alamy

Thomson’s tide-predicting machine calculated the tide pattern for a given location based on 10 cyclic constituents associated with the periodic motions of the Earth, sun, and moon. (There are actually hundreds of periodic motions associated with these objects, but modern tidal analysis uses only the 37 of them that have the most significant effects.) The most notable one is the lunar semidiurnal, observable in areas that have two high tides and two low tides each day, due to the effects of the moon. The period of a lunar semidiurnal is 12 hours and 25 minutes—half of a lunar day, which lasts 24 hours and 50 minutes.

As Laplace had suggested in 1775, each tidal constituent can be represented as a repeating cosine curve, but those curves are specific to a location and can be calculated only through the collection of tidal data. Luckily for Thomson, many ports had been logging tides for decades. For places that did not have complete logs, Thomson designed both an improved tide gauge and a tidal harmonic analyzer.

On Thomson’s tide-predicting machine, each of 10 components was associated with a specific tidal constituent and had its own gearing to set the amplitude. The components were geared together so that their periods were proportional to the periods of the tidal constituents. A single crank turned all of the gears simultaneously, having the effect of summing each of the cosine curves. As the user turned the crank, an ink pen traced the resulting complex curve on a moving roll of paper. The device marked each hour with a small horizontal mark, making a deeper notch each day at noon. Turning the wheel rapidly allowed the user to run a year’s worth of tide readings in about 4 hours.

Although Thomson is credited with designing the machine, in his paper “The Tide Gauge, Tidal Harmonic Analyser, and Tide Predicter” (published in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers), he acknowledges a number of people who helped him solve specific problems. Craftsman Alexander Légé drew up the plan for the screw gearing for the motions of the shafts and constructed the initial prototype machine and subsequent models. Edward Roberts of the Nautical Almanac Office completed the arithmetic to express the ratio of shaft speeds. Thomson’s older brother, James, a professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast, designed the disk-globe-and-cylinder integrator that was used for the tidal harmonic analyzer. Thomson’s generous acknowledgments are a reminder that the work of engineers is almost always a team effort.

Like Thomson’s tide-prediction machine, these two devices, developed at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, also looked at tidal harmonic oscillations. William Ferrel’s machine [left] used 19 tidal constituents, while the later machine by Rollin A. Harris and E.G. Fischer [right], relied on 37 constituents. U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey/NOAA

As with many inventions, the tide predictor was simultaneously and independently developed elsewhere and continued to be improved by others, as did the science of tide prediction. In 1874 in the United States, William Ferrel, a mathematician with the Coast and Geodetic Survey, developed a similar harmonic analysis and prediction device that used 19 harmonic constituents. George Darwin, second son of the famous naturalist, modified and improved the harmonic analysis and published several articles on tides throughout the 1880s. Oceanographer Rollin A. Harris wrote several editions of the Manual of Tides for the Coast and Geodetic Survey from 1897 to 1907, and in 1910 he developed, with E.G. Fischer, a tide-predicting machine that used 37 constituents. In the 1920s, Arthur Doodson of the Tidal Institute of the University of Liverpool, in England, and Paul Schureman of the Coast and Geodetic Survey further refined techniques for harmonic analysis and prediction that served for decades. Because of the complexity of the math involved, many of these old brass machines remained in use into the 1950s, when electronic computers finally took over the work of predicting tides.

What Else Did Lord Kelvin Invent?

As regular readers of this column know, I always feature a museum object from the history of computer or electrical engineering and then spin out a story. When I started scouring museum collections for a suitable artifact for Thomson, I was almost paralyzed by the plethora of choices.

I considered Thomson’s double-curb transmitter, which was designed for use with the 1858 transatlantic cable to speed up telegraph signals. Thomson had sailed on the HMS Agamemnon in 1857 on its failed mission to lay a transatlantic cable and was instrumental to the team that finally succeeded.

Thomson invented the double-curb transmitter to speed up signals in transatlantic cables.Science Museum Group

I also thought about featuring one of his quadrant electrometers, which measured electrical charge. Indeed, Thomson introduced a number of instruments for measuring electricity, and a good part of his legacy is his work on the precise specifications of electrical units.

But I chose to highlight Thomson’s tide-predicting machine for a number of reasons: Thomson had a lifelong love of seafaring and made many contributions to marine technology that are sometimes overshadowed by his other work. And the tide-predicting machine is an example of an early analog computer that was much more useful than Babbage’s difference engine but not nearly as well known. Also, it is simply a beautiful machine. In fact, Thomson seems to have had a knack for designing stunningly gorgeous devices. (The tide-predicting machine at top and many other Kelvin inventions are in the collection of the Science Museum, in London.)

Thomson devised the quadrant electrometer to measure electric charge. Science Museum Group

The tide-predicting machine was not Thomson’s only contribution to maritime technology. He also patented a compass, an astronomical clock, a sounding machine, and a binnacle (a pedestal that houses nautical instruments). With respect to maritime science, Thomson thought and wrote much about the nature of waves. He mathematically explained the v-shaped wake patterns that ships and waterfowl make as they move across a body of water, which is aptly named the Kelvin wake pattern. He also described what is now known as a Kelvin wave, a type of wave that retains its shape as it moves along the shore due to the balancing of the Earth’s spin against a topographic boundary, such as a coastline.

Considering how much Thomson contributed to all things seafaring, it is amazing that these are some of his lesser known achievements. I guess if you have an insatiable curiosity, a robust grasp of mathematics and physics, and a strong desire to tinker with machinery and apply your scientific knowledge to solving practical problems that benefit humankind, you too have the means to come to great conclusions about the natural world. It can’t hurt to have a nice yacht to spend your summers on.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Brass for Brains.”

References

Before the days of online databases for their collections, museums would periodically publish catalogs of their collections. In 1877, the South Kensington Museum (originator of the collections of the Science Museum, in London, and now known as the Victoria & Albert Museum) published the third edition of its Catalogue of the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus, which lists a description of Lord Kelvin’s tide-predicting machine on page 11. That description is much more detailed, albeit more confusing, than its current online one.

In 1881, William Thomson published “The Tide Gauge, Tidal Harmonic Analyser, and Tide Predicter” in the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, where he gave detailed information on each of those three devices.

I also relied on a number of publications from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help me understand tidal analysis and prediction.