“We have no specifications for Gilbreth’s apparatus, but from the photographs shown in Fig. 25, it is obvious that his early apparatus embodied a tuning fork as the interruptor of the electric supply. The bottom photograph shows an apparatus embodying a disc commutator. As the disc revolved, each contact engaged a stationary contact finger connected to a resistance, so arranged that first four, then three, and then two contacts were linked, the circuit being broken completely on the last contact, making the light progressively dimmer, until it went out altogether.
“The disc had two series of these contacts, and revolved at five, ten, or fifteen revolutions per second, by means of a pair of stepped pulleys, driven by a belt from an electric motor. It gave lights blinking at 10, 20 or 30 times per second.
“This apparatus was noisy and cumbersome, but its chief disadvantage was that because it functioned by delaying the extinguishing of the lamps, it was only possible to increase the speed of the flashes at the expense of the intensity of the light. This caused difficulty in photographing anything but the very shortest cycle, except in almost total darkness.
“Also, because of the interruption of the current, the intensity of the light must always fall below the maximum for the same lamp on uninterrupted current, since the disc was liable to stop at a point where the maximum current could reach the lamps. It was therefore unsafe to use more than the nominal amount of current recommended for the lamp employed.”
Source: The Purpose & Practice of Motion Study by Anne G. Shaw (Manchester & London, 1960: Columbine Press) pages 93-96
Signals of the Beyazit Tower, Istanbul
From Bruce Sterling
“When the firefighters watching out for fires from Beyazit Tower in the old days saw flames, they gave the news in their own cryptic jargon: “’Congratulations, you’re a father!’ “’Is it a girl or a boy?’ “If the fire was on the other side of the Golden Horn, in Galata, Uskudar, or the other districts along the Bosphorus, the answer was ‘a girl!’, but if it was on the western side of the inlet in Istanbul proper the answer was ‘a boy!’
“Two earlier timber fire towers were themselves swallowed up by flames, but the present Beyazit Tower, made of stone, has survived since 1828. Standing in the midst of the busy center of the old quarter of Istanbul, it is still used as a fire tower today as in the past. The tower is 85 meters high and has a total of 256 wooden steps.
“Tower is used to watch out for fires at. night. Information about fires at all times of day is relayed here via radio. Air pollution can seriously reduce visibility, making the job of watching difficult at times.
“In the past, if a fire was spotted in the districts westwards of the Golden Horn us far as Yesilkoy, the signal was two baskets hung on either side of the tower; if the fire was in Beyoglu or along the Bosphorus, one basket was hung on one side and two on the other; and for the districts on the other side of the Bosphorus one basket was hung on either side. This custom continued until 1934.
“Today, the tower is also used to give a weather forecast for the following day. A green light means rain, a red light snow, a yellow light fog, and a blue light sunshine.
“At night, between 04.45 and 06.00 when the Ataturk and Galata bridges are closed to road traffic to let ships in and out of the Golden Horn, the ships are guided by lights on Beyazit Tower. A green light means that ships in the Golden Horn can sail into the Marmara Sea, and a red light that ships in the Marmara Sea can sail into the Golden Horn. Two red lights mean that the bridges are closed to shipping.
“Today, special permission is needed for those not on duty at the tower to enter, due to the dangerous condition of the wooden staircase.” “
Source: article by Deniz Kaya
Information Tech of Ancient Athenian democracy, Part One: Post-it Notes of 500BC
From Julian Dibbell
If any of you are on your way to or through Greece in the near future, may I suggest you make a beeline for the Agora Museum, on the site of the excavated ancient Agora, the original Athenian marketplace and civic center, where it all went down, birth-of-Western-Civilization-wise, in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.?
The museum is, I assure you, a Dead Media treasure trove. Yes, let the package tours deliver their waves upon waves of sweat-drenched, awe-struck retirees unto the easy wonders of the sacred Acropolis; we Necronauts are made of more discriminating stuff.
Many were the baffled Northern European backpackers I saw walk past the Agora Museum’s rows and rows of graffiti-encrusted potsherds (broken bits of ceramic on which the Athenians scratched random notes to themselves and others), struggling to grasp why good foundation-dollars had been squandered on collecting and presenting so arrant a pile of junk.
But who among us could stand before that same pile and not shiver with the awareness that we had stumbled upon the ancient precursor of the Post-it Note™?
I for one got goose bumps. For me, however, the greatest thrill, and here I speak sincerely, was the museum’s ample collection of inventions devoted to the efficient daily management of one of the ancient world’s most complicated social entities: Athenian democracy.
I suppose this has been written about elsewhere, but it hadn’t really occurred to me before how novel, and in many ways still historically unique, a form of social organization Athens came up with.
This was participatory democracy on a large scale and a broad base: every citizen (i.e., every free adult male) was a member of the Assembly that debated and voted on all matters of policy; every citizen could be expected at some point in his life to be called up for a year of service on the Council of 500 that drew up the measures the Assembly voted on; juries were made up of 200 citizens at a time; and prosecutors were pretty much anybody who felt exercised enough to bring suit on behalf of the People.
Qualities of leadership were of course admired and rewarded, but in general, random selection seemed to play as much of a role in filling civic positions as election did.
The implication being, I guess, that the Athenians felt their system had enough checks, balances, and redundancy built into it to overcome the failings or excessive strivings of any single participant.
For perhaps the first time in history, in other words, the political was in principle no longer the personal. The notion of the abstract citizen was born, and a momentous birth it was, full of weighty implications for the philosophy of politics in general and for the history of the modern, post-Enlightenment state in particular.
But if you didn’t learn all that back in school, I can’t help you now. Our interest here is rather in the practical problems this new conception of politics posed for the Athenians, and in the technological solutions they came up with.
In engineering terms, the overarching problem the Athenians were faced with was not a unique one. It was a problem as old, in fact, as the construction of the ancient Mesopotamian irrigation system (one of the world’s first great engineering projects) and as modern as the design of integrated circuitry: it was a problem of flow.
Unlike the more autocratic forms of government that had been the hallmark of civilization hitherto, Athenian democracy depended for its legitimacy on a constant, high-volume circulation of individuals in and out of public offices. It was this channeled flow that made the system both impersonal and representative.
Without the static structure of the offices to shape the flow, after all, the people’s will would have been no more coherent than a mob’s. Without the bodies of the entire citizenry coursing through it, on the other hand, the political structure would have been no more than a bureaucracy.
The Athenians had to keep those bodies flowing smoothly, then, and that was largely a matter of keeping track of who belonged where and when. They also had to maintain a smooth and dependable flow of the information generated by those bodies, the votes, the decrees, the endless speechifying.
They had, in short, to do a lot of stuff that modern information technology would have helped
them tremendously to do, and nonetheless they managed pretty well, with the materials at hand, to build the tools they needed to make their system work. Those tools, the info tech of ancient Athenian democracy, are the subject of the following Notes. I present them now without further ado.
Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Info Tech of Ancient Athenian democracy, Part Two: The kleroterion randomiser
From Julian Dibbell
The flow of bodies through the Athenian political system was essentially a circuit, officeholders, jurors, litigants, etc. were drawn up from the reservoir of citizenry, slotted into their temporary places, delivered of their votes and opinions, then returned to their private lives, where they would live by the rules and verdicts they had helped to shape, and whence they would again be inserted into the system at some future date and, like as not, in some other role.
In a sense, then, there was no beginning and no end to this process, but there are two good reasons for us to start our examination of Athenian political technology at the phase in which citizens were selected for office: one, because it’s more or less logical to start there, and two, because I cannot wait to tell you about the gadget the Athenians invented to facilitate that phase. Simply put, the “kleroterion,” or allotment machine, is the crown jewel of the Agora Museum’s collection.
What survives for display is just a fragment of one of the original devices, a roughly two-by-three-foot slab of rock with a curious grid of deep, thin slots gouged into it, but once you grasp the design of the whole, even this poor remnant becomes suffused with a kind of Flintstonian majesty.
As originally constructed, kleroteria were tall rectangular stones about as tall and wide as a grown person, and about half a foot thick.
Covering the face of the stone was a rectangular matrix of what looked like short horizontal lines and were in fact deep slots carved into the rock. The slots were arranged neatly in rows and columns, usually 50 rows down and typically 5 or in some cases 11 columns across.
Along the left side of the grid a tube (of metal? some sort of reed? my sources don’t say) was attached to the stone, running from the top to near the bottom of the slab. At the top of the tube was a kind of funnel, and at the bottom was a small crank-driven device, about which more later.
Now, to understand how the kleroterion worked, and indeed how Athenian democracy in general worked, it helps to know that the citizenry was divided into ten tribes, which were in turn divided into a number of “demes.”
Citizens were born into their demes, and it was through his deme and tribe that the city tracked a citizen’s place in the political system. The tribes, for example, had the responsibility of supplying jury members, and this was a complicated job. It was complicated because the Athenians were rightly paranoid about corruption working its way into the jury system, and had therefore settled on the practice of assembling very large, randomly selected juries at the last possible minute.
This, naturally, was a recipe for royally gumming up the works, but through the miracle of bronze-age technology, as embodied in the kleroterion, the Athenians were able to efficiently go about the business of, for instance, condemning Socrates to death.
It worked like this. When a citizen sought jury duty (which paid only slightly better than modern jury duty, so don’t ask me why they sought it, but apparently they did), he went at dawn to the kleroteria maintained by his tribe and showed up with other potential jurors.
He brought with him an identity ticket made of bronze or wood, and he gave it to the presiding tribal officer (known as the archon), who then slotted it into one of the kleroterion’s columns according to the jury-section letter stamped on the ticket. The slots were filled starting at the top row and working down.
Once all the candidates’ tickets were slotted in, the archon took a quantity of small bronze balls, some colored white, the rest black, and poured them into the funnels at the tops of the kleroteria. The total number of balls was equal to the number of rows filled with tickets, and the number of white balls was a function of the number of juries that needed to be filled that day.
So: the balls fell down into the tube, at the bottom of which they were stopped by the aforementioned crank- driven device. The crank was turned, and one ball dropped out. If the ball was black, the first row of tickets was removed from the kleroterion, and their owners were dismissed. If the ball was white, the first row of tickets remained in place, and their owners were jurors for the day. Another ball was released, another row of candidates dismissed or accepted, and so on.
At last the final ball was dropped and the judicial day began. Jury-selection was not the only task to which the kleroterion was put. Some kleroteria were located in the chambers of the legislative Council House, where they were used to select committees on which representation of all the tribes was required: as many columns of slots were filled as there were tribes, and as many white balls were dropped as there were committees to be selected.
I have left out some of the complexities of these procedures, so it may be hard to appreciate the full ingenuity of the device, but trust me: it was an elegant design.
So elegant, indeed, that I am tempted to believe that the equally elegant correspondence between the workings of the kleroterion and the workings of Athenian democracy in general was more than just coincidental.
Based upon the elemental intersection of an ordered grid (the matrix of slots) and a randomized flow (the tube of balls), the kleroterion could almost be read as an abstract diagram of the Athenian political circuitry itself. But what would be the profit in reading it thus?
We would then be left to ponder endlessly the chicken-and-egg question of whether the circuitry was built according to the diagram, or the diagram drawn according to the circuitry, and we don’t exactly have all day. Our tour of the Agora Museum has just begun.
Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Info Tech of Ancient Athenian democracy, Part Three: cryptographic ID Cards
From Julian Dibbell
After the kleroterion allotment system, the second phase of an Athenian citizen’s passage through the political system was an easy one. It consisted of the citizen’s showing up for the office for which he had been selected.
And yet for Athenian society in general, this phase was fraught with the risk of inefficiency and corruption.
The citizen might not show up when needed, after all. Or he might show up at the wrong place. Or worst of all, someone not actually selected for the office might show up in his stead.
Whatever the problem, though, the Greeks had a doodad for it, and for this one, the problem of getting the right citizen in the right office at the right time, they had at least three.
ALLOTMENT TOKENS
Among the most fascinating objects in the Agora Museum, the little bits of ceramic identified as “allotment tokens” are also among the most obscurely explained by the museum literature.
Their design is clear enough. About the size of a Scrabble piece magnified by 2, these fire-hardened clay plaques differed from a Scrabble piece in shape only by virtue of the fact that one edge had an irregular, one-of- a-kind jigsaw cut to it. This edge fit neatly into the jigsawed edge of one, and only one, other token, from which
it had been cleaved before being fired.
There was writing on the tokens as well. Painted onto the original clay plaque before it was cut and fired were the name of a tribe, the name of a deme, and in the case of the existing specimens, the letters “POL”, thought to be an abbreviation for a political office.
The office and deme names were written on one side of the plaque, at opposite ends from each other, and the tribe name was written across the middle of the other side, so that when the plaque was cut in two, one half bore the deme name, the other bore the office name, and each bore a piece of the bisected tribe name, which would only become legible again when the two pieces were rejoined.
What was the point of this high-concept design? The museum literature offers only the tentative suggestion that the tokens were “a possible means of allotment.”
But it’s hard to imagine how they could be sensibly used for that purpose, especially when the magisterial kleroterion already did the job handily. The seasoned Necronaut can only conclude that, like the cyrograph used in medieval monasteries to ensure the validity of copied manuscripts and the tally sticks used by the old English Exchequer to ensure the stick-bearer’s right to valuables deposited with the king, the “allotment” tokens were a kind of premodern authentication device.
I imagine it worked about like this: After a citizen was allotted a particular office, probably a low-profile one with a high turnover, he was issued the “office” half of one of the token pairs. The other half, presumably, named the citizen’s deme and was given over to an officer of his tribe whose duty it was to hold onto these things for safe keeping.
When the citizen then went to perform the duties of his newly allotted office, he took his token with him.
The Dead Media Notebook Page 56
