In one of its Talk of the Town pieces, the magazine pays a visit to Marshall McLuhan. He had come to New York to give a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn: “Every new technology, according to the Professor, programs a new sensory human environment, and our computer technology has catapulted us right out of the specialist age and into a world of integral knowledge and synesthetic responses. ‘The computer is not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole central nervous system,’ he explains.”
In less self-confident hands, that moment could have been played for laughs or, at least, an eye-roll. This was the 1960s! A computer was something the size of a garage that ran on punch cards. It was, to say the least, a stretch to think of it as our central nervous system. One wonders what The New Yorker of the 1930s would have made of McLuhan’s grandiose imaginings. But Eustace Tilley, in his middle age, had the self-confidence to give the Professor the benefit of the doubt.
· · ·
On of the writers of that piece, Lillian Ross, later hears Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles, and ventures out to gauge its impact. She finds a New York D.J. named Joe O’Brien, who compares the Beatles to Picasso, calls the band’s new work a “terribly intellectual album” and then adds: “My youngest son is a freshman at Yale. He tells me that the day the album was issued the entire student body of Yale went out and bought it. Exactly the same thing happened at Harvard.”
The modern ear, trained by the snark of social media and the blogosphere, waits for the hint of contempt. It doesn’t come. A piece on Simon and Garfunkel ends with the two of them doing a sound check before a concert in New Haven.
He looked up at the rows and rows of empty seats, and then up toward the last row, where Garfunkel, silhouetted against the blustery sky, stood listening.
“And ev’ry stop is neatly planned
For a poet and a one-man band.
Homeward bound.”
That could have run in the magazine last week. They could all have.
F. S. Norman, Brendan Gill, and Thomas Meehan
MARCH 19, 1960
MORE NEWS FROM the spooky world of automation! The Monroe Calculating Machine Company has just unveiled a new all-purpose computer, called the Monrobot Mark XI (having given their machine the most inhuman name possible, and in the form of a pun at that, the Monroe people apparently hope to strike a note of humanity by listing successive models as if they were kings, not things), and of course we have been to see the machine, at the Monroe showroom, on Park Avenue, and have been almost instantaneously outwitted by it, in a not very fierce battle of ticktacktoe. Walter K. Clifford, vice-president in charge of marketing at Monroe, told us that the latest approach to computers is to make them compact and low-priced, both of which Mark XI is. Resembling, in length, breadth, and height, an ordinary steel desk surmounted by an ordinary typewriter, Mark XI struck us as much less forbidding than the truck-size computers we’ve grown used to. We weren’t surprised when Clifford gave it a friendly pat. “Mark XI solves many of the technical problems that we in the computer game have been bucking for years,” he said, with a passion that left us in no doubt about how he had come to be vice-presidential non-robot in charge of marketing. “Up to now, all-purpose computers have required a great amount of space to sit down in and couldn’t be readily moved from place to place. Mark XI weighs only three hundred and seventy-five pounds and is therefore completely portable; you can use it wherever there’s an electric outlet. Speaking of electricity, I might mention that most computers call for a good bit of rewiring, to handle the heavy load of current they consume, but the Mark XI plugs into a standard outlet and consumes about half as much electricity as a toaster does. Furthermore, computers have always been so delicate that they had to be operated in carefully air-conditioned rooms; the Mark XI can operate anywhere, without regard to temperature.”
The Mark XI seemed to preen itself a little, and we half expected the visible knob of brains atop it to type out some politely modest comment. Before this could happen, Mr. Clifford was heaping further compliments on it. “The real news about Mark XI is its price,” he said. “Just after the war, when the first all-purpose computers came on the market, they cost about a million dollars. Gradually, the price has come down—first to half a million, then to a quarter of a million, and last year to a hundred and eighty-five thousand. But Monroe has made the breakthrough that the small businessman has been waiting for. Hold your breath!” Obediently, we did so. “The Monrobot Mark XI will sell for the amazingly low price of twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars,” Clifford said, his eyes rolling like marbles. “A giveaway price! And for an absolutely idiot-proof machine! When data is fed into it by punched tape or cards, the machine is capable of untended operation. It can do an average of five thousand arithmetical computations per minute. By itself, with only a monitor in the room, it can automatically compute the earnings—including all deductions, overtime payments, and so on—of a payroll of eight hundred people and print their pay checks for them. It can also be programmed to do sales analysis, inventory control, invoicing, brokerage accounting, differential equations, and probability analysis, to name a few of its applications.”
We let out our breath, and Mr. Clifford urged us to try beating the Mark XI at a game of ticktacktoe. He pulled a switch, and the typewriter on Mark XI typed out “Your move.” Clifford explained that the numbers 1 through 9 on the keyboard of the typewriter had been set to represent the squares in the game. Nervily, we pressed number 5. Mark XI chose number 3.
We got trimmed in five straight games, and the vice-president in charge of marketing seemed very much pleased.
Lillian Ross and Thomas Whiteside
AUGUST 4, 1962
“THINK OF TRANSOCEANIC television,” Sylvester L. Weaver, Jr., who was then vice-president of the National Broadcasting Company, urged a group of N.B.C. writers just about ten years ago. “You know. Something happens in Athens. Boing! The guy pushes the button ‘Athens’ and the lights begin to blink all over the place as Athens starts pouring in.” Well, the great day of transatlantic television is here, thanks to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co.’s orbiting Telstar communications satellite, and if Athens itself hasn’t yet started pouring in, live, through viewers’ sets in this country, a stream of shots from other capitals of the Old World—London, Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Vienna, Rome—did appear on their screens the other day, while in a similar manner European viewers received on their screens a series of shots from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, and a number of other points in this country, during the first formal exchange of live television programs between the United States and Europe. On this side, the exchange was made possible by the joint television-production efforts of the news departments of three networks here—the Columbia Broadcasting System, the National Broadcasting Company, and the American Broadcasting Company—with the cooperation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and, on the other side, the efforts of the television branch of the European Broadcasting Union (Eurovision) whose membership embraces the broadcasting systems of eighteen European countries. The American program was produced by a tri-network committee composed of Ted Fetter (A.B.C.), Fred Friendly (C.B.S.), and Gerald Green (N.B.C.), who worked on it for a month before air time; the whole production staff, we were proudly informed by a temporarily omni-network-minded press agent at N.B.C. a day or so before the broadcast, amounted to some two hundred people, including correspondents, cameramen, producers, directors, engineers, and technicians, from the three networks.
Attracted by the grandness of the occasion, we insinuated ourself, around midday of the day of the broadcast, into Studio 4 J in the R.C.A. Building, the coordinating control room for the American part of the Telstar program, to watch part of the dress rehearsal for the final show. The control room—a comparatively small one, although specially equipped to handle complex broadcast pickups—was dimly lit and crammed with technicians and production people
, and what with voices that seemed to have no point of origin within the room issuing from various loudspeakers, and the urgent voices of people present, the place seemed to us to be in a tumult. The focus of attention was a semicircular array of monitoring screens, large and small, before which a row of technicians and assistant directors, some wearing headsets with microphones, sat at a long and elaborate control panel, while another row of network men, including Fetter, Friendly, and Green, were squeezed in behind the control-panel men in a space about a quarter the size of that behind the average lunch counter. The small monitoring screens were showing scenes being fed in from various parts of the country—one showed the Statue of Liberty; another showed the big dome of the A.T.&T. Telstar transmitting and receiving equipment at Andover, Maine; another was focussed on the carved face of George Washington at Mount Rushmore; yet another showed an incessantly zooming-in and zooming-out shot of the Capitol’s dome in Washington—and as the scheduled time for each one arrived, it appeared on a large monitoring screen labelled “Program.” We found the whole effect bewildering.
“Stand by, El Paso! Stand by!” Sid Smith, the director of the program, who sat at the center of the control panel, was saying as we found a niche in a wall to one side of the room.
In a few moments, after a shot from El Paso, we heard a cry, “Washington, you’re on!” and Chet Huntley’s image appeared on the big “Program” screen.
“Switch to Chicago!” said someone at the control panel. A shot of the Cubs-Phillies game at Wrigley Field leaped on. “You should be giving the baseball sound,” the same man said sharply.
The sound of the ballpark came on. “Ladees and gennelmen,” a voice called out from the ballpark, “we’ve just been informed that this baseball game is being shown on television to Europe by Telstar. Let’s give all the baseball fans in Europe a big hello from Chicago.” This being only the rehearsal, the voice wasn’t carried over the ballpark loudspeaker, and consequently there was no big—or any—hello from the crowd.
“Hurray!” someone at the control panel said, perfunctorily, to indicate the lapse.
Next came a tape of a Presidential press conference, in lieu of the one that was to follow, at air time.
“Go, Canaveral!” Smith cried, and John Glenn came on, talking about space exploration.
“Stand by, St. Lawrence! Switch!” Smith said after a few minutes. The St. Lawrence River appeared on the screen.
“Stand by, Stratford!” Smith said. A scene from Macbeth, played at the Festival Theatre, in Stratford, Ontario, came on.
“Come in, Seattle!” said Smith. Various shots of the World’s Fair at Seattle appeared, including one of a boy eating a large Danish waffle.
Half the people in the control room began chanting a countdown together—from ten to one. What they were counting down was a cue to a series of live shots at Mount Rushmore.
“Stand by for ‘Mighty Fortress’!” someone called as three hundred and twelve members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir came on the screen, accompanied by an audio-tape of the choir singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
Friendly got into a discussion with one of the production people, a young man named David Buksbaum, about communications with Mount Rushmore. “We’ve got to cue them on ‘Mighty Fortress’ well ahead of time,” he said.
Howard K. Smith came onscreen, and talked about the United Nations and the late Dag Hammarskjöld.
“Five! Four! Three! Two! One!” a chorus in the control room cried.
“And cue,” the director said. “Dissolve to the Golden Gate! Dissolve to Canada! Dissolve Seattle! Dissolve Canaveral! Dissolve Statue of Liberty! Dissolve Mount Rushmore! Dissolve Niagara Falls! Dissolve U.N.!”
Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, onscreen, began an ad-lib discussion of the still pictures of the preceding program as they would be received in Europe and radiophotographed back here for inspection. Friendly reached over the shoulder of a technician at the control panel, picked up a microphone, and, standing in for the chief announcer at the European Broadcasting Union control center, in Brussels, said into it, “This is Mr. Dimbleby, in Brussels. We hope you have been receiving our still pictures of your program satisfactorily.”
“We did indeed, Mr. Dimbleby,” Cronkite said.
“Thank you very much. Good night, Chet. Good night, Walter,” Friendly said. He turned again to Buksbaum. “We’ve got to cue the choir on ‘Mighty Fortress’ well ahead of time.”
The program moved to what the director referred to as the pre-show section, in which the American program would make contact with Brussels. At the moment, the communication was only aural.
“We’re ready,” a metallic voice, with a British accent, said over a small loudspeaker in the control room.
Walter Cronkite’s image appeared on the screen. “Hello, Brussels,” Cronkite said.
A telephone rang at the control panel. Buksbaum answered it. “It’s Bill Monroe, in Washington,” he told Friendly. “He says that Pierre Salinger wants to know when we intend coming in on the press conference.”
“It depends on the orbit. We don’t have a time yet,” Friendly said.
The metallic voice said, over the loudspeaker, “I am speaking on the microphone that Richard Dimbleby [the B.B.C. announcer] will be using. Dimbleby says, ‘Yes, I have the picture. Go, America, go.’ As soon as he says, ‘Go, America, go—’ ”
“Then we wipe to full screen,” Cronkite said.
“It’s starting to rain at Rushmore,” the director announced.
“Chet, if the choir moves indoors, you’ll have to ad-lib your way through,” Friendly said.
A shot of a couple of buffalo grazing in the distance flashed onto the screen.
We asked Buksbaum where the shot originated.
“Custer State Park, in South Dakota. I went out West to work on that buffalo spot, among other things, but I had to come back here again,” Buksbaum replied. “They have three hundred of them out on the range. They’re being rounded up right now. At air time, we’ll get them to run onscreen on cue.”
Buksbaum turned to a production man nearby. “Three hundred buffalo,” Buksbaum said. “I guaranteed that I’d deliver them, and I guarantee that you’ll see them. Every nickel’s worth.”
· · ·
Meanwhile, back at A.T.& T. headquarters, at 195 Broadway, we had a little talk with Mr. J. W. Cook, an executive vice-president who was minding the twenty-six-story building (1914), with its spacious, cool, marble-columned halls, bronze-inlaid marble floors, marble drinking fountains, marble friezes of winged cherubs over elevators operated by handsome and unmistakably human girls—the whole beautiful works carrying a modest slogan in its ground-floor windows: “Long Distance Telephone Conquers Time and Space.”
“Pretty good building we’ve got here. Hard to replace,” said Mr. Cook, who wore a fine sunburn and a neat blue suit. “We might gussy it up a bit—the lighting is a little old-fashioned—by cleaning the porcelain shades, but I wouldn’t change anything in our surroundings. They’re highly economical. They’re chock-full of character. We overlook the graveyards of St. Paul’s and Trinity. This place has substance. Space is sort of exotic. Telstar is a first. A great thrill. But our basic business is still the telephone call.”
“Then what’s Telstar?” we asked.
“Another string to our bow,” Mr. Cook said. “We’re a service business. The Princess telephone furnishes a service. Automatic dialling furnishes a service. Telstar gives us another way to make your telephone call. There’s lots more going on around here besides that bird up there. The guidance system of the anti-missile missile—that’s ours, too. Engineering, Marketing, Testing—all our departments are constantly working on new services. Our marketing people might be thinking of using Telstar for high-speed data machines. Machines talk to machines these days. Say you’re a large corporation. You have branches in Italy, France, Belgium, West Germany, Spain, and you like to keep your finger on the pulse. Costs. Investments. Telst
ar may be useful in keeping your machines in touch with their machines. Like that!” Mr. Cook snapped his fingers. “Telstar supplements our use of cables for transoceanic telephone calls. Once you get a world system operating, with a lot of the birds up there going around, Brazil could use Telstar to call North Africa. Right now, however, the point is we made our calculations, declared ourselves, and brought it off. The whole ball of wax cost between forty-five and fifty million dollars.”
“Any shareholders complain about spending all that money?” we asked.
“Not a one,” Mr. Cook said. “I’ve owned a few shares myself for many years, and I go along with the way most of the shareholders feel—proud. I don’t regard Telstar as just another supplementary piece of equipment—a new button to shut off the telephone with, or those chimes that ring in your house instead of an ordinary telephone bell, or the Rapidial. You can’t beat the plain telephone, but you don’t make character going downhill; you make character going uphill. Down here”—Mr. Cook pushed the bar on a Rapidial on his desk, and the machine (which dials numbers for you) whirred around, making do-it-itself noises—“I get a chance to fool with a lot of the different gadgets we come out with. Up there”—he waved both hands at Telstar—“you lose a large share of your collective control. Once you put it up there, you can never get it back.”
“Which would you choose,” we asked, “if you had to choose?”
“I beg the question,” Mr. Cook said.
“Now,” said a young assistant assigned to us by Mr. Cook, “we’ll just look in on the chairman of the board.”
The 60s Page 41
