Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
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posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 10, 2012 -
21 comments
Adler Planetarium,
founded in 1930, was the first planetarium in the western hemisphere, and is
a US national monument. Until recently, the planetarium was run with a
Zeiss Projector (
Mark IV) that was
around 40 years old. The proposed upgrade was
controversial in the 2008 presidential elections, as $3 million in federal funding was earmarked for the $14 million project. In the end, the high-tech projection system was funded. The result:
the world's most advanced planetarium system, with a 64 megapixel resolution display, provided by 20 individually modified projectors, 42
GPUs and run with the help of 84 servers. And it can be
controlled from an iPad or
X-Box controller.
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 12, 2011 -
30 comments
Jan Chipchase is employeed by Nokia in the "corporate anthropology" field, but he considers it "design research," as he's not an anthropologist by training. His work covers researching
how people modify their phones in China, India, Ghana, and elsewhere, adding features or extending battery life. He also tracks how
cellphones are associated with personal identity and how they are playing roles far from urban and suburban centers. In some locations, cell phone numbers are written above doorways for identification, when there is no official map or organization for streets. He also blogs about his experiences, and his most recent post, he covers the rise of "
Super Fakes."
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posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 3, 2009 -
16 comments
