The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Jon says: ‘If you wanted to show a picture, let’s say, of a hammer – just showing a picture of a hammer against a white background or a grey background with nothing else in the picture is the clearest way to show a picture of a hammer, but it doesn’t show you what it’s used for. So maybe you want a picture of a man holding a hammer, but then maybe you want a picture of a man holding a hammer actually nailing something. Then you want to see the actual building, so you see the context of what he’s nailing. And then you want to show that there are other people working there as well. So you start looking for your picture of a hammer and it starts getting more and more complicated. Now there’s so much in the picture that you don’t even notice the hammer and it’s just a confusing bunch of objects. So I was looking for the ideal picture that had a lot of information in it but where the clarity of the presentation was also there.

  ‘The other thing I started to do was to try to build in recurrent motifs. In other words, there were certain things that people had said are so important. You want to make sure that they get it and the best way to do that is to say it more than once. So an example might be the human hand. I really wanted to make sure that there were lots of pictures of hands doing all the things that hands can do. Similarly if there were other objects that could appear in different contexts in different pictures. Then if one picture wasn’t understood, the fact that another one was could let them go back to the first one and say: “Okay, now I see. This makes a little more sense.” So I was looking for recurrent images that would help link a story, for example in the sequence of how we eat. There’s a picture of a fish in the water, then fishing nets, then a number of fish on a grill slowly blackening as they cooked. The fact that you saw the fish in its natural habitat, you saw the means of catching it, you saw it on the grill20 – helped make that story clear. Had it been a fish, and then he was cooking lamb chops, you wouldn’t have had that connection.’

  As they continued to whittle down the picture sequence, they built a Rube Goldberg21 rig in their workroom so that they could check the overall look and final resolution of the video-converted photographs. Each candidate picture would be in the format of a slide – either they were supplied as a slide or, if not, HAIC photographer Herman Eckelmann would create a new slide. They would project that slide onto an A3 piece of paper that was taped to the wall and then, using a video camera mounted on a tripod, they would video the image being projected on the wall, and see how it looked on a tiny television screen.

  In the film version of this story, now would be the perfect moment for a montage. Let’s have some piano-led music, not unlike the jolly theme tune from Murder She Wrote. Let’s picture Jon, dark hair framing his face, brow furrowed in concentration. Jon looks up at a wall calendar. There’s the June deadline, and we see the days as they’re crossed off in red magic marker. Wendy walks in, gives a megawatt smile, adds to the teetering pile of books. Frank throws him a National Geographic with a post-it note attached. Jon sighs, but opens it up. Now Wendy’s seated at the same desk, Jon standing behind her and reading Gem Cutting. The clock shows 9a.m., 5p.m., 11p.m. Then Jon is seated back at the desk, rubbing his eyes. He cuts out another photo and adds to the pile. We see Wendy, Shirley, Amahl Shakhashiri (Frank’s assistant), Jon and Frank all talking animatedly on the phone. More subjects are ticked off the wall chart. Then the music fades, and we rejoin Jon, a mug of coffee in hand, staring at the wall. The camera moves closer to show us what he’s looking at. It’s the wall chart. The camera moves closer still. We see that lots of the subjects now have ticks next to them, but we notice that a couple do not. We read two that don’t: ‘Waterhole’ and ‘Eating’.

  ***

  The only animal sequence photo they had in mind before they started looking, was animals gathered at a waterhole. This was an idea Frank had right back at the beginning – a single photograph that would show a range of species at a single point, drinking. The scene would emphasise the importance of water to life here, and would show several non-human species co-existing. There was also an obscure pun built in to the waterhole picture, an in-joke for people who shared Frank’s specialisations and interests. You see, radio astronomers had found that a certain portion of the radio spectrum seemed to be the quietest and most effective in terms of transmission through planetary atmospheres and interstellar space. This band of frequencies had been dubbed the ‘waterhole’ as they are sandwiched between the frequencies of the emission of hydrogen at one end and hydroxyl radical at the other – which combine to make water. So, just as animals gather at the waterhole, intelligent beings might meet at the ‘waterhole’ region in the radio spectrum.

  The best, indeed the only, scene at a waterhole that the team were able to find appeared in a brochure published by the South African Tourist Board. They gave their permission easily and willingly. Jon writes that back in 1977, as South Africa was still a pariah state for its institutional racism, they did wonder if it was sufficient reason to eliminate the photograph from consideration. But with no alternative coming to the fore, they decided to include it.

  The team also wanted something that clearly illustrated the way humans eat and drink. There are eight images in the sequence that together illustrate food, agriculture and eating. Image #75, for example, is a National Geographic shot of three enormous harvesters rumbling over a cotton field. Then comes image #76, ‘the Grape Picker’, captured by influential Australian photographer David Moore. ‘Grape Picker’ isn’t Moore’s most interesting or aesthetically pleasing work, but it does show a human figure, his forearm covered in sweat and mud, clearly pulling a vine of grapes towards his face and pressing them to his mouth. This is followed in the sequence by a picture of a woman in a supermarket. She is also eating grapes, standing in front of a banked wall of fruit and vegetables. The idea was to connect these two images, both showing humans eating grapes, and to illustrate that not all humans were hunters, gatherers or farmers – that we also buy our food from markets.

  The woman is actually Wendy. It was Frank’s idea that they should have some kind of image of a market, so rather than spend more time looking for a picture, five of them – Frank, photographer Herman Eckelmann, Wendy, Jon and Amahl – trooped down to the produce counter at the Grand Union Supermarket, Cayuga Mall, Ithaca. Jon was kind enough to show me one of the also-ran photographs from this particular session. In it we see Amahl, wearing a white blouse and black skirt, her long dark hair loose around her shoulders. She’s standing sideways to the camera, handing a shrink-wrapped pack of grapes to Jon, who’s sporting a light, floral-print short-sleeved shirt tucked into what look like grey-blue jeans.

  The photograph has various problems. As the grapes are in a shrink-wrapped box, you can’t really see what they are. And from the perspective of a life form unfamiliar with grapes, it’s not at all clear what the two human figures are doing. They’re both looking at each other, with slightly bemused expressions, holding this pack of grapes aloft like some rare, valuable, god-like or possibly dangerous item. You can certainly see why this didn’t make it aboard Voyager. It doesn’t answer any questions at all, it only poses more of them. What on earth are they doing? Is this some kind of ceremony?

  The final image that was chosen, of Wendy eating a grape, is much better. She is clearly eating a grape, and she is clearly standing in a place where other foodstuffs seem to be available. Wendy also looks slightly uncomfortable, but that may have been because of the odd looks their escapades were provoking. According to the account in Murmurs, this strange band – posing and being photographed with food, then returning the food to the shelves – was attracting lots of attention, including from the store manager, who angrily enquired what the hell was going on. Frank did the talking, explaining that there was nothing to see here; they were just taking a photograph of a woman eating a grape so they could send the photograph to the stars in a metal record.

  The session ended. They returned most of the food to the shelves, paid for the grapes and returned to Cornel
l.

  While man-eating-grape-from-vine (#76) and woman-eating-grape-from-supermarket (#77) both showed humans pressing something small and round to their open mouths, it was felt neither properly illustrated the whole story of how we eat and drink. You might think finding an image of humans consuming food and drink would be simple, but nothing seemed to unambiguously communicate the mechanics of human consumption. The only other image in the running was Chinese dinner party (#81). This unremarkable shot was taken from a book called Chinese Cooking, from the Time-Life ‘Foods of the World’ series, chosen because it illustrates how eating is often a social, group activity. And yet even with this example, it’s still hard to be sure exactly what’s going on. To us humans it’s plainly a gathering around a table stacked with food, but to an alien audience, it’s not so obvious. For a start, only one person in the photograph is clearly raising something to their mouth, whereas the rest are smiling, talking or chewing.

  Amahl Shakhashiri suggested they stage their own image. They briefly discussed a plan to illustrate drinking with three pictures: #1 with a person looking ‘unhappy’, then #2 holding a glass with water to their mouth, then #3 the glass down, half-full, and a person with a smile on their face. Instead Amahl envisaged one efficient photograph showing three people, one licking, one biting, one drinking. Graduate student George Helou made a suggestion that a person holding a pitcher full of water, and pouring water into their mouth, would tell the story more clearly than a glass of water. ‘Moreover, you could estimate something about gravity by measuring the arc of water,’ he says.

  George grew up in Lebanon and attended college at the American University of Beirut, before leaving for the US. He had been advised by Frank Drake for a couple of years and had taken courses with Carl. He was in his early twenties, and intent on advancing through his graduate studies quick sharp. He told me: ‘I’d always been interested in SETI and authored with Frank an important paper on “optimal frequencies to use in SETI”. [I was ] also very interested in the science of planetary exploration. So when this team was being assembled by Frank and Carl it was natural that I’d be involved, even though I can’t recall exactly how it started … This Record exercise was a bit of a distraction from that pursuit, which was about taking my exams and getting started on a thesis, so I tried to limit the time spent on it.’

  They gathered in the studio of staff photographer Herman Eckelmann. Amahl took the lead, while Herman stood behind the camera. The three actors were Wendy Gradison, Val Boriakoff and George Helou.

  The first photograph didn’t turn out too well. The idea was to show someone licking ice cream, to show the human tongue at work, as tongues didn’t appear anywhere else in the picture sequence. And while you can see the cone of chocolate ice cream in Wendy’s hand, you simply can’t see her tongue clearly enough.

  Val, dressed in a grey round-necked tank top over a pale green shirt, had been handed a tuna sandwich in white bread. According to Jon, Val hated tuna, which certainly comes across in the first attempt – he is practically scowling at the camera as he bites down. But his face wasn’t the problem; the angle and colour of the sandwich meant you couldn’t clearly see the bite at all. Meanwhile, George can be seen pouring water into his open mouth from an opaque earthenware jug, but when they came to develop the photograph, they felt that the water could be interpreted as some kind of solid silvery pipe. Remember, although the final image (which you can see at JPL’s online Voyager archive) is in colour, within the record this would be one of the black-and-white, low-resolution images, meaning some of the finer details would be harder to discern. They tried again.

  By the time of the final shot, Val is dressed in a simple white shirt, George has on a fetching blue, red and white striped number, and Wendy this time is shown perfectly side on, clearly licking the tip of the chocolate22 ice cream with outstretched tongue. Val’s sandwich is now on dark rye toast, much more discernible in black and white. And before the photograph was taken, he took a nice clean bite out of the opposite side of the sandwich so that the photograph efficiently captures both the event of his biting down on one side of the sandwich as well as the after-effects of his biting down on the far side of the sandwich. George meanwhile is now grasping a clear glass jug,23 so while you still have the silvery pipe problem, you can clearly see that the clear jug is full of a liquid, that seems to be being poured directly into his open mouth.

  It still took some time to get it right. George had to keep pouring water into his mouth while Herman got the lighting, white balance and focus all right. ‘This type of pitcher is ubiquitous in Lebanon, and drinking that way was second nature to me,’ says George. Nevertheless, ask George how much water he had to drink before the photo was done and he’ll tell you: ‘A lot.’

  Today George hangs with the infrared posse. Since the early 1980s he has been involved with NASA and European Space Agency infrared astronomy missions that include the still-active Spitzer Space Telescope.24 Indeed in 2017, right around the time I was asking him questions about water being pitched into his open mouth four decades earlier, he was helping spread the word about Spitzer’s ‘Trappist-1’ discovery – the first known system with seven (yes, seven) Earth-size planets all around a single star, and including three in so-called ‘goldilocks’ orbit, meaning they could have conditions right for life. As this system is around a dwarf star only 39.5 light years from the Sun (located in constellation Aquarius), it was heralded as a major step forwards in the search for alien life.

  So there you have it: George’s fetching shirt, Val’s distinctive bite and Wendy’s tongue, together forever. Wendy says: ‘I believe that my tongue is immortalised in space because I was available and sitting at my desk the day of the photo shoot. Val, George and I were there because three people were needed on short notice. It was pretty funny at the time. Speed, convenience and ease of access were themes for both photos of me. The other photo, eating grapes in a grocery store to set context juxtaposed against the “Man with Grapes” photo was similar. I was available. Understanding, with my non-scientific background, the path and importance of the Voyagers, I always pinch myself that I was able to be a part (albeit small) of this project, and am amused and also awed that there exists a representation of me and my tongue in the cosmos, forever. Although I am CEO of a multi-million-dollar behavioural healthcare company, I still feel having been involved, and being out there in space, is the coolest entry on my résumé.’

  George also told me: ‘Even then, I understood the record was an opportunity for us humans to look at ourselves and ask what’s essential about humanity. Today that assessment hasn’t changed. Personally, I feel incredibly lucky to have been at the right place and right time to participate in this remarkable exercise of putting together the record, as an intellectual exercise.’ And in his acknowledgements in Murmurs, Frank Drake writes that Val, who passed away in 1999, felt his reward for all the help he gave to the Voyager project was being in that picture.

  The man who took this photograph, and many others on the record, was Herman Eckelmann. Born in Hoboken in 1925, Eck was a Second World War veteran who had served aboard the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was married, had a daughter and four sons, and alongside his Cornell work as an electrical engineering research associate and photographer, he was a pastor, founding the Faith Bible Church in Ithaca in 1960. In his acknowledgements Frank pours out gratitude, describing Eck working into the small hours in his dark room, cancelling family arrangements to keep working, taking new original photographs when demanded, and endlessly creating and recreating slide-format photographs for the final sequence. ‘Occasionally he had a quick sandwich.’ And in 2018 Amahl described Eck as ‘indispensable’, a go-to photographer, ready to help with close-to-zero notice. Eck passed away in 2001.

  ***

  Meanwhile, Carl was still wrestling with the Outer Space Committee’s ingenious little catch-22. Yes, they could agree to being recorded saying ‘hello’, only after they’d had a meeting about bei
ng asked to say ‘hello’, and having agreed to their saying ‘hello’, they would say ‘hello’ on a date that would be too late to be recorded saying ‘hello’.

  Carl again phoned the State Department. Its prime concern was that if they helped Carl in his ambition and did bully some delegates to offer up greetings for the record, they needed guarantees that the delegates’ messages would be used. This was all getting very sticky. Carl simply could not make such a guarantee. The very project itself was without guarantee. NASA had the right to refuse the record at the last moment if they found it to be substandard, embarrassing or too full of vulvas. Plus, even if the record was a certainty, Carl would not have wanted to make promises at this stage. There were still too many unknowns. The record had not yet been mixed, the soundscapes not fully cut, the images were not yet encoded. They simply did not know how much editing would be required.

  According to Willian Poundstone’s Sagan biography, Carl called NASA yet again, and this time found someone useful – a chap called Arnold Frutkin25 who seemed to know who to talk to at both the State Department and the UN to get the ball rolling. It was Frutkin who persuaded the State Department to take a leap of faith, and it was he who contacted the then-UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Hang on. That name sounds familiar…

  Notes

  1 One of the first commercially successful electronic music LPs.