A scanned portrait of an unidentified woman in the family photo collection.
My father, an early adopter of nearly everything, took on a project to digitize a collection of historical family photos that had accumulated over many generations and that were now in his possession. It was the early years of digital photography when scanning technology was barely up to the task, and computer image file formats were crude by today’s standards.
Nevertheless, he forged ahead and built a repository of over 700 scanned photographs dating back to the 1800s. He recognized a weakness in the collection—there was no context, no annotations, no identifications of the people portrayed. Old photographs lose their value when this information, originally held in the memories of those who were around at the time, is not recorded.
My father knew this and wanted to somehow attach the information about the photo, in the scan of the photo. I know this, because he asked me (an imaging scientist) about how to do it. Unfortunately, at the time, there was no standardized way to embed such “metadata” within existing image file formats. He was a man ahead of his time.
John checks for mail at Rural Route 2, Box 619, later to become 292 Heather Lane.
In 1965 we moved into a newly-built house on the outskirts of the town of Long Lake Minnesota. Today considered an “exurb” of Minneapolis, at that time it was a rural community at the very edge of urban influence. I turned twelve on the day we moved in and was starting to explore the possibilities presented to a teenager in those years.
The Vibroplex Deluxe Original telegraph key, first manufactured in 1939.
I was moved recently by an unexpected item encountered while clearing out my parents’ home. They both passed away in recent years leaving, as we all will, a lifetime of accumulated possessions. Perhaps it is a rite of passage that we all mark our parents’ passing with tributes and shared memories, and then respectfully distribute their earthly possessions.
Those possessions usually include home furnishings of a previous era, and clothing that might fit but doesn’t match anyone’s current style or fashion. Many kitchen utensils will find their way to donation centers. Easy items to dispatch are those for which there are few memories. The more difficult are those with sentimental attachments.
My dad was an amateur radio operator, a “ham”, which is a term for the enthusiasts across the world that participate in this form of communication, ever since Marconi sent his first wireless message. There is a broad and varied number of these practitioners of a discipline that requires technical expertise and skill, and a desire to share their experiences “over the air”.
I grew up in this culture, listening to the chirps and squawks of my dad’s radio receiver late into the nights. One of the essential ham skills was to tap out Morse code messages with a telegraph key — the first level of an amateur radio license (“Novice Class”) required proficiency at five words a minute. My dad was extremely skilled at this and could signal at much higher rates. As one improved in this skill, the limitations moved from brain-hand coordination to the mechanical key itself.
This limitation was recognized early on, and various ingenious adaptations of the simple momentary contact key were invented. Some worked better than others. Over the course of my dad’s ham career he acquired various makes and models of telegraph keys with which he competed in amateur radio contests, to see who could make contact with the most other hams in a weekend.
His amateur radio station equipment will find homes with other ham operators, but his set of telegraph keys were distributed to his children, all of whom have those memories of dot-dash Morse code beeps in the night. This is the item I received: on a beautiful chrome-plated base, the key itself is a delicate collection of mechanical components, carefully balanced and customized to the hand of the operator. I am told that operators have a distinct “signature” that can be recognized when listening to the delivery of Morse code, each hand having its own rhythm and style.
This identifies the manufacturer, Vibroplex, and proudly displays its serial number and patented status. The logo is a lightning bug, carefully anodized or painted red on the brass plate, a feature maintained even on current models. This may be a collector’s item as there are many similar to be found at http://www.vibroplexcollector.net.
The ham community has an endearing term of respect for their fellow amateurs who have since passed away: Silent Key. It is a reference to the early days of telegraphy where the letters SK were sent to designate the end of a transmission, and then the station would become silent.
There is a national silent key registry, the cumulative obituaries of the ham community, where you can look up life accounts of past amateurs, including my dad, K0TO.
His station is silent now, but my memories of it will remain until I too become silent.
Showing a few bruises from years of heavy use in my home, at school, during protest marches and on backpacking trips, this is my first single lens reflex camera, the Nikomat brought back from Japan by my dad’s business contact.
A half-century ago I was a teenager in high school, fascinated with cameras and photography. I had progressed from my first Kodak Instamatic to a (used) Kodak Retina-II 35mm; both are considered “rangefinder” cameras: you looked through a viewfinder that simulates what the lens sees.
But what I really wanted was a single lens reflex camera, a Nikomat, a camera one step down from the famous flagship product of the Japanese camera maker, Nikon. A “single lens reflex” (SLR) is a high-performance camera, where the view through the eyepiece comes through a complex arrangement of mirrors and prisms from the very lens that will be recording the picture. The key to this magic is a mirror on a spring-loaded hinge that provides the periscope-like view through the lens while aiming and composing the shot. When the shutter release button is pressed, the mirror swings out of the way just in time for the shutter to open and expose the film.
I acquired my first SLR by saving the earnings from my summer job flipping hamburgers at the local drive-in. Except it wasn’t enough. My dad helped out, not by a contribution, but by asking an associate who occasionally made business trips to Japan to make a camera purchase on my behalf, since the local cost was significantly lower than the imported retail price in the U.S. and, crucially, within my savings. At that time such long-distance business trips were rare, and I had to wait several more months for my camera to arrive.
When we consider the impact of computer graphics we usually think
of Hollywood motion picture special-effects, or beautifully crafted images and
commercials from high-end marketing firms, which both seem like products of the
east and west coasts. We don’t think of midwestern
artists or public university departments as being part of that world. Yet this is exactly where much of the
pioneering work in computer graphics was done and its commercialization was
born.
The coils that provide the magnetic force to move the electron beam
Cathode ray tubes are a remarkable technology that incorporate many seemingly magic principles of physics. Thermionic emission causes electrons to “boil” off a cathode, high voltage electric fields accelerate and focus them, and magnetic fields steer them to the anode screen where they energize phosphor molecules, which then re-release that energy as visible light!
While developing the electronics to control the CRT and make
all this magic happen, we often had to “bring up the spot”, showing the
electron beam in one static location, where it could be examined visually and
measured with various instruments.
This was always a tricky maneuver, because if the electron
beam were allowed to become too intense, the energy transfer to the screen
would cause it to heat up to the point where the phosphor would suddenly
vaporize, leaving a dark spot that could never be lit up again. Usually, this burn-hole was in the middle of
the imaging area, and so the CRT, the single most expensive component in the
system, would become instantly unusable.
To avoid this event, there was a standard procedure for bringing up the spot: apply voltage to the CRT and gradually increase it, sneaking up on the level where the spot would become visible, and then avoid going too far. The safe operating zone was rather small.
But even the best procedures cannot anticipate every possible
experiment and test that might be needed while inventing new technology. Consequently, there were situations where the
beam accidentally and unexpectedly reached the critical phosphor burn level,
and whoever was conducting that particular test suddenly realized that they had
crossed the threshold and now the CRT had a permanent blemish. They had become a member of “the burn-hole
club”.
The burn-hole club comprised everyone who had suffered this
unexpected event. It was both an
embarrassment, and a badge of honor. It
was awful to realize that an expensive component was now worthless, but on the
other hand, the tests and experiments that we were conducting were on the
cutting edge of our knowledge, the term “cutting edge” implying that injuries
were part of the process. Only brave
researchers dared to push this edge forward.
I am not a member of this exclusive club, but that is
because I had skilled technicians who knew far better than I how to conduct the
tests I requested. They were on the
front lines of the technology. And as a
result, they were the ones first inducted into the burn-hole club.
There is one incident that deserves special mention. It occurred during the development of the
brightness calibration method, a critical part of making accurate exposures
onto film. We used a photocell at the
far edge of the screen. It needed to
“see” the spot, and measure how bright it was.
The task of figuring out how to do this was assigned to Rick Keeney, who
became a master of writing code to control the complexities of driving a
cathode ray tube.
To solve this particular problem, Rick came up with a clever
algorithm to position the beam directly under the photocell. The exact horizontal and vertical position of
the photocell is not known, at least not at first. It needs to be located. So Rick made a first best guess, and then
refined it. By moving the beam slightly
horizontally and vertically and seeing if the light seen by the photocell
increased or decreased while doing so, the beam position could be
estimated. Move the beam to where the
light measurement was strongest, and that would be the location directly under
the photocell.
But if the photocell light level was low, it was hard to
know which way to move, so increase the intensity of the electron beam and try
again. And if that didn’t help, then it
was likely that the beam was not quite where it was expected. So move it over a little bit and try again. This was the strategy for locating the beam
and calibrating its brightness. It worked
fairly well… until it didn’t.
On one occasion, the beam could not be detected at all. The algorithm increased the intensity trying to measure the light, but as it did so, burned the phosphor in its path. When it failed to detect the beam, it moved over a little bit and burned the phosphor there too. Since the beam was still not detected, it was moved a little more and tried again. The algorithm didn’t have a limit check on position, so it marched all the way across the full width of the screen, leaving behind a tire-track of vaporized phosphor.
This was a spectacular example of damage by electron bombardment, and Rick Keeney, in addition to being an Academy Award winner, also holds the prime honor in the burn-hole club. And I have the privilege of curating the resulting damaged tube.
The trail of damaged phosphor, leading right off the edge of the screen.
Rick with a more public acknowledgement of his skills in pushing the cutting edge of science and technology.
Those who know me would be stunned to learn that I have a
gun collection. I acquired them in the course
of my work trying to make computer images on film in the 1990s. They are electron guns, the mysterious
workings at the business end of a cathode ray tube.
This is the first of three posts describing a now-(nearly)-obsolete technology.
Thomas Edison nearly discovered them. In his experiments with heated filaments in evacuated glass bulbs trying to find a suitable incandescent lamp, there were hints. He noticed depositions of material on the walls of the glass tubes. Many scientific discoveries are preceded not by the expression “Eureka”, but instead by the comment: “Hmm, that’s funny”. If he had followed up on this odd result, he might have also invented the vacuum tube amplifier.
I was 16 years old when Apollo-11 landed on the moon. Color television had been invented but most TVs were still black and white. I had seen a few color televisions on display and in other homes, but the color was usually awful, partly because the broadcasting signals had to be compatible with black and white sets.
From my gun collection: an electron gun, extracted from a cathode ray tube
After years of fearing the consequences of corporate RIFs (“reduction in force”), aka layoffs, and having survived a dozen or more of them, I had finally reached the point where losing my job would have a lesser consequence. I had built up my savings in anticipation of some future retirement and was now working for the sheer pleasure of it.
I had always declared that if the work became tiresome or that I was no longer learning things, I would move on to something else. But those conditions never happened, and at age 65, a time when many decide to hang it up for an easier day, I found that my company was still interested in what I had to offer. I continued my happy employment, pleased to be paid for work that was valued.
That changed this last summer, when the company was acquired by a venture capital firm that offered a stock premium in exchange for taking it private and pursuing a new business plan. I hope that the company will thrive and continue their pioneering transformation of the print industry from analog presses to digital, but I will not be there to see it.
My ride along that road has ended, as the new management has deemed my color imaging scientist position no longer required. Though I will miss the technical challenges and problem-solving, this actually works out well for me.
I had been wondering how to transition to part-time status in order to more fully engage in the activities promoted by my travel-addicted partner. Further, I have no shortage of personal projects that have been put on hold over the years, and new ones that are still being formulated. I contemplated what would happen if the daytime hours suddenly became available to pursue them.
I am currently finishing up my work for the company and clearing my office. Decades of projects have left behind strata of artifacts: notebooks, schematics, prototypes, presentations, test prints, research papers, and a myriad of business cards of professional contacts. As I encounter them, I must perform a version of triage: discard/recycle, preserve for whomever next takes them on, or claim them for my personal scrapbook, including the “distributed computer museum”. It is all a trigger for nostalgia.
I don’t have time for reminiscing now though. To plow through it, I make the unreliable promise to review it again later, when I can properly share it with the people that I worked with, and the families that lived through it. I will attempt to craft a proper story around each artifact. Maybe they will serve as an informal history of the life and times of what has been a wonderful and fascinating career.
