Update

Just a couple of days ago my Iphone updated.

It took it a really long time to do it.

After that, the battery on the Iphone 6, which I've only had for a couple of months, started running down in a day.  It had really lasted a long time before that.  I was actually thinking that I wondered if they'd update it again soon, to fix whatever they'd done.

Well, today it updated again.

I don't know that they're related.

I do know that I really wish Apple would be more content to just let these things exist in a steady state without monkeying with them all the time.

Oh oh.

My Iphone is updating, in part so it can upload maps of "Japan Transit".

Hmmm

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud : I went to edit my big new post on the status of the election and. . . wiped it out. Ack. And then I lost a Wo...

Just before the phones went out.

Hmmm. . . . 

Broadcast Radio (for the second time).

Quite awhile back, in 2012, I posted this item on Wyoming's first commercial radio station:

Today In Wyoming's History: January 2. It must have been quiet, or at least different, before that.

Today In Wyoming's History: January 2: 1930 First commercial radio station in Wyoming begins operation. KDFN later became KTWO and is still in operation.

Hard to imagine an era with no radio. But Wyoming lacked a commercial radio station until 1930. This was a Central Wyoming station (or is, rather, it still exists). I'd guess Cheyenne could have picked up Denver stations by then, but in Central Wyoming, having an AM radio prior to 1930 must have been pointless.

Since that time, I posted the item about the use of radio by the Army in 1916, and got to rethinking this topic, amongst other communication topics.

In doing that, I went back as I thought I'd posted before on broadcast radio.

And, indeed I did, but what I didn't do is label it, so it was hard to find.  Indeed, that's been a problem with my earlier blogging. By failing to label things correctly, old posts are easy to loose.  In this particular case, not only did I loose it, but I'd forgotten as a result, that I had done a particular post.  Usually I recall my older posts and I was very surprised that I hadn't posted on this topic. Turns out that I did.  I new I had posted on some single episodes of radio shows from the glory days of radio and when I couldn't find them I did a search on the raw data section of this site and found those posts, and my first one on broadcast radio as well.  So I've edited them all and now radio as a label has tripled in frequency here.  Anyhow, at that point, I thought about axing this post, but as it was mostly already done, and as it actually adds content, I have not.  My original post is here:

Radio

When I was young, my father listed to the radio a fair amount. What I really recall about that in particular is that he'd listen to Denver's KOA, which was an all talk radio station, but not like the ones we have now that are all right or left political talk.  It had a lot of different radio programs, and sports.  He particularly listened to the Denver Broncos and Denver Bears (their minor league baseball team at that time) broadcasts, and the radio shows that they had which discussed those teams. That certainly wasn't all they aired, however, and at one time, when I was fairly young, I used to listen to a fair amount of KOA myself.

The first radio tube, circa 1898.

KOA is still around, but those days are really gone, as are the days of all local radio.  We picked up KOA. . . .

Frankly, even when I posted the item above, I didn't really appreciate the rapid onset of radio, or how late it really came into being.  I knew that there weren't home radios in 1916 and that during the Great War people didn't get their news that way. But when did commercial broadcast begin?

Well, 1920. Sort of suddenly and in a lot of places at first.

I referenced Denver above. Denver had a commercial broadcast radio station in 1920. That's' really early if you consider that 1920 was the year that the first commercial broadcast station began operation in the United States.  And for that matter, it was that year for the United Kingdom as well. So that Wyoming wouldn't have a station until 1930 really isn't surprising.  So Colorado had a commercial station the very year that commercial radio started in the United States.

As for Colorado, I was correct in my supposition about it probably having stations prior to Wyoming, as noted, but I am amazed by how quickly radio came on there.  Colorado had 94 stations by 1922.  So, one in 1920, and then 94 in 1922. The first one, KLZ, is still in operation.  For that matter, KTWO is also still in operation.

Still, let's consider that.  Up until 1930, there was no radio in Wyoming, unless of course you could pick up a Denver channel from Cheyenne (and I don't know if you could, or not).  1930 is within the lives of our older citizens, although that's a decreasing number of them given the year.  My late father was born in 1929.  My mother in 1925.  One of the local high schools was built in 1923.  The building I work in was built in 1917.

So, prior to 1930 in Wyoming, as in much of the US, there was no radio.  Now, 1929 is hardly the ancient world.  And important things were happening in the teens and twenties to be sure. World War One, the stock market crash, etc.  People didn't get the news of those things by way of radio.  Newspapers, which often were published twice a day in that era, were the quickest means of news delivery for the average person where radio was not.

And, of course, prior to 1920, there was no commercial radio at all.

And not only is this significant as to news, but entertainment.  Popular music existed, but the knowledge of it came by way of friends and associates, not radio.  You could buy records, but you weren't hearing them on the radio.  There was even a top 100 for years in the teens, but those records didn't get on that list by way of radio play.  Sales, then as now, determined that, but the decision to purchase didn't come from hearing a song played on the radio.  You'd heard that song played on somebody's record player.

When radio came in, in the 1920s in many places, and starting in 1930 in Wyoming, as we've seen, it made a huge change.  People took to home radios really quickly and they became an institution.  It's odd to think, in that context, of how new they really were

Well, there's a lot more about all that on my post Radio.

Oddly, one thing I didn't cover in that first post, was car radios.  Radios have been, as odd as it may seem, a big part of a car my entire life.  Indeed, when I was a teenager and in my early twenties everyone wanted to have a really nice stereo in their cars.  Some pretty junky cars had some pretty nice radios, which of course were also tape player.  That hasn't really changed over the years, although car radios have gotten really good so that the need to change them is smaller than it once was.  The newest ones in a lot of vehicles also play CDs, Itunes libraries and, via Bluetooth, can act as telephone receivers.  It won't be long until every vehicle has, effectively, a car phone, something that was once quite a rarity.

So its odd to realize that early cars didn't have radios.  Indeed, I own one truck made in 1962 that didn't come equipped with a radio.  I added one, but I sort of regret doing that now.  But I was about 20 at t he time.  When I had a 1945 CJ2A I did not equip it with a radio, and it didn't have one.  Anyhow, the first car radios were an add on and were so expensive that they nearly rivaled a fair percentage of the value of a typical average American car itself.  Early Motorola car radios, first offered in 1930, cost $130.  Crossley Motors, a British manufacturer, offered the first car to have a regular factory installed radio in 1933, although Chevrolet offered a radio option in 1922. The Chevrolet radio however, was impractical due to its massive antenna and large speakers.  Contrary to some assertions, there were other cars manufactured in the 1920s with radio options, but they were unusual and not standard on any car.

Radios themselves didn't become suddenly standard in the 1930s for automobiles.  That wouldn't happen until after World War Two, and even then some things that are standard now remained options. The radio in my 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe Sedan, for example, had push buttons. The regular 54 had a radio, but no buttons.

Anyhow, I don't mean to divert this to a discussion about cars and radios, rather than just radio, but this serves to illustrate how new radio really was.  In the 1920s there were a lot of places in the US where having a radio would have been pointless, as there were no stations. By the 1930s, radio was everywhere and radios were coming into automobiles, in spite of the limitations of tube technology.  By the 1950s, when television was starting to come in, radios were a standard feature in cars, but not necessarily trucks.  Now, in an age when we listen to less radio thanks to other forms of audio information and entertainment, radios are still everywhere.

In the 1940s and 1950s one thing that established people had was a really nice home stereo, with radio and turn table.  Now, these big old pieces of furniture seem odd to us.  How things have changed.

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Related threads:

Radio

The Telegraph

Recently I posted this item on Communications during the Punitive Expedition:  The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition. Part Two. Radios and Telegraph.

One of the things that this really brought into the forefront of my mind was the state of communications in general in the decades leading up to the Punitive Expedition of 1916, and it relates on top of it, in a synchronicitous fashion the topic I also posted about in More Medieval than Modern?  Indeed, the history of the telegraph argues really powerfully for what George F. Will wrote about in the column that entry references.

Prior to the telegraph, no news traveled any faster than a horse or boat.

None.

On continental landmasses, this made the postal service extremely important and most nations had extremely developed post offices.  The British post office delivered mail all day long in urban areas, so that a letter posted in the morning wold tend to arrive midday, and a reply letter could be there by evening.  In nations with larger masses the post office was a critical governmental entity.  There's a real reason that the drafters of the Constitution provided for the head of the U.S. Post Office to be in the cabinet and there's a real reason that delivering the mail was one of the few duties that the Federal Government was actually charged with.  The mail needed to get through.

But it was carried by a postal rider.  That rider trotted, and indeed he probably "posted the trot", which game him some speed, but it was still horse speed.

In wet areas quite a bit of news went by boat or ship.  For that matter, anything going from North America to Europe, or vice versa, went by ship.  Sailing ship at that.  We wouldn't consider it fast, but the people of the pre telegraph age would have considered that to be what it was.

This only came to an end, and a dramatic and sudden end, with the telegraph and railroad.  And oddly enough, those two changes came at the same time, and were complementary to each other.  Indeed, it was the railroads that first really exploited telegraphs.

The telegraph, or more properly the electrical telegraph was first thought of in the late 18th Century as the properties of electrical transmission started to become known.  The first working telegraph was constructed by an English experimenter in 1816, an experiment that actually used eight miles of wire but which failed to gain much attention.  Various experiments by various individuals followed such that by the 1830s there were a fair number of individuals experimenting with similar concepts.  One such individual was Samuel Morse, whose code was adopted for telegraph transmissions.  By the late 1840s telegraph lines were going up everywhere.

By 1861 a telegraph line had been stretched across the vast expanse of the American West such that telegraph transmission from the Atlantic end of the United States to the Pacific could be achieved rapidly for the first time, replacing the Pony Express mail service, used only for mail that required rapid delivery, in short order.  What formerly took about ten days now took, as a practical matter, hours.

Transcontinental telegraph line.

Three years prior, in 1858 an even more amazing feat was accomplished when the Transatlantic submarine cable was put in. The thought of what was involved, and that it worked, is astounding.  Ships remained partially in the age of sale, and partially in the age of steam, at the time.  And that, in 1858, a cable could be stretched that vast distance, and work, is amazing, seeming to be more of our own age than of that of the Pre Civil War world. 

That it was a monumental achievement was known at the time and could hardly be missed.    The impact on time caused by the cable was massive. What had taken days to achieve in terms of communications could now take place, when it needed to, in hours.

Other submarine cables would soon follow all over the globe, although it would take until 1902-1903 to stretch the vaster distance of the Atlantic and reach significant points therein.  Still, by 1902 Canadians could telegraph to New Zealand and Americans to Hawaii.  The world, in terms of communications, had been connected.

So, by the last couple of decades of the 19th Century, there wasn't a significant region of the Untied States that couldn't be reached by telegraph. That doesn't mean that there was a telegraph office in every town by any means, but telegraphs were extremely widespread.  And if railroad reached a town, telegraph certainly did.  So, in a fairly short expanse of time, news which had once taken days or weeks to travel anywhere now could get there within hours.  A person in New York could send a message to a person in Sacramento.  And nations could exchange information nearly instantly.  The impact of this change was immense.  We think of the second half of the 19th Century, if we think about it at all, as being in an era of slow communications. But it wasn't.  It's part of our own age of rapid communications.  Just not quite as rapid as our own in many ways, but rapid still.

Of course, part of the reason we don't' think about telegraphs is that we don't use them. They've fallen away.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century they were a huge part of the culture in some ways, conveying good and bad news.  They were fairly institutionalized in fashion. Messages went from one telegraph office to another, with the sender usually paying a charged based upon the number of words in a telegram.  On the receiving office, while in some instances a person took the telegram at the telegraph office, usually a runner employed by the telegraph office delivered the message to the address of the recipient.

Western Union telegram delivery personnel, 1943.  Note the man on the right is wearing leggings, something we typically associate with soldiers of that era but which were also worn by people to who rode horses, motorcycles or bicycles.  That individual was probably a bicycle deliveryman for the Western Union telegraph company.

 

By the 20th Century, people were using telegrams to send fairly routine, but important, communications.  Often just to let family know where they were and that they were well.

Marine drafting telegram to his parents, early 1940s.  This Marine had just returned from duty in Cuba.  The telegraph is being sent from a booth owned by the Postal Telegraph Company, one of the major American telegraph companies up until 1943, when it merged with the most famous of telegraph companies, Western Union.

And they were also used by "wire services" to convey important new, about which we will have a subsequent post.

United Press dispatch of a news item to its subscribing news services.

 And they also conveyed tragic news, often officially.

Woman and child receive news of serviceman's death in this war time poster. The U.S. Army and the British Army in fact gave notice to families of soldiers who were killed, wounded or captured in this fashion during World War One and World War Two.

Now, you couldn't send a telegram even for sport.

And no wonder.  Telegrams have become a victim of other forms of rapid communication.  The ended in the United Kingdom, which was really responsible for their creation, in 1982.  Western Union in the US managed to carry on until 2006, which is frankly really amazing.  In India, which had less advanced communications, they carried on until 2013.  By they're gone now.  In an age of Internet communication, texts, and mass use of cell phones, they have no place.  

But they had been revolutionary.

If I could eliminate one thing from the planet for all time. . .

it would be the cell phone.

I hate them.

It's not that I don't use them, I do, a lot, but I really dislike them.

I dislike them for more than one reason, but my principal reason is that everyone under 25 years of age, and increasingly more people in older age brackets as time goes on, are glued to their little screens actually missing life.  It's amazing.

People can't avoid checking Facebook or Instagram at the drop of a hat, on their little screens. They sit in restaurants and meetings with other people, looking at artificial electronic life over real life.  They've grown unable to enjoy passing scenery from a car or airplane window.  It's a sickness.

I also hate the degree of connectivity they have caused, although I enjoy that too.  Now, people are tied to their apron stings to each other as never before, even while they also are able to preserve bonds that our highly mobile lifestyle would otherwise strain.  There's a balance of considerations there, and I don't know how it comes out, but which ever way it comes out, it doesn't save this technology, which "improves" darned near every day, from being an overall bad development.

Connectivity

In the past couple of days, I have had instances in which I have been sitting in my office, with my computer connected to the net, and I have found it necessary to text message somebody using my cell phone.

Indeed, over the past year, not only have I found that it continues to be necessary (no surprise) to own a cell phone, but I am now text messaging on my cell phone as a work necessity. Text messaging tends to be associated with teenagers at the mall, but at least in my recent experience it's gone on to be a feature of at least the legal work place. Not all that long ago I found myself walking through Denver getting and receiving text messages pertaining to a deposition that was going on in Texas.

Here at my office, where I am right now (taking a break for lunch) I have, right where I am, a laptop computer, a telephone, a second miniature laptop, a cell phone, and an Ipod that's jacked into the computer, which allows me not only to send and receive email (including work email, and I've done that) but to keep my calendar and contacts electronically.

When I started this profession a little over twenty years ago, my office was equipped, as all our offices were, with a phone and a computer. The computer did not have net access. I don't really recall what I used that computer for, but chances are that I didn't use it all that much on a daily basis. I did write legal memos on it, and it had some programs that were used to substitute for casebooks we had in our library. It was probably three or four years after that when we purchased a computer that had net access, and we obtained West Law in our office for the first time. Before that, most local lawyers had a West Law account at the County Law Library, which was in the old County Courthouse. Having a good fax machine in that era seemed pretty neat. Now all this seems quite quaint.

It does make me wonder about the earlier era, however. Twenty years ago we were already on the cusp of a technological revolution. Even ten years before that we sort of were. But what about before that?

From probably the mid 1920s through to about 1980 the telephone was the only piece of connected technology any law office had. Fax machines hadn't arrived. If you wanted to send something, you did it by mail. Or if you wanted quick contact, you called. What was office work like then? It no doubt involved a lot of dictation of correspondence, and indeed we dictated when I first started out. Some people still do that. But we all did. And dictation in that era did place a bit of a premium on avoiding revisions, although we all revised. Revisions in that era were truly manual, and the result was, the further you go back, that the product had to be regenerated.

What about before 1920? At some time prior to that, most offices didn't have phones. How different office work must have been then. Quick contact just wasn't going to happen. Contact would have mostly been through the mail. Dictation would have been all direct. Everything was much more hands on and manual.

It'd be interesting, if we could, to go back to one of those offices, say an office of 1912, and see how they really worked, what somebody in our profession (assuming that there is a 1912 equivalent) actually did, on a daily basis, and how they did it, before communications became so instant over vast distances.

Communications and Road Miles

I had a fairly typical experience, and a bit of an odd experience, yesterday which calls to mind the topic of this blog.

Yesterday I went to my office, then to Sheridan Wyoming, then to Ranchester Wyoming, and back.

On the way to Ranchester, we passed two Rolls Royce touring cars. The Silver Ghost type of car, really old ones. They were, of course, premium touring cars in their day, which would have been basically the years on both sides of World War One. Huge automobiles.

The trip basically entailed about 170 miles of travel one way, or a grand trip, in one day of about 300 or so miles. We were home by dinner.

On the way back, I pulled over by the Midwest exit where there was cell reception to make a work call to an attorney in Gillette, WY. My son took this photograph while I was doing that.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well, in a century's time, communications and travel have been so revolutionized that they've radically impacted the way those in my field, in this location, do business. A century ago I would not have taken a day trip to Sheridan and Ranchester. For that matter, while I could easily have gone from Sheridan to Ranchester, most summers, a century ago, that would likely have pretty much been a day trip in and of itself. No, an attorney, if he ever had any cause to go to Sheridan from Casper, would have taken a train. Most likely, you'd take the train up one day, and back the next.

A very adventurous person, if they owned a car, might have driven up to Sheridan, but it would have taken all day. And you would have stayed upon arriving.

This year, I suspect, the travel by car of that type, on roads of that era, would have been impossible. Everything is flooding. I doubt a person could have driven in these conditions from Sheridan to Ranchester. You might have had to take the train to do that. The rail line does run though both towns, then up to Garryowen, and on to Billings. It did then as well.

Even in the mid 20th Century this would have been a long road trip, but you could have done it in a day.

But even the telephone aspect of this didn't exist when I first practiced law, some 20 years ago. That's entirely new. It effectively makes your car your office. As internet connections continue to improve, very often you have internet service darned near everywhere for that matter.

An improvement, or just the way things are?

The Telephone

Concerning changes between then and now, something that occurs to me is that those practicing a century ago were much less impacted, if impacted at all, by the telephone.

That may sound obvious, but the impact would be huge.

There are days that I hardly get off the phone. And as I try to take my phone calls, even if really busy, it means that the phone impacts the flow of my work a great deal. This would not have been the case at one time.

It's really difficult to imagine, actually. A day without phone calls and without email. Communications would come solely by mail or by direct contact. I suppose if people had a question, they dropped by to ask it or to make an appointment, and most contacts would have been very much local.