Samuel Morse successfully demonstrated the telegraph in 1844. The first words he sent down the wire had gravitas, were thought-provoking, and possessed a literary (King James Bible, Numbers 23:23) pedigree:
“What hath God wrought.”
But by 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, messaging had already turned prosaic. The first words spoken into a phone were:
“Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”
And Thomas Watson was all the way over in the next room. He could probably hear Bell just fine through the doorway—in case you thought your kid texting you in the kitchen from the breakfast nook was something new.
(Poor Tom, never remembered as anything but Alexnder’s butt boy, when in fact he took his phone company profits and founded one of the largest shipyards in America.)
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi made the first long-distance radio transmission. What did he have to say?
“s”
That’s it. Or, to put it literally (Marconi was using the Morse code developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail):
...
And Marconi was a real chatterbox compared to the man who invented television in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth (really, that was his name). We can’t analyze the content of the first TV broadcast because it didn’t have any. What showed up on Farnsworth’s cathode ray tube was:
———
A straight line. Which is, I suppose, some kind of “intellectual level,” so to speak. But Farnsworth soon brought the intellectual level of television further down to where it has remained ever since. The second thing he broadcast was:
$
He put a dollar sign in front of his primitive camera because—according to what I read on the Internet—an investor asked, “When are we going to see some dollars in this thing, Farnsworth?”
Which brings us to that Internet, which tells me—with no apparent embarrassment—that the first word ever to appear on itself was:
“lo”
In 1969 a UCLA student named Charley Kline tried to transmit the command “login” to a Stanford Research Institute computer on ARPANET. This caused the system to crash, and all that came through was “lo.” About an hour later (if you think the people in tech support are bad now, imagine how bad they were when they didn’t exist) the “gin” arrived.
And I am still waiting for the olive and the vermouth.
And While I’m Ranting Against the Digital Age Let Me Not Forget to Excoriate an Aspect of Social Media that Lacks Even Sociability . . .
On the Fresh Hell of the Internet of Things
Our belongings as well as our selves are online. The world is filling with “smart devices.” A tirade on these gadgets might seem to be off the topic of America having worked itself into a state of angry perplexity. But, in abetting furious confusion, they work for me.
To requote Marshall McLuhan abbreviated: “The world has become a computer, and as our senses go outside ourselves we move into a phase of panic terrors.”
I’m not exactly panicked or terrorized by the Echo Dot that I (unaccountably) received for my seventy-third birthday but I take McLuhan’s point.
I’m an ordinary old married man. I’m used to everybody being smarter than me. Major media outlets are full of reporting and editorials about how stupid my political, social, and cultural ideas are. I long ago conceded the point about who has the brains in the family. A twenty-fifth wedding anniversary proves it. I have children ranging from sixteen to twenty-two. They know everything. I have hunting dogs. I can’t tell if there’s a pheasant in a corn row forty feet away.
I suppose I’m smarter than the chickens I keep. Although they’ve got a swell coop, a spacious yard fenced high and low to protect them from life’s perils, free food every day, and they’re not doing a damn thing—such as laying eggs—in return. So I suppose not.
But now it isn’t just everybody that’s smarter than me. Everything is smarter too.
Or so I’m told—by a certain smart-alecky smart device in my lap being a five-pound know-it-all. (Although it turns into a moron if I spill a cup of coffee on its keyboard.) Forgoing that temptation, I Google and find PC Magazine’s “Best Smart Home Devices.” The article beings,
What if all the devices in your life could connect to the internet? Not just computers and smartphones, but everything: clocks, speakers, lights, doorbells, cameras, windows, window blinds, hot water heaters, appliances, cooking utensils, you name it. And what if those devices could all communicate, send you information, and take your commands?
Let me tell you what the “what” is in this “what if” scenario. I’d forget my password. That’s what.
Also, I do not care to start having conversations with inanimate objects. I’m at an age where this is the kind of behavior that could cause my wife and children to stage an intervention. (“He forgot his password and his password is ‘password.’”) I’d wind up in the Memory Care unit of the local nursing home.
Even assuming I remember my password and assuming I’m allowed to remain in my own house with in-home senior care, I’m still baffled by PC Magazine’s list.
Video Doorbell Enhances my household security by giving me an on-screen real-time image of who’s at the door. Really? There’s this thing that never needs recharging and works perfectly when the Internet crashes. It’s called a window. I look through it. Also, I have a 12-gauge pump.
Smart Thermostat The temperature can be adjusted from anywhere with wifi. Oh good. Now my wife and I can argue about whether it’s too hot in our living room or too cold in our living room even when we’re on vacation hundreds of miles from our living room.
Smart Microwave So smart that when you touch “defrost” it tells you, “Quit nuking the Swanson Hungry-Man Classic Fried Chicken frozen TV dinners and learn how to cook something healthy, Fatso.”
Smart Bathroom Scale If it’s in league with the Smart Microwave and thinks telling me what I really weigh is a smart idea, it’s about to find out
