Morse Code in Tubular Bells (2021)
madpsy.uk
madpsy.uk
"If anybody should think this way tiresome, let him, instead of the balls, suspend a range of bells from the roof, equal in number to the letters the alphabet, gradually decreasing in size from the bell A to Z; and from the horizontal wires let there be another set reaching to the several bells; from the horizontal wire A to the bell A, another from the horizontal wire B to the bell B, etc. Then let him who begins the discourse bring the wires in contact with the barrel, as before; and the electric spark, breaking on bells of different size, will inform his correspondent by the sound what wires have been touched: and thus, by some practice, they may come to understand the language of the chimes in whole words, without being put to the trouble of noting down every letter."
The first documented successful message by wire was 20 years later although there was no independent observer. It took about 55 years from the time of this article until one was publicly demonstrated.
Many people claimed they were working on it, such as in this 1773 love letter by Genevan Physician named Louis Odier:
"I shall amuse you, perhaps, in telling you that I have in my head certain experiments by which to enter into conversation with the emperor of Mogol, or of China, the English, the French, or any other people of Europe, in a way that, without inconveniencing yourself, you may intercommunicate all that you wish, at a distance of four or five thousand leagues in less than half an hour! Will that suffice you for glory. There is nothing more real. Whatever be the course of those experiments, they must necessarily lead to some grand discovery; but I have not the courage to undertake them this winter."
Communication at a distance was "time machine"/"fountain of youth" technology up until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_alphabet was a mystical occult version from the 1600s.
I wrote some articles on this stuff, had a short-lived podcast. Still, to this day, the lowest traffic writing and production I've ever done, by at least 2 orders of magnitude, probably 3.
Nobody is interested in it.
It wasn't popular for the same reason you don't see people reading some doctoral thesis at the coffee shop.
Jean-Antoine Nollet's 200 monk experiment, Benjamin Franklin's electrified wine goblins for party-goers, Stephen Gray's flying boy or the Flamsteed Newton debate with the bonfires of the royal observatory star maps that disagreed with Newton's celestial models (Historia Coelestis Britannica)... The reason they aren't well known is because nobody is interested in knowing them.
Personally I'd watch a whole Netflix series, say, on Turgot making his isometric map of Paris and John Rocque's copy of the idea for London but I've found out how absurdly unusual that is. People were able to just wander through the nobility's homes by order of the king and into their gardens taking measurements and recording things like trees and sculptures. Methods of land survey, still in use today, were developed to construct this map of 1730s Paris
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment
Many surveying expeditions had cartographical errors attempting to draw straight lines across vast distances due to this phenomena when they were passing the various because of their gravitational pull. These surveys had to be done at night because they relied on the stars to guide them and used the gravity of the perpendicular plumb to go straight. The pull of the mountains were not accounted for.
This has a name https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_deflection
It also disproved Hollow Earth theory, which at the time had a number of notable supporters, such as Edmond Halley, who to go back, was a friend of Newton's and plausibly copied Flamsteed's work on the famous comet.
Flamsteed was really protective and didn't like Halley so it's hard to suss out the reality. He made the calculations predicting the return but viewed them as property of the observatory being made during his employment there. Haley, who had access to the work, on the other hand, publicized his calculations and was not protective. Did he independently derive them? Haley claims he didn't know about the work, Flamsteed says otherwise. Who knows? +1 for open access I guess
You'd have to do a lot of convincing to bring me back into the fold on making more of these. It was like 100 hours of work per episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Mothers_Do_%27Ave_%27Em#T...
What the Wikipedia page doesn't mention this, but I read long ago that the composer of the tune received only a small one-time payment for it and no royalties, despite the popularity of the show.
Other famous themes he created: Are You Being Served?; Last of the Summer Wine; The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin; To the Manor Born; Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister); Blankety Blank; and The Generation Game. See his Wikipedia page for the full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Hazlehurst
AFAIK, the main reason that he received no royalties is because BBC programmes generated no income. The BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, generates revenue through selling and licensing content, but that was created in the 1990s. I don't know whether the royalties situation has changed, but I doubt it.
So Hazlehurst wasn't well paid, nor were the recordings well funded. This is another great example of constraints triggering innovation: the theme for Are You Being Served? memorably uses the sounds of coins and cash registers, which was Hazlehurst's solution to not being able to afford proper percussion.
If you have two spare minutes now, watch Matt Berry's lovely tribute to Ronnie Hazlehurst, from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui1rdhQljU
And for your convenience, a Morse code chart for those who wish to follow along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:Interna...
Given his musical sound in general and the sound of the rest of the album, it is not something I ever would have thought twice about if I heard it without prompting. Neat story.
VVV GBR GBR GBR [BT] TL5 T [BT] VVV VVV VVV ...
VVV is often sent when testing your equipment, and I think that's what's happening here.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Mike_oldfield...
The Telecaster guitar and bass used would be my #1 culprit on introducing noise since pickups are virtually antennas. Mike Oldfield even had added an extra high gain single coil BL pickup to his '66 Tele. If you don't gain stage or ground properly the mics that were used for the acoustic instruments, they could have also captured RF noise easily, even if they had a heavy metal housing that acted like shielding. Some Farfisa organs are also noticeable noisy, although I don't know about their EMI or how banged up was the one used for the album that belonged to David Bedford. The electric piano used was a Rhodes, and those were built like a tank. Finally the tracks were overdubbed over and over. This would in all likelihood have attenuated both the audio and noise, but using a mixer or a tape that is susceptible to interference means that you have more chances of capturing noise at some point in the recording. I guess we will never know for sure.
Anyway, it adds to the mystique of the record.
My college has an FM radio station, and the broadcast antenna is (or was) on the roof of one of the dorms. Any sort of speaker would play the station faintly. A block away, in the engineering classrooms, we could easily see the station's waveform on our oscilliscopes probing wall power, just superimposed on the 60 Hz sine wave.
Cool to see amateur radio and fldigi in a Hacker News article.
Aren't music CDs already compressed using lossy compression? A FLAC copy of that uncompressed CD would be one generation away from the original, whereas an MP3 of the rip would be two generation removed from the original (i.e. still lossy, only more so)?
However I think compact disc audio is allowed to suffer some degradation from errors.
It takes well over 700 MB to store 70 minutes of CD audio. When the same disc is used for data, which has to be reliable, the capacity drops to 650 MB.
I think that's referenced in the 1983 Black Sabbath song "Trashed".
It really was a meeting
The bottle took a beating
The ladies of The Manor <---
Watched me climb into my car and
I was going down the track about a hundred and five
They had the stop-watch rolling
I had the headlights blazing I was really alive
And yet my mind was blowing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Again_(Black_Sabbath_albu...
I was listening to this decades ago, and saw the note on the cover that the album was recorded at The Manor, so I put that together.
Oldfield was locked into a predatory Virgin Records contract written by Richard Branson (Tubular Bells was the first ever Virgin Records release) and he was increasingly irritated that Virgin was not promoting his albums.
He hid a message in Amarok and offered £1000 of his own money to anyone who could find it. The message is "FUCK OFF RB" in morse code.
Apparently, no-one claimed the prize.
I used to live near someone with a CB radio, and the pitch of one of my synths would go up by a semitone when they were transmitting.
The lady who lived upstairs in the building owned an electric organ. She usually played it during the day, but on weekends she'd sometimes fire it up to play long and loud ... long after our baby had gone to sleep.
One day I noticed that keying the transmitter would cause the organ to make a sound like a pachyderm in agony. Turned out to be the solution to the loud weekend-concert baby-waking problem.
> The decoded morse is actually slightly wrong – rather than ‘MVV’ at the start it should be ‘VVV’ but that’s down to FLDigi not being 100% accurate. Anyone who knows morse can confirm what you actually hear is ‘VVV GBR’.