Author: JF Ptak

An X-Ray of the Earth, 1756

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I’m not sure why there was so much included in this engraving that had
nothing to do with its subject matter.
The essential part of the image is the cross section at bottom: the image of landforms, created by the man
most responsible for the establishment of stratigraphy, the German
physician/chemist/mineralogist/geologist Johann Gottlieb Lehmann (1719-1767). What Lehmann accomplished was a sensational,
x-ray-like interpretation of the surface of the earth, a privileged vision
distant from the real birth of the science of geology in the work of James
Hutton more than 50 years later. (Hutton was about the first to treat the entire
corpus of the geology of the earth and which was also completely removed from myth
and fable. His work formed the basis for
that of Charles Lyell who in turn provided some of the intellectual basis for Charles
Darwin.) He seems to be the first to
create such a slice of the earth, illustrating an orderly, historical formation
of the various layers (and not an unrelated jumble), and the first steps
towards establishing the laws of formation of geological sequence.

Outside of the spectacular introduction to the workings of earth in this cross
section, I’m taken by the enormous sky, and the very lonely compass, placed,
seemingly haphazardly in a blank field, creating a very considerable blank space above the great discovery.
The scientific greatness of the images aside (can I even say such a
horrible thing?), the engraving looks to me like a modern surreal work.

Book Note: Lehmann, Johann. Versuch einer Geschichte von Flotz-Gebuergen,…1756, printed
in Berlin
. “This unpretending treatise must be
ranked as one of the classics of geological literature”—Archibald Geike

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Cross-Sections — Perception — Perspective
History of the Future: Radio in the Classroom, 1945

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KDKA in Pittsburgh
was one of the first radio stations to broadcast in the USA in 1920—two
years later found another 500 licensed stations. By the time this pamphlet was
published nearly 95% of all homes in America were equipped with a radio,
the near high end of the Golden Era of the medium. (Perhaps there is no
greater, faster change in any sort of revolutionary change than there was from
radio to television. TV was basically an
insignificant spot on the radio horizon in 1945, and then in ten short years it
became radio’s great black sun, obliterating it as a competitor for
entertainment.) It is no wonder that radio was seen as a
potential colossus for an information delivery system, with schools making use
of whatever it was that they could squeeze from it.

This history of the future picture on the front
cover of this (1945) publication reminds me of the anxious moments in the opening
moments of 8^th grade when one of the teachers brought a television
to school (being in NYC) for us to watch the Mets in the 1969 World Series,
nearly 40 years ago next week. (There were series games played in sunlight
then.) Radio had great potential and
promise, and the kids crowded around this receiver/turntable tech center would’ve
been like kids 10 years ago crowding around a monitor to see their first
glimpses of the internet.

Radio didn’t make it.

There’s some interesting detail in this
photo. The programming on the blackboard
in the rear directed the children to classrooms for the different radio
lessons: “New Horizons”, “World of Wings”,
“Science at Work”. “By Freedom’s Light”, and a few others that I can’t make
out. All were CBS productions, which
evidently had nothing to do with the publisher of this pamphlet, Newsweek. The shows were being broadcast by WBEZ,
Chicago, which was actually a Chicago Public Schools station and intended for just
this purpose—real public broadcasting.

The girls in the front are looking at a user’s
guide for “CBS American School
of the Air”, which seems to have had some legs as an idea, or at least its
legacy looks really interesting. In the 1939/40 season of this “program” the
great music and sound geologist and proto-multiculturalist Alan Lomax¹ (1915-2002) wrote and directed “American Folk Songs”, “featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, the Golden Gate Quartet,
Burl Ives, Aunt Molly Jackson, and field recordings of square dancing,
French-Canadian, and lumberjack songs”.
Which means I guess that school kids were being exposed to impressively different
sorts of American music that they probably would not have hears anywhere else
as incidental sound.

But as I said, radio was swept away by the great leavener of
television. It looks like Alan Lomax
never did do anything for the TV, and its educational aspect (so far as
school-use goes) never really did get off the ground. Overall, it seems to me that TV never did get as smart as radio.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that because of Lomax’s one-world Lefty approach to the
appreciation of music–world music today, multiculturalism in another form—he came
to the squinty-eyed attention of the challenged J.Edgar Hoover, the FBI
managing to produce an 800-page file on the ethnomusicologist, all without a
single anti-American blot. Lomax’s total
body of work is astonishing, and we all owe the man a strong salute.

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Future, History of the — Technology, History of
The Story of the Story of ________: Fertilizer, Sponges and Etc.

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A very small part of a large collection that I purchased of the Library of Congress some years ago (the “Pamphlet Collection”, about 90,000 odd, interesting and almost entirely unrelated in their categorization items) was re-connected by me into a subclass of sweet/odd minor history. The titles needed to start something like The Story of _____, have an interesting cover illustration, and have the subject material be not-common.

I discovered that it was easier and more interesting to arrange this ephemeral material according to categories that would make the items interesting in a group, where the whole was greater and more interesting than the sum of its parts. And so a popular and slightly terrible Sponges, a Swell Story springs to life as a Duchampian illustration, far more interesting than it could possibly be as a solemn and bad history of sponges told in 32 cramped pages.

Some other iconoclastic categories in this vein includes pamphlets whose covers have only a printed “!” or “?” on them, with the sub-category of mercilessly bizarre and entertaining printed titles with exclamations or questions (like “Better than Dead?” and “Fury! Money!”).

And so I share a few of these The Story of pamphlets–there’s really not too much to say about them beyond offering up their cover images, so I’ll let it go at that.



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Books–title pages, beautiful — Fantastic Titles
Selling to “Simple” Women, 1939: “She’s Not Interested in Bloody Meat”

Post 882 (revised; part of the History of Women Series; also see Women Meat Pioneers.)

These sales-happy customer relations images from a modern food merchandising catalog (Modern Merchandising, 1939) come at an interesting time in the history of eating—or lesser yet, the history of buying food. The pamphlet addresses the growing idea of the super market, a notion still new in the minds of consumers —it seemed as large to the consumer familiar with the 1920’s concept of a market as it seems tiny to the megamarket people of the present.The illustrations–all quite small, margin-inhabiting affairs, space killers, no bigger than 1×2 inches–are there to help the grocer deal with women customers and better understand “them”.

I’ll address the interesting merchandising changes here in another post—right now I’d like to focus on the marginal drawings in the bottom corners of the text. They may be small and offhanded–generally they are less than two square inches–but the messages they delivered, marginalia or not, were very strong. Over and over again these bits demand the sub-class of women, emphasizing their trivial, ephemeral interests—bits of Nothing reinforcing large bits of Something.

The messages beneath the images, collectively: “women judge meat by appearance:; “there a little bit of the monkey in all of us…we like to see and handle”; “offend not eyes , nose nor ears”; “part of the selling job”; “women like to WATCH”; “her work is monotonous”; “she goes shopping in search of adventure”; “she’s not interested in bloody meat”. They present cascading reactions: they’re somewhat funny to my eyes, and then uncomfortable, and outrageous, and then simply sad that their solemn pronouncements on the status of women would be so acceptable, their as-yet unidentified sexism and bitter “racism”a non-sequitur.

.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Bad Ideas — Perception — Perspective — Women, History of
The Worst Job of the 19th Century? Tongue-Pullers, Nipple-Pinchers & Anal Tobacco Blowers Try to Revive the Dead.

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Nels Quevli, the Mason City, Iowa author of the oddly-titled What Should be Done with the Bodies of the Dead (1936), does indeed have a point that rises above his oddly-titled, laugh-imminent pamphlet.. It is a little laborious getting there, and the 71-year old ex-pharmacist and “science writer” with “fifty years” of studying death really could’ve used a little editing in his 47-page exegesis, but a five-minute scan gets you past the grueling set-up to what the man is really worried about: being buried alive.

This is a great and grand old issue in the history of medicine, and it turns out that what Mr. Quevli was asking for was old-fashion simple: this was to put the newly “dead” into a Dead House¹ for three days or more at 85 degrees to wait and see if the body began to putrefy, purification being (in 1936) still about the only infallible indicator that death had occurred (scaling beyond the family of mortises (morti ?) including pallor, livor, algor and finally rigor). The body was still being tended to some degree while in the death house, though nothing is said of water; and after three days or so without hydration a person is going to be in very rough shape anyway particularly if they were traumatized to begin with. But this solution for Quevli was much better than the alternative of being sent to autopsy while alive or being buried while still shallowly breathing.

The determination of the occurrence of death was a major medical feature of the 19^th century, the French in particular waging a fight for how this to be so. Briefly put, for centuries even before Pliny death was described as the absence of an audible heart—the crux of the sentence being the word “audible”, so that the end of life was dependent upon being a physician’s/person’s capacity to hear the heart beating. This might be very problematic if the person listening for that heartbeat had faulty hearing from defect or age, as the listener would place his/her ear on the chest of the patient to determine if the heart was functioning or not. The stethoscope wasn’t invented until 1816 by Rene Laennec–who produced a monaural device much like a primitive hearing horn made of solid wood—which was a vast improvement over no stethoscope at all, by again was very crude compared to early 20^th century devices. It was much more preferred by most doctors (though there were contingents who distrusted the instrument and wouldn’t use it and still others who thought it an insult to their person insinuating defective hearing capacity) compared to the ancient hairy-ear-on-chest method. It was also, in a small way, a kind of auditory x-ray.

It was also more elegant than other methods, the following examples referenced from Jan Bondeson’s delightful Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Norton, 2001):

–Christian Friedrich Nasse’s Thanatometer was a long thermometer that was inserted into the stomach, supposedly measuring a core body temperature that would determine if life was possible (and published in 1841);

–The (Englishman’s) Barnett scalding death cure, which recommended burning the skin of the arm to see if it blistered (no blister/no life);

–the German Middeldorph invented a heart flag, a needle device that would be thrust into the heart, which if functioning would trigger something or other that would cause a flag to be released at the top of the needle (a very Victorian and visual one, this);

–Christian August Struwe’s interesting Lebenspruefer (1805) was an electrical device that delivered a dual shock to the eye and lip, the logic here being that if the person was still alive that there would be a resulting twitch;

–the nameless tobacco enema, which blew smoke…(delivered in the beginning by breath through a tube and improved later to replacing the lips with a bellows, this secondary improvement by Antoine Louis² and furthered by Dr. P.J.B. Previnaire’s much more powerful anal tobacco furnace. [Now there’s three words I’ve never strung together before].)

–Leon Collongues believed that he could hear the capillary functions of a possibly-dead person’s fingers if placed in his ear;

–Jules Antoine Josat³ invented a nipple-pincher (“pince-mamelon”) life-rejuvenation device, operating on the assumption that a deeply sedated person could not resist a strong pinch of the nipple and would have to wake up if alive.

Perhaps the most spectacularly extension of the nipple-pincher was the tongue-pulling idea of Dr. J.-V. Laborde⁴ (1830-1903), a research physician with wide credentials, who reasoned that a continued regimen of advanced and strenuous pulling of a patient’s tongue would over time bring them back to life if alive. This is what leads us to the point of this post: Laborde established a mortuary, and in this mortuary, where the dead were waiting to die, he employed a man whose job it was to pull the tongues of these bodies. In the misty picture of all of this that is painted in my mind’s eye, the fellow working his way from body to body pulling their tongues with a heavy pincer seems far worse than nipple squeezing or even being an anal smoke blower, though to choose between the three in a twisted Purgatorial mandate would be hard to so. Although the nipple pincher wasn’t replaced by anything mechanical, the smoke blower was (by a powerful bellows), and so was our friend the tongue puller, who after complaining of the boredom of his task was pushed aside by an electrical device. I am loathe to report that I cannot find a picture of the machine.

Notes:

1. This was not an uncommon practice. for example Munich and Frankfurt had their Leichenhaus in which the dead were allowed to putrefy, as did Vienna its Zentralfriedhof.

2. Antoine Louis. From the Bondeson book, page 156: “Antoine Louis had also proposed another method of testing life, or at least stimulating the vital spark in the apparently dead person: with a powerful bellows, he administered an enema of tobacco smoke. One of the pipes of this remarkable apparatus was thrust into the anus of the apparently dead person; the other was connected, by way of a powerful bellows, to a large furnace full of tobacco (reference 5). Such enemas of tobacco smoke were thought to be very beneficial and were used to try to revive not only people presumed dead but also drowned or unconscious individuals. In 1784, the Belgian physician P.J.B. Previnaire was given a prize by the Academy of Sciences in Brussels for a book on apparent death, which described and depicted an improved bellows for enemas of tobacco smoke, which he called Der Doppelblaser (reference 6). These enemas were regularly used well into the nineteenth century, particularly in Holland; modern science has discerned no physiological rationale for their use, except the pain and indignity of having a blunt instrument violently thrust up one’s rear passage must have had some restorative effect (reference 7).”

3. Josat. From Weird Universe.net I found the following, quoting Death and Sudden Death, by Paul Brouardel and F.L. Benham:

“Josat invented a pair of forceps with claws, with which he proposed to pinch the nipples of persons whose death has to be ascertained. Josat obtained the first prize of the Academy, but Briquet, repeating the same tests on the hysterical subjects under his care, proved that they did not react under Josat’s forceps any more than the dead.”

4. M. Laborde won a 2500 franc prize for his innovation in 1894 (as reported by the Revue scientifique. He sounded like an interesting man: according to the British Medical Journal (in reporting his death 25 April1903) upon his own death in that year Laborde: “as a freethinker had a civil ceremony; as an hygienist was cremated; as a member of the Societe Mutuelle d’Autopsie willed his body to be dissected; as an anthropologist willed his brain to be preserved at the Anthropological Museum…”

Some of Laborde’s works include Le traitement physiologique de la Mort. And Les tractions rythmées de la langue, moyen rationnel … de ranimer la fonction respiratoire et la vie … Avec … dessins, etc And: La traitement physiologique de la mort (Paris , 1894) And: La signe automatique de la mort reelle (Paris, 1900). And “Les Tractions Rhythmees de la Langue”, VIII, pp. 76 ff, ed. 2, Paris, 1897, and VIII, 2d part, pp. 406-510. And commented upon in some number, for example: Le Traitement physiologique de la mort par les tractions rythmées de la langue. Le tracteur lingual automatique Laborde, by Alix Hache.

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Virtual Filmstrip of Italian Defenses Against Bombing and Gas, 1944

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In my collection of WWII propaganda and civil defense pamphlets I found this extraordinary Italian publication, Se un’Accressione viene dal Cielo…che Cosa fa l’Operaio (1944, which translates loosely as “When the Aggression/Bombing Comes from the Sky, What Happens to the Workers?”). As we can see from the cover illustration, the (Italian) workers are being guided/marched from their factory by their Nazi overseer, dressed for a gas attack, just as the attacking planes were coming overhead. Inside we find a briefly-worded, explicit guide for the factory worker, and target of Allied attack, about what to do when the bombs started to fall.

The 104 illustrations, taken one after the other, form a sort of filmstrip, and could well function as a guide for those who couldn’t read. I also find them unsettling for their composition, color , size (very small, each section being about 1/2 inch x 1 1/4 inches), proportion…just about everything about them sits badly with me.

Here’s an example, taken from the middle or so of the presentation:

Here’s the full selection of the images (all of which are clickable for a fuller view):

The rest of the presentation follows in “extended reading”:

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Technology, History of
The Library of One Book

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Is this an image of a librarian carefully reaching for a carefully
placed book, carefully arranged in a carefully-odd Borgesian-style library
housing only books of the same height and thickness? Or is this a librarian in a Library of the
Same Book, housing thousands of copies of copies of the same book, climbing the
ladder to make sure that he had a copy of just the copy that was requested (“a
copy held at least 5 feet from the ground, near a side window though not
touching a vertical piece of wood”)?

Neither. These are
shelves filled with nothing but uncut sheets of playing cards, housed for the
playing card factory somewhere in Paris (?) “during the reign of Louis XIV”. Playing cards, which were introduced to
Europe via Marco Polo from China
or traders coming from the Middle East or etc., are much older in Europe than one would think, I think, and by the time
this print was made, playing cards were already quite popular there for two
centuries.

I can’t identify all of the activities of all of the twelve
tables of card preparation here, though some seem pretty obvious: the trimmer working near the pressman, the
sorters and assemblers of decks of cards at the lower left corner, the paper
preparer (?) just to the right of the man on the ladder, the pair of men
preparing the type trays at middle-bottom, and that’s about it. I’m not sure what everyone else was
doing. I’m not even so sure what’s going
on with the sheets of cards on the bookshelves, the target of this post—it can’t
be for drying purposes, as the sheets are too close together…perhaps it is just
for storage of different sheets of cards for different decks.

In any event I’m right or I’m wrong on this guess, about the same odds as being dealt “nothing” in a game of five-card poker (almost 1:1 odds), but that’s fine: I just like the composition of the print.

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Outsider Logic
Subjugation of Women 1938: “They DO as they are Told”

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The modern/antiquarian and very long history of the subjugation,
control and disenfranchisement of women slips not so silently into the present
here in the USA; elsewhere around the world this idea isn’t so “antiquarian” at
all and this presence is heavier still.
The morality of the capacity that restricts access to education, and
voting, and access to work, and equal rights in the control of a family, seems
slow in catching up to modernity.

This concept
of control struck home again while looking through a selection of CBS documents
on the state of radio in 1938. They seemed benign though ruthless in what they
were trying to accomplish: a simple objective and complex way of reaching it—the
sale of advertising on the radio. Looking
for comparisons between radio and the rest of the information-control market, I
came upon thin volume entitled What’s
Happening in Daytime Radio?, which for the most part was taking an historic
early stab at directing advertising at the women who were evidently
relentlessly following the soft romantic exploits of some of the fifty or so “soaps”
that were broadcast in 1938. (These very mild romantic adventures were called
so because of the soaps and detergents that sponsored and advertised on these
shows, directed of course at the target female audience.) The opening section started “The Women (God
Bless ‘em)”, wound its way through every manner of inferiority-inducing female
imagery: “the women, god bless ‘em, are not always chatterboxes. They do like to listen. And listen
carefully. They do what they’re told…by
radio.” It is still shocking though, in
an odd way, not at all surprising, to see this sort of copy printed at the
highest levels, and taking place within the lifetime of my still
extraordinarily full-of-life mother.

In this same pile was another bleak remembrancer of the
still-alive past, The Perfect Secretary,
a bleak messenger from 1938. In addition
to the de facto class and sexual
regulation of the structure of the business world and the woman’s
hardly-existent role in its formulation, we are introduced to the concept the most
basic mechanisms and elements of the control of a subjugated group. The pamphlet attempted to conform the
personality and character of the woman to her job as secretary. The
unannounced writer states that “it would be a mistake to overlook the
importance of the personality of a secretary.
What makes personality? Manners and dress produce personality.” He then moves on to specify the fat middle of
the correct mode of dress, reminding the secretary or secretary-to-be that it
was not only the “slovenly, unkempt” girl who lacked personality, but also the
overdressed girl was well “who adopted the undignified style of costume”. But correct dress and coifed hair wasn’t
enough: “with poise there is no personality”. (“An attractively dressed girl
without poise is unfortunate.”) “Conspicuously
colored nail polish is not becoming to a secretary in the better offices.” “Flippant and unreliable manners bury the
finest personalities.” And lastly, “it is one of the first duties of a
secretary in an office to be ever conscious of avoiding body odors”. There are another 34 pages of correctnesses
that follow, to painful to specify.
These attempts at control at the most basic level of a person’s identity
were “normal” for their time, and a remarkable testament to advances (thus far)
in equalizing the world of men and women.

“When we consider the positive evil caused to the
disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the
loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next
in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which
are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which
men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections
of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add
to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced
restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse
evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on
the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than
by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro
tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less
rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the
individual human being.” John Stuart
Mill, The Subjugation of Women, 1869

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Bad Ideas
The Hidden Beauties of Barrels, Pig Bristles and Forgotten Escalators

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I wonder what is was like to be a traveling salesman hauling
around hundred-pound barrels of pig bristles?

We don’t really find out the answer to that question in Origin and Development of the Paint Brush (1938),
but that remarkable, far from the maddening crowd question does present itself in
the text. And that is why I love
pamphlets like these.

Spending my professional life with the book, and being a
reader, I’ve come into contact with and have been exposed to a good, solid, Big Number of books, a Big Book of Big Numbers of
books. And so when the unusual creeps in
or is stumbled upon, they shine like little novas in my book-sky. And the ones that shine with their own
special light are the titles come in three favorite flavors: the Sublime Mundane, Outsider Logic, and
Fantastic (and Impossible). Today’s
selection are from the first category, and exhibit titles and texts that look
like non-luminous and uni-dimensional but turn out to be anything but mundane.

Earlier in this blog I’ve written on pamphlets entitled Flagpole Painting, School Safety Pioneers, Fortunes to be Made with Frogs, Where are the Dead?, How to Repair a Zipper, Mud’s Romantic Story, Soap in Everyday Life, The Fine Art of Squeezing, Salt Salesman’s Manual, Know Your Groceries, The Book of Envelope Facts (and others),
and they’ve all shown a terrific inner quality that is completely hidden by
their so-sleepy and yet strangely-compelling titles. Like the paint brush history pamphlet. Here are a few other new examples:

The Otis Elevator
pamphlet (1947) is efficiently designed beneath its semi-bizarre cover,
floating in odd typeface, completely lifeless design, mannequin humans, and
washed-out pastels. The Chinese coloring
book style of its covers hides a superior content, complete with schematics and
beautifully supplied with photos of elevators long-since removed from sight and
memory.

The Hooking pamphlet is not about its obvious contemporary
counterpart, but is a luminous, luxurious introduction and stylizer to the
science of hooking large objects to cranes via giant hooks and chains, and especially
about how to keep yourself from being
crushed by tons of steel not hooked properly.

The Mystery of Filters
charm is wholly in its title and cover design, its text describing nothing
but camera filters. It is still a cool
cover, nonetheless.

Elevators,
published by Travelers’ Insurance Company, tried to protect themselves a little
further by ensuring safe practices of elevator operation, mostly in industrial
settings. This was published in 1926 and
was already in its seventh printing from its inception in 1913 when the
elevator was just in its second decade of popular, relatively widespread usage.
The haven’t-given-this-cover-design-a-moment’s-thought hides a thorough (and
bland) treatment of elevator safety; too bad, the cover photosnap-art promises
something more. Its not there, except
for this beautiful photo of an industrial elevator op with a tie.

And coming back to wood barrels that are not necessarily
filled with pig (or wild boar) bristles but with something else less advanced
comes this manual on making wood barrels.
Everything is there, everything you’d need to make a barrel (and a good
one at that), and I admire this sort of fantastic dedication to what is
essentially (to our modern mind) mundane—except that it is as dry
as well-cured barrel wood. But I admire
it still, as I do the Elevator pamphlet,
because, well, they’re done right.

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Impossible Books — Outsider Logic — Title Page Art, Beautiful
History of Dis-Inventing Sex, 1: 1930’s American Radio

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(Also part of the Blank and Missing Things series: Sex)

The classes in the Western world for the most part enjoyed
their own social amusements: the rich
had opera, theater, concert halls; the working poor and associated classes had
burlesque, minstrel and variety shows. The
invention of the motion picture began to draw a common thread between these two
classes, a place where anyone from anywhere could enjoy themselves for a nickel
(or whatever). Commercial radio came
into being in the late 1920’s, growing enormously in the 1930’s and ‘40’s
before encountering its mortal enemy of television in the early 1950’s. Since radio was free (minus the cost of brain
rot from listening to the underwriters who commercials were interrupted by the
stuff people wanted to listen to) it became for those decades a superb democratizer
of American entertainment and (to some degree) culture.

Opera, vaudeville, minstrel shows, theater and so on enjoyed
their own segments of saucy visions and rakish stories, with sex certainly not being
necessarily prohibited. This was absolutely
not the case with radio, which in the 1930’s and ‘40’s held strict standards
against suggestive behavior that might hint of sexual meanings. There was plenty of sotto voce sexual innuendo to be found, but you really had to look
for it and pay attention. The feeling
among the broadcasters was that since radio was being invited into the very
homes of its listeners that there was a deeper responsibility to keep the shows
clean and relatively wholesome. And so sex took a holiday.

Its not that movies and television in the 1950’s were
rampant Decameron (with all of its semi-comic/tragic half eroticism) or Caligula spas, but
they certainly “showed” more skin than radio from that period ever talked about
or alluded to, even if the first TV married couples beds weren’t pushed
together until the Munsters shared a big double in the 1960’s.

(No,
the Ricardo’s never did push their twin beds together; it really was the mores-bending Munsters, who are pictured below. Perhaps the great “first” of a couple sharing the same bed needed to remove the human aspect of the reaching act, placing the responsibility in the attached-hands of a Frankenstein’s monster-like character and his bride. This happened too with tv’s first interracial kiss–between Capt. Kirk and his communications officer, can’t remember her name–making the encounter between humans of incredible accomplishment and remove, and of course set centuries in the future.)

Be that as it may, Lee DeForest (1873-1961), the inventor of the audion
which made the whole industry possible (after Hertz and Marconi) complained in
1947 of the enormous silliness and suggestive nature of the new medium. He loftily wrote about what could’ve been “a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, and the uplifting of American mass inteliigence” but instead was a ‘laughing stock”, the medium addressed to what he thought was the average national intelligence of a thirteen year old. Maybe he was right, and the man simply couldn’t stand it. 61 additional years would’ve made the De Forest explode–but then again, he was already close to that hearing saxophone players; who knows what the man would’ve thought of cable television. But the one thing he really couldn’t compalin about with radio was eroticism or sexual conduct, because that really wasn’t there.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Technology, History of