What's an album?

Seeing that NPR recently published its list of the 'Top 50 Albums' of 2013, my mind turned to a question asked last year by a freshman student in my class: "What's an album?" It's actually a very reasonable question, in a time when downloaded music far outpaces the sales of physical "units" of any kind, and most younger listeners pick and choose the songs they want, and put them on playlists without any regard for what "album" they appeared on.

The first "albums" were notebooks; the term derives from album, Latin for "white," which was figuratively used for a blank tablet, and later a blank book, in which friends might leave their thoughts (this was called an album amicorum). In the later nineteenth century, the term was applied to photograph albums, with blank paper leaves upon which photos could be affixed with glue. And, in the early days of recorded music, when a single 10-inch 78 rpm disc could hold only 8-10 minutes of music, longer works -- concertos, symphonies, and so forth -- were issued in a bound volume, with a sleeve for each disc needed to play the complete work -- this was the phonograph album. The term was carried forward when LP (for Long Playing) 33 1/3 discs were first released in 1948, since each of them contained up to 45 minutes of music, which could include perhaps ten or twelve individual popular recordings, which previously would have been contained in a multi-disc album. In the late '60's and '70's, the "concept album" took advantage of the format to create a carefully sequenced series of interlocking songs -- sometimes, as with Abbey Road, 'gapless' -- which constituted a whole.

But alas, our albums are no longer held together with paper and glue, nor with any material substance -- but only by the dream-stuff of our imaginations.

Duplicates

Image from the Early Office Museum

"Don't you know what duplicates are?" an incredulous Groucho Marx asks brother Chico in one of their better-known skits. "Sure," replies Chico, "that's a five kids up in Canada." The joke was a reference to the Dionne quintuplets born in Ontario in 1934, two of whom are still alive today. But of course we all know what duplicates are -- or do we? We're so used to the ability to make scans or photocopies today that the earlier copying technology of the 1960's and '70's -- the "Ditto," Mimeograph, or Gestetner machines -- seems almost impossibly antique. And yet it's still possible to re-create some of these earlier methods of copying today, such as the Hektograph (above), a precursor to the rotary mimeograph which also used aniline dye; instead of mounting the master copy of a cylinder, it was simply placed in a bed of gelatine, and the dye allowed to soak in; subsequent copies were made by simply placing a blank piece of paper on the gelatine and then peeling it off. Simple Hektograph kits were sold as late as the 1950's and can still be had on eBay or Etsy -- or one can, fairly easily, make one's own almost from scratch. And, while you're waiting for the gelatine to solidify, why not read the Early Office Museum's excellent History of Copying Machines?

A Few Talking Machine Records

This steroeview, part of a promotional set offered by the Sears, Roebuck Company to illustrate the plenitude and variety of its store offerings in 1906, shows how 78 rpm phonograph records were stored; before shipping or sale, a paper sleeve would be added. The long shot emphasizes the vast array of disks available, just waiting to be shipped to your front door. Note that the employee in this photo is wearing a special, shoulder-length glove on his left hand, to avoid scratching the discs! You can view an entire set of these stereoviews in this Flickr album, starting with card no. 1 -- Mr. Sears himself, of course!

3D Movies in 1922

3D film technology is always touted as the "latest," and although most have some idea of the earlier era of 3D film in the 1950's with its paper and cellophane glasses and tendency toward horror films (think Vincent Price in House of Wax), few realize that the earliest 3D movies were shown in 1922. One system, known as "Teleview," was invented by Laurens Hammond and installed in the Selwyn Theatre in New York. It used two projectors, one showing  only the frames from a right-eye perspective, one from the left; cinema-goers sat behind "televiewers" which were electronically synchronized to the frames and blocked out the opposite eye automatically. It was a bulky and expensive setup, and never made it as a commercial proposition -- and yet, remarkably, its basic principle is exactly the same as the latest 3D television today. For more detail about Teleview, see Daniel Symmes's archived site, "The Chopper." Although Hammond's system wasn't a commercial success, he went on to invent what's arguably the most durable and distinctive electronic keyboard of all time: the Hammond organ.

The Eidophusikon

Of all the curious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual technologies claiming to replicate the appearance of nature -- the Diorama, the Panorama, the Moving Panorama, or the Theatre of Arts -- the Eidophusikon perhaps came closest. First shown in London's Leicester Square by the painter Philip James de Loutherborg in 1781, it was a complex apparatus, and much of its mechanism remains a subject of dispute and conjecture. Like Daguerre's later Diorama, it employed subtle lighting effects and colored filters; like Thiodon's Theatre of Arts it had miniature boats and human figures that moved by some subtle mechanism; like the moving Panorama, some of its scenery moved on rolls or scrolls. There have been many attempts to re-create it; I saw one not-terribly-successful one at the Yale Center for British Art some years ago; its over-reliance on plexiglass was a problem, I thought. A far more ambitious version was achieved by a small group at the Asutralian National University in 2005; the video of this recreation is a must-see for any enthusiasts of old media. There's also a brilliant page from the New Model Theatre showing the steps they take in construction (they've built several).

The Optigan: An Optical Disc from 1971

Like its cousin the Mellotron, the Optigan was an organ that used pre-recorded instrumental sounds to provide automated melody or back-up lines to the player -- the novelty was its use of optically-recorded discs, which borrowed the technology developed decades earlier for optical soundtracks on film. Although sold by a subsidiary of toy company Mattel, it was definitely not a toy; it was relatively expensive, and heavy too. I know this because one was left in the basement of my house; the tubes and other electronics were housed in the pedal assembly, which must have weighed at least thirty pounds. I'm embarrassed to admit that, not knowing what it was at the time, I left it on the curb -- hopefully some electronics enthusiast recognized what a treasure it was; all I know is, it was gone the next morning. Months later, I found one of the optical discs in the basement next to where the organ had been -- you can hear what this and other discs sounded like at the Optigan website.

Anne of Green Gables

Not many realize that Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables was first adapted as a film back in 1919, starring Mary Miles Minter. The film is lost, and all that remains are a few stills, such as the one shown in this theatrical lantern slide from the W. Ward Marsh collection at the Cleveland Public  Library. The prominent -- and, given the book, inexplicable -- presence of a watermelon is perhaps one sign that the film wasn't especially faithful to the book; Montgomery was said to be incensed.

The 'Annie' Daguerreotype of Poe

Unknown maker, American, daguerreotypist; Edgar Allan Poe, late May - early June 1849, Daguerreotype; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

There are two reasons for celebrating the 'Annie' Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe -- first, the portrait itself, named after Mrs. Anne Richmond, Poe's friend and the original owner of the photograph, and the curious story of its making and her care of it (she survived Poe by fifty years), and secondly, because it is among the images being made freely available by the Getty Trust as part of its new Open Content program. Following the lead of the Rijksmuseum, the Getty is making a wide array of high-res images of its collections -- any in which no other copyright is known -- available for free to anyone. It is a bold move, and one I personally welcome; there's nothing that so irks a researcher as inordinate fees for images which -- other than the fact that the museum owns their originals -- would long be out of copyright.

The First Photo-Montage

Photography was yet in its infancy when David Octavius Hill began taking Calotypes (sometimes referred to as Talbotypes) in Scotland in 1843. The Daguerreotype had been announced to the world only four years previous, and it remained unclear whether Daguerre's patent, which he had assigned to France, permitted unlicensed photography elsewhere. Licenses were issued to Claudet and Beard in Britain, but since Hill was in Scotland he believed his work did not infringe on these licenses. Having been present at the meeting at which the Free Church of Scotland was formed, Hill hit upon the idea of photographing every person present, then transferring their likenesses to a group portrait. Unfortunately, with so many heads to squeeze in to the scene, it wasn't always possible to insert them in a natural manner; if you look closely you can see heads growing in clusters like grapes, perched at unnatural angles, and out of proportion with their neighbors.

Rufus C. Somerby

Rufus C. Somerby (c. 1833 - 1903) was an entertainer, showman, and panoramist in the mid-nineteenth century. He operated several moving panoramas under the management of Boston's George K. Goodwin, including a panorama of "Dr. Kane's Arctic Voyages," and also was involved in mechanical theatres. He worked as an agent for P.T. Barnum, bringing one such mechanical theatre, "Thiodon's Theatre of Arts," from Britain to the US for an exhibition at Barnum's American Museum. He toured with Civil War panoramas, trained dogs and horses, and an entire "Japanese Village" (see below), becoming ons the of the best-known showmen of his day. My thanks to his grandson, Richard Somerby, for sharing this photo from his own family scrapbook, and to the Wikipedia, for the use of text from the entry I wrote for Mr. Somerby.