JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2891

Carlo Spartari created some interesting if not enigmatic approaches to transmitting thoughts and information via radio back in the mid 1930’s. The first example of his work—nowadays I think mostly forgotten and I imagine pretty obscure—is his book on a new radio language entitled: Spartari Radio Language, Sirela: Spatari Radio Language: A Word-of-mouth Code Easily Understood by Listeners of Many Nationalities Without Need of Memorizing for Use in International Radio Broadcasting, which was evidently self-published in 1937. (“SIRELA” I assume would stand for something like “Spartari International Radio Elementary Language” or something along these lines.

Taken out of context and working with the text as a visual element, these works seem to me to have more than a heavy touch of an Outsider artistic quality. I find them to be sort of beautiful in their own complex ways:

If nothing else it is easily the tallest book (18”) on radio codes and ciphers that I have seen, Carlo Spartari invented a rather clever and interesting radio language. It was based upon the seven musical notes of the diatonic scale–DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and SI—which took no translation to understand, and the notes of course are pronounced in about the same way, everywhere,   as la  Italiano. On the one hand it seems to me to be whimsical, and on the other, it seems brilliant. That’s the problem sometimes with challenging new ideas—they can be excellent almost as easily as they can be meshugina.

This work was accompanied by another, the Spatari International and National Criminal Identification Code, which are basically two very compacted sheets entirely filled with a cipher capable of describing a rather wide variety of appearances of a person with a relatively short number of words. If time was an element in a criminal pursuit, then the Spartari code could perhaps have proved invaluable to law enforcement folks, whereby a lot of data can be transmitted in a short, alpha-abbreviated message via radio or wireless. There are codes to describe the following characteristics of the person of interest: name, alias, nationality, build (“fat/fat and short/fat and tall”), weight, eye color, hair, scars (and their various forms and locations), moles, tattoos, birthmarks, malformations, teeth, hair/beard. Fingerprints, relatives, g\hat style, shoes, tie, and suit, all of which can be described in some detail in the code.

That said, they are using radio here, so, it might be almost as easy to just say what it was needed to be said rather than worry about a time-saving cipher. It really seems like this would be more valuable used in conjunction with the third part of this publication, which is Spatari Television Code for Facsimile Transmission. Certainly in this instance where time and space were critical then the abbreviations and associated ciphers used by Spartari would do well in fax transmission more so than spoken language.

“Back in 1905 a young musician was so impressed by the fact that the language of music is universal, that he decided to develop a language based on music. The result is the Spatari Radio Language, an ingenious system of speech based on the notes of the musical scale, capable of being understood by anyone, regardless of his native language, and requiring no study of grammar, vocabulary or syntax. The entire language consists of only the seven notes DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and SI, and the symbol BO. Capable of being combined into nearly a million different words or groups, these symbols can be pronounced on sight, and easily written down as soon as heard. The “secret” of the language is that each group of symbols represents an entire thought, or sentence. It is not intended that anyone memorize the symbols, as they can be written down as heard, and found quickly in the Spatari dictionary later.”–World Radio History online, Radex

Also see Jerome S. Berg, On the Short Waves, 1923-1945: Broadcast Listening in the Pioneer Days of Radio.