A. C. Baldwin, pastor, telegraph lexicographer, poet     10 June 2010
 

telegraphic code incunabula
life and works
writing for the telegraph, writing for the pulpit
religious codes, and a conclusion
publications
 

I regularly perform a due-diligence check of Google Books and archive.org in search of newly-uploaded scans of telegraphic codes. A. C. Baldwin’s Traveler’s Vade Mecum (1853) turned up during my most recent search. The Google scan is of a copy at NYPL (which knows the compiler as A. C. Balwin). I have not yet examined a physical copy of the code, which is 16cm tall according to OCLC; other copies are at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) and Cambridge University.

This code interests me because 1 it is early; 2 it has a delightful mix of phrase matter; and 3 its compiler also wrote poetry and an index rerum-like classified list of themes, authorities and scriptural passages for use in composing sermons.

The full title is The Traveler’s Vade Mecum; or, Instantaneous Letter Writer by Mail or Telegraph, for the convenience of persons traveling on business or for pleasure, and for others, whereby a vast amount of time, labor, and trouble is saved. Note that neither economy nor secrecy are given as objectives for the code; it is conceived as an aid to writing.

It takes its place among the incunabula of the form, when telegraphic codes were forking off from their signal book predecessors. One sign of its signal code derivation is its organization into two sections (signal codes were typically ordered in this way, for two, three and four signals, for time-critical, classified phrase, and vocabulary sections, respectively). Pages 13-32 provide phrases under the departments of traveling, home, clergymen, and commercial. The fifth department, for miscellaneous, is much the largest and runs from page 33 to the end of the 300-page book.

The code offers 8466 numbered phrases. A sense of the whole might be gained from this selection, drawn from each of the five departments —
 

1	I send you by mail a book, a duplicate of which I have with me, whereby I shall be enabled to let you hear from me often with very little trouble.
2	Please to accept of this book, by means of which I hope to have the pleasure of exchanging thoughts with you frequently.
29	I am in one of the famous ventilated cars which professes to exclude the dust, but in my opinion it is a great humbug.
37	The scenery on the banks of the river is perfectly enchanting.
92	Inquire for my umbrella which I left at . . .
134	This is a place under a good moral influence.
133	This is an immoral place.
214	Composed and entirely resigned to the will of God.
312	I shall be absent next Sabbath, and wish the committee to see to the supplying of the pulpit.
387	The news from Europe has served to depress the price of stocks.
1697	When does college term begin?
2253	Buy any quantity (or . . . bales) of cotton as speedily as possible.
3476	I would like to make arrangements with you to publish another edition if agreeable.
6135	Our friend . . . . has fallen in love with a pair of bright eyes, and is thought to be past recovery.
6483	You may send me forthwith cut nails of the following description and quantity, viz., . . . .
7571	You will rue the day if you do.
7574	On the road to ruin with railroad speed.
7579	There is a delightful rural prospect from this place.
8009	. . . . is a notorious swindler, and not the least confidence whatever can be placed in him.
8450	You are quite too young to think of any such thing.
8466	The thermometer is ... degrees below zero.

In general, there is greater depth of phrase matter within the topics of the first four departments, than is the case for the miscellanous section. The compiler likely had little knowledge of commercial topics — any quantity of cotton? at what classification? — and phrases under that heading might better have been distributed in the miscellaneous section.

An example is given of how the Traveler’s Vade Mecum might be used —
 

A. C. Baldwin, The traveler’s vade mecum or Instantaneous Letter Writer (1853)

Here, the message is written on a card, not a telegram blank. Figures in the left column indicate phrases; words (place and personal names, times) at the right are qualifications of those phrases. The virtue here seems to be in writing, not in economy of sending. The example and its translation are followed by this dubious assertion: Persons unaccustomed to writing, and to whom the penning of a few lines is a great burden, will find this book an efficient aid and relief.

One can form one’s own opinion of this, by perusing the phrases offered in these two pages from the Home and Clergymen’s departments —
 

A. C. Baldwin, The traveler’s vade mecum or Instantaneous Letter Writer (1853)

I doubt that this code found many (or even any) users. The phrases in its travel department are too dependent upon a somewhat limited script. Later codes with a large phrase vocabulary devoted to travel, offer more expressions about meetings, being late, missing connections, sending and receiving money, and the like. Overall, Baldwin’s phrases are an uneven mix of very personal and over-detailed observations. And too, the combination of personal (and even sentimental and romantic), business and other very diverse content in the phrase offerings means that nothing is gone into deeply. Yet all of these shortcomings make this an interesting read; the book is an early draft in a genre that would develop rapidly, and take different forms, over the next 70 years.

A few page spreads of Traveler’s Vade Mecum are presented below, as I turn to its background, its compiler, and its connection to other of his writing.
 

telegraphic code incunabula

The traveler’s Vade Mecum appeared only a few years after the introduction of the electro-magnetic telegraph in regular service in the United States (mid 1840s), run on Morse’s telegraphic alphabet. The codes were a new genre, one that would evolve — and diversify in form and subject domains — over the next few decades. Some of the earlier published codes have the flavor and tentativeness of first drafts.

In addition to 1 Traveler’s Vade Mecum, these early codes — leaving out purely marine signal codes — included F. O. J. Smith his 2 The Secret Corresponding Vocabulary; adapted for use to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph and also in conducting written correspondence, transmitted by the mails, or otherwise (1845); Henry J. Rogers his 3 The Telegraph Dictionary, and Seamans’s Signal Book, adapted to signals by flags or other semaphors; and arranged for secret correspondence, through Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: for the use of commanders of vessels, merchants, &c. (Baltimore, 1845); two codes by John Wills, 4 his Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Vocabulary, or, condensing correspondent, designed to communicate commercial and other general intelligence, in abbreviated form and at small expense (Baltimore, 1846); and 5 his Telegraphic Congressional Reporter (Baltimore, 1847); and Alexander Jones, 6 his A System for Condensing or Abbreviating Communications for Transmission by Magnetic Telegraph (New York, 1848). (I give their extended titles because of the self-descriptions these usefully provide.) Of these six, only two — Jones 1848 and Wills 1846 — employ codewords; Traveler’s Vade Mecum and the others employ figures or other cipher constructs.

Baldwin admits to having undertaken a project whose ultimate scale, if known at the outset, would have discouraged the attempt. He would need to generate and organize phrase matter, against the sense of the impossibility of anticipating the wants of every body, and the difficulty of deciding what phrases will be most needed. How much about travel? How much about marriage, or cotton or failure? And how many senses under each heading (of failure, say), and what should the key words be, for phrases that might conceivably fall under more than one?

What models might a scholarly pastor have had available? Signal codes? Baldwin notes in his preface that whilst engaged in the project, Rogers’s Telegraphic Dictionary (1845) had appeared, and so he may have worked with that. He acknowledges that Rogers anticipated several of the features in his own code, but observes that Rogers’s code was designed for the marine service, and not for general correspondence like his own. Models or none, Baldwin built a dictionary of 8,466 numbered and classified phrases — testament to discipline, obsession, perhaps a hope of exploiting the new telegraphic technology in order to generate supplemental income.

I’ve already mentioned flaws in the code, from which it derives some of its charm today. Some phrases might have been taken from an etiquette book, and even from poetry —
 

6089	It is a long story ; too long to telegraph.
8019	It is very tedious, and hard to be endured.
8111	I am not so tired so as to suffer any inconvenience.
8174	It is unjust, and not to be allowed.
8175	It is unkind as well as unchristian.
8362	I advise you by all means to take a wife, provided you can find one worthy of you.

These phrases bring to mind the poetical effusions found in John L. Winnea’s Cryptography (San Francisco, 1881). That document (and associated US Patent 294,175 of 1884 for a Cryptographal Table) focuses on blank tables and codewords, but also provides a single page of phrases of progressively baroque construction :
 

	Against my judgment and inclinations
	Avowing the utmost respect and desire to
	Have been unfortunate in his intercourse with the world
	Have put in circulation some of my trifling letters
	Delicacy and pride, therefore, forebade any advances on my part
	The vivacity, the ingenuousness, and the sensibility of her sex and her country
	By enjoying, I can impart happiness so exquisite, my heart, my disposition, my feelings, my affections, are still the same, glowing with the same warmth

Read further for another instance of phrases coming unmoored from the mundane purposes of the code that contains them (Andrew Hallner’s Scientific Dial Primer of 1912). There were also, of course, more intentionally literary (witty, ironic, etc.) riffs on telegraphic codes. But I digress.

Other specialized phrase dictionaries were available for literary and presumably other composition. Two examples are Thomas Dolby’s The Shakespearian Dictionary (London 1832) and J. Hain Friswell, his Familiar words, subtitled An index verborum or quotation handbook (London, 1865). The latter is later than our period, but may have had predecessors. Books of this sort may have provided models for Baldwin; certainly, they coexisted with his and others’ codes, all of which might be set under the heading classified phrase dictionary. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas appeared in 1852, just one year before The Traveler’s Vade Mecum.

An additional parallel, though not model, for the The traveler’s Vade Mecum was model letter books. Sporting titles like The New Letter Writer (1853), the The Fashionable American Letter Writer (1833, here), and The Compleat Letter Writer (1756), these combined model letters with rules of etiquette, and were a long-established genre in 1853. Baldwin provides not letters, however, but classified phrases for letter production.

As for subject domain expertise? Wills (1846 and 1847) knew commodities, trade and politics; Jones (1848) knew commodities. J. S. Buell, compiler of Mercantile Cypher for Condensing Telegrams (Buffalo, 1860), knew canal and rail transportation.

Baldwin was not an expert in any professional subject domain apart from pastoring. But his labor in composing sermons, and the analytical skills he had employed in developing a classified index of themes and texts for the pulpit, may have specially equipped him for developing a telegraphic phrase dictionary.
 

A. C. Baldwin, The traveler’s Vade Mecum or Instantaneous Letter Writer (1853)
 

Abraham Chittenden Baldwin, 1804-1887
 

portrait from Henry Pynchon Robinson, Guilford Portraits : Memorial epitaphs of Alderbrook and Westside with Introductory Elegies and Essay (New Haven, 1907)
 

Mr. Baldwin had, for several years, been residing with his brother-in-law, William C. Foote of Yonkers, N. Y., and consequently many of the present ministers in active service have never met or known him. His ministry in Connecticut in former years was one of marked diligence and varied activity, and he was prompt and tireless in efforts to do good in the various spheres of usefulness where he labored. A versatile talent and good executive ability fitted him for practical life, and he was an effective preacher, and a careful pastor. (ex Minutes, 1888)

A. C. Baldwin lived in some obscurity in his last years, but in his active years he had been an ambitious, energetic and productive pastor and writer. His versatile talent included writing sermons, indexing, lexicography, poetry, and editing. The table below shows his biographical and publication history. A more detailed list of Baldwin (and his wife’s) publications, including links to scans where available, appears at the end of this essay.
 

1804	Birth of Abraham Chittenden Baldwin, son of Col. Benjamin and Betsy (Chittenden Baldwin) in Guilford, Connecticut. (April 26)
1827	Graduated Bowdoin College.
1830	Graduated Yale Theological Seminary.	Helen and her Cousin. Written for the American Sunday-school Union.
1830	Ordained, Berlin, Massachusetts.
1830	Married Emily Foote. (June 30)
1832	Dismissed.	Sermon preached in the Unitarian Congregational Church in Northborough, at the funeral of Isaac B. Davis : who died, January 7, 1832, aged 22.
1833	Installed, Olivet Church, Springfield.	The confession of faith adopted by the Evangelical Congregational Church of Berlin, July 29th, 1832.
1839	Dismissed.
1839-40	Principal, Ladies’ Seminary, Newburgh, New York.
1841		Themes for the Pulpit, being a collection of nearly three thousand topics with texts...
1842	Installed, Howe Street church, New Haven	Essentials of the Gospel : a sermon preached at the dedication of the Church in Howe Street, New Haven, January 26, 1842.
1843	Awarded Honorary Master of Arts, Yale University
1845	Dismissed
1846		Review of a pamphlet purporting to be a Statement of facts in relation to the Howe Street Society : containing also additional facts.
1847-54	Family guardian, Deaf and Dumb Asylum, Hartford compelled by ill health in his family to resign this office
1848		Pulpit themes : illustrated by three thousand Scripture tests in full, systematically classified... (Edinburgh edition)
1853		The traveler’s vade mecum, or Instantaneous Letter Writer, by mail or telegraph
1857	Installed, First Church, Durham	Friendly letters to a Christian slaveholder. The dark ways of God. A sermon preached October 3, 1856, at the funeral of the Rev. Samuel N. Shepard, Pastor of the First Church in Madison, Conn.
1860	Dismissed
1861-66	Acting pastor, Black Rock, Bridgeport
1862		The faithful minister’s joy in death : a sermon, preached March 9, 1862, at the funeral of the Rev. David Smith, D.D.
1866 –	without charge: supplied vacant pulpits in the Hartford vicinity for about ten years.
1873		Joel Barlow. New Englander
1880		The frozen zone and its explorers: a comprehensive history of voyages, travels, adventures, disasters, and discoveries in the Arctic regions... (co-author) A pastor’s counsels to young Christians in a series of familiar addresses following a revival of religion.
1886	Emily dies. (October 1)
1887	A. C. Baldwin dies of the infirmities of age, aggravated by liver and kidney disease, in Yonkers, New York. (July 6)

Baldwin demonstrated with his Themes for the Pulpit (1841) and Pulpit Themes (1848) an interest in systematic assemblage of ideas and texts. I surmise that his experience at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum in Hartford (1847-54) further encouraged him along these lines. The medium of instruction there was sign language, introduced from France, and whether or not he learned sign, Baldwin would have been exposed to a more theoretical conception of language and communication; that, and perhaps freedom from the weekly grind of generating sermons, may have emboldened him to undertake his ambitious Traveler’s vade mecum. The American Asylum for Deaf-mutes had been established in Hartford in 1816 by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851, like Baldwin a graduate of Yale’s School of Divinity) and Laurent Clerc (1785-1869), whom Gallaudet had induced to come from France. The archives of the American School of the Deaf are described here. (I need to pursue this direction further.)

Baldwin was competitive. His Friendly Letters appeared in a collection of prize-winning essays on slavery. His published output of sermons appears to be substantial. His writing was fluent and confident.

Information presented in the table above is derived from several sources, including these :

1. Vital Statistics in The Congregational Yearbook, 1888. Boston: Congregational Publishing Society (thanks to Gloria J. Korsman at Andover-Harvard Theological Library for finding and making this available to me)
2. Minutes of the General Conference of the Congregational Churches of Connecticut, at the Twentieth Annual Meeting, at Middletown, November 8-10, 1887, with Reports and Statistics. Volume IV., 1885-1889 (Hartford, Conn., 1888): 369-70 here
3. History of Bowdoin College, with biographical sketches of its graduates, from 1806 to 1878, inclusive (Boston: James Ripley Osgood, 1882) : 363 here

   Baldwin is poetically eulogized here :

4. Reverend Abram Chittenden Baldwin, verse memorial in Henry Pynchon Robinson, Guilford Portraits : Memorial epitaphs of Alderbrook and Westside with Introductory Elegies and Essay (New Haven, 1907)   here —

   ...Much more than theology did he know,
   This active brainy man for order made
   And function, full executive in grade...
    

Writing for the telegraph, writing for the pulpit

Writing for both the telegraph and the pulpit involve formulaic composition. The sermon is the more literary form, of course, one that requires the full repertoire of rhetorical and literary devices, and in which economy of expression is no virtue, save in the service of higher purpose with regard to the listener’s soul. But construction of telegraphic messages, and of sermons, involves identification of themes, selection of texts, assembly of messages. For the pulpit, the texts came from scripture, and there existed a variety of aids for exploiting that reservoir, including concordances, but also books with titles like Pulpit Outlines, Pulpit Sketches, Helps from the Pulpit; or Sketches and Skeletons of Sermons, Pulpit Orator, Studies for the Pulpit; Containing Skeleton Sermons, Biblical Illustrations..., and so on. The preacher might also subscribe to The Preacher and Homiletic Monthly and other periodicals. And he would also have maintained his own index rerum, perhaps that blank book published by John Todd.

Baldwin’s Themes for the Pulpit, being a collection of nearly three thousand topics with texts... (1841) was one such tool. It was designed primarily as an aid to selecting a subject, and a few pertinent passages from scripture; it provides no skeleton upon which to build a sermon, and still less, anything like model sermon.
 

A. C. Baldwin, Themes for the Pulpit, being a collection of nearly three thousand topics with texts... (1841)
 

As is evident from the page spread shown above, it provides subjects, texts, and the names of divines — but not further bibliographic information — in a thematic (or thesauric) order; the topics are not arranged in the order in which they should follow each other in a Theological System.
 

left: table of contents, A. C. Baldwin, Themes for the Pulpit (1841); right, table of contents, The traveler’s vade mecum or Instantaneous Letter Writer (1853)

Take the first heading, of subjects relating to God. Remove the authorities and scriptural passages, and what remains is a more quickly scannable, panoptical view of subjects —

The Being of God proved from the Frame of the World.
The Being of God proved from the Frame of Human Nature.
The Being of God proved from Universal Consent.
The Being of God proved from Supernatural Effects.
Eternity of God.
Omnipresence of God.
The Grandeur of god.
The Greatness of God’s Wisdom and Power.
The Holiness of God.
The Compassion of God.
The Incomprehensibility of God's Mercy.
The Severity of God.
The Patience of God with Wicked Nations.
The Long-Suffering of God with Individuals.
God the only Object of Fear.

Baldwin may have derived these Themes for the Pulpit from his notes of reading scripture and other authorities, entered into an index rerum or something like the same blank book he assumes his readers maintain.

Baldwin distinguishes his production from the many pulpit outlines, sketches and skeletons targeted at indolent and uninspired pastors. He characterizes this volume as merely supplemental to the index rerum that his readers surely maintain —

It is not pretended that this book contains all those subjects which are profitable for pulpit discussion. It is presumed that every Pastor keeps a blank book in which he enters from time to time topics appropriate to the spiritual wants of his people, which are suggested to him in his reading, conversation, and pastoral labours. This collection is by no means intended to supersede the necessity of his keeping such a book. The blank leaves bound up with this volume are designed for him to use for this purpose. In this part of the book he can add subjects as they occur to him, arranged either according to the plan of the preceding pages, or according to a plan of his own.

And indeed, 80 unnumbered and blank pages follow the last page bearing print. Those blank pages are unmarked in the the NYPL/Google scan.
 

religious codes, and a conclusion

Telegraphic codes were compiled for every realm, religion no exception. The most common example is missionary codes; The China Inland Mission Private Telegraph Code (Shanghai, 1913) is described, and onward links provided, here.

There also existed codes for trade in ecclesiastical vestments and equipment, and religious publications. The Salvation Army issued a code in several editions; see a description at the website of SA International Heritage Center, and a delightful article by Wesley Harris, Souvenirs of Salvationism 1, Journal of Aggressive Christianity 40:256 (December 2005 – January 2006): 50 (pdf here (accessed 16 July 2007).

And then there is Andrew Hallner his The Scientific Dial Primer Containing universal code elements of universal language, new base for mathematics, etc. (San Francisco: Sunset Publishing House, 1912), an impractical but religious-based code that reads like an epistolarly novel. A description and onward links can be found here.

But to conclude on A. C. Baldwin, who was no crank.

Baldwin in his life, and in his The traveler’s vade mecum and his Themes for the Pulpit, embodies an intersection of several of my own longstanding interests : telegraphic codes, index rerum (and other commonplace and notational systems), poetry, and deafness. His Themes for the Pulpit is a refined and analytical classification of a large body of material, both from scripture and from other authorities, and its compilation would have taken the same attention to textual detail, and overall structure, that undergird any telegraphic code. His code is remarkable for its ambition and scope of subjects: I presume it was not a financial success, but it remains a fascinating instance of lexicographic art. I must leave this essay in its present state, for now, but expect to augment and revise it as I investigate Baldwin and his work — including his duties at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum in Hartford — more closely.
 

A. C. Baldwin, The traveler’s vade mecum or Instantaneous Letter Writer (1853)
 

A. C. Baldwin, publications

This is not a careful bibliographic guide, rather a chronological listing of items encountered online. With one or two exceptions, it excludes (so far) poetry and brief notices by Baldwin (and his wife) found in the American Periodicals Series, Nineteenth Century Magazines, and in America’s Historical Newspapers.

1. Helen and her Cousin. Written for the American Sunday-School Union. Revised by the Committee of Publication. 1830. 79pp. One in the Ten Dollar Sunday-school Library, listed here and reviewed here.
2. Sermon preached in the Unitarian Congregational Church in Northborough, at the funeral of Isaac B. Davis : who died, January 7, 1832, aged 22. Publication: Boston : Printed by Pierce and Parker, 1832 (24pp)
3. The confession of faith adopted by the Evangelical Congregational Church of Berlin, July 29th, 1832. : Together with the original church covenant. Evangelical Congregational Church (Berlin, Mass.); Boston: : Printed by Peirce & Parker., 1833 (12pp)
4. Themes for the Pulpit, being a collection of nearly three thousand topics with texts, suitable for public discourses in the pulpit and lecture room. Mostly compiled from the published works of ancient and modern divines. New York, M. W. Dodd, 1841

   The NYPL copy (Google scan) bears no marginalia save for an inscription on the first flyleaf — Rev. Samuel Miller D.D. / With the Respect of the Compiler. It also bears a bookplate (or stamp) for the Library of Princeton University. My own copy has a similar inscription, same location, same hand, to James Milnor D.D..

5. Essentials of the Gospel : a sermon preached at the dedication of the Church in Howe Street, New Haven, January 26, 1842. New Haven, Conn.: Printed by B.L. Hamlen, 1842 (26p)
6. Review of a pamphlet purporting to be a Statement of facts in relation to the Howe Street Society : containing also additional facts. New Haven : Printed by B.L. Hamlen, 1846.

   n.b.: This and two related items are listed in Henry Martyn Dexter, The Congregationalism of the last three hundred years, as seen in its literature: with special reference to certain recondite, neglected, or disputed passages, &, &. (New York, 1880) here. The other two items, one preceding and the other succeeding Baldwin’s own, are :

   Statement of Facts in Relation to the Howe-Street Society. New Haven, 1846. octavo, pp. 14.; and
   The Reviewer reviewed: being an Examination of a Pamphlet published by the Rev. A. C. Baldwin, purporting to be a Review of a Statement of Facts, etc. New Haven, 1846. octavo, pp. 38.

7. Pulpit themes : illustrated by three thousand Scripture texts in full, systematically classified from the works of the most eminent divines. Edinburgh: R. Ogle and Oliver & Boyd, 1848
8. The traveler’s vade mecum, or Instantaneous Letter Writer, by mail or telegraph, for the convenience of persons traveling on business or for pleasure, and for others, whereby a vast amount of time, labor, and trouble is saved. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1853
9. Friendly letters to a Christian slaveholder, in Liberty or slavery; the great national question (Three prize essays on American slavery. Boston, Congregational board of publication, 1857.

   (The other contributions are Richard Bowers Thurston (1819-1895), The error and the duty in regard to slavery, and Timothy Williston (-1893), Is American slavery an institution which Christianity sanctions, and will perpetuate?)

10. The dark ways of God. A sermon preached October 3, 1856, at the funeral of the Rev. Samuel N. Shepard, Pastor of the First Church in Madison, Conn., who died September 30th, 1856, aged fifty-seven. New York: : John F. Trow, printer, 1857 (23pp)
11. The faithful minister’s joy in death : a sermon, preached March 9, 1862, at the funeral of the Rev. David Smith, D.D., for thirty-three years pastor of the church in Durham, Conn., who died March 5th, 1862, aged ninety-four.New York : J.P. Prall, 1862. (46pp)
12. Joel Barlow. New Englander ( July 1873): 413-37.

    Barlow (1755-1812) was a poet and patriot, who had served as chaplain in Washington’s army, and went to France on a trade-diplomatic mission. He was proceeding to meet Napoleon, then on his ill-conceived advance into Russia, when he died in Poland.

    Baldwin’s writing is fluent. I fasten on this passage, for example : Something must be done. Just at this crisis, one of those dashing, brilliant humbugs, which about once in twenty years have from time immemorial bedazzled and duped the public with promises of large and sudden wealth to all its patrons, was brought out from its infernal den, where such things are concocted by the knowing ones, and attracted almost universal attention. It was a great Land Company... (p421)

    Two observations: his use of the expression the knowing ones, that one recalls (Lord) Timothy Dexter his A Pickle for the knowing ones: or, Plain truths in a homespun dress (1838, reprinted in Boston 1881) here, and his energetic language about humbugs, familiar to us from his Traveler’s vade mecum.

13. Fitz-Greene Halleck and the Village Belle, in Harpers (June 1878): 132-3

    For more than half a century the writer has had in manuscript a copy of a humorous poetical correspondence between Halleck and an interesting, talented young lady of Guilford, Connecticut, the native place of each... An introduction is followed by the poetry itself.

    No particulars are given about the talented young lady save that she was the beautiful and bright daughter of one of the most respected and honored families in the State and fell a victim to consumption in early life. Baldwin presumably knew her. Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) was a well-regarded poet of his time.

14. A pastor’s counsels to young Christians in a series of familiar addresses following a revival of religion. Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1880.
15. The frozen zone and its explorers: a comprehensive history of voyages, travels, adventures, disasters, and discoveries in the Arctic regions, including recent German and Swedish expeditions; Captain Nare’s English expedition; Prof. Nordenskiold’s discovery of a northeast passage; the sailing of the Jeannette, etc. Illustrated with one hundred and seventy-five engravings and maps. Written and comp. from authentic sources, by Alexander Hyde, A.M., Rev. A.C. Baldwin and Rev. W.L. Gage. (Hartford, Conn., R.W. Bliss & company; San Francisco, Cal., A.L. Bancroft & co., 1880)

Mrs. Baldwin seems to have been the author of these volumes, as well :

1. The turkies’ convention; and The gander’s protest. [N.p., 1874] (at Yale)
2. Ruined by rum.: A tale of facts; together with an appeal for temperance./ By a lady. Hartford: Brown & Gross [etc.], 1877. (at Michigan)

Both A. C. and Mrs. Baldwin published poetry, and A. C. some other short items, in periodicals including Christian Secretary and the New York Observer and Chronicle during the 1870s. At some point I will transcribe Mrs. Baldwin’s The Parson of Olden Times and the Modern Parson. A Ballad. from the Christian Secretary, April 6, 1876. It’s pretty good.
 

THE   INCO N HARD   ARE CO.     21 May 2010

I like the smell of hardware, he thought to himself, there’s no other business for me.

Stoddard, William Osborn, Jr. Making good in the village. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916. Illustrated by George Varian.

First, these contemporary notices/reviews —

A story for boys. The hero begins his active career as an errand boy in a New York hardware store. He does not shirk any of the tasks allotted him. In addition, he makes a close study of the buying and selling of the stock with a view to advancement in the business. Before he is able to progress materially, his mother’s failing health compels removal from the metropolis to a distant village. Apparently, the only way there of earning needed money is by turning to farm labor. But the boy’s training and ambition help him to see greater possibilities in the village’s dilapidated hardware store... The boy takes hold, and by applying up-to-date methods revives the dormant business and makes it successful. — Springfield Republican ¶ A L A Bkl 12:488 Jl ’16 / Springfield Republican p17 Ap 23 ’16 180w
ex Book Review Digest (1917)

Every fellow will like Tom Stewart, the hero of the book. He was a city boy who got a job in a hardware store and learned the business. Then his mother got sick and he had to go to the country were, in the village, he found a worn-out old hardware store. Tom got a job there on trial. By his ambition, work and clever schemes, he made the store one of the best in the town.
ex Boys’ Life — (June 1916)

This fiction falls loosely under the conduct of life heading, in the Horatio Alger mold. Energy and granularity in its telling, and some close observation of hardware-selling, make it readable today.

What is left out of the above notices is an ordeal in the woods. Tom’s competitor in Steubenville, Slocum & Stilwell, are selling second-rate goods cheap, but dishonestly by suggesting they are their regular stock. Tom sees his business slow and, despite his own best judgement that a well-established line of standard goods is his best and honest bet, agrees in a moment of weakness to take on a line of second-rate merchandise, from a Mr. Bagby of Snare & Tobey. He has a crisis of conscience. His partner, mother and others arrange for him to take a camping/fishing trip with a customer, Hiram Johnson, and while on that trip he learns something about (1) negotiating rapids by being decisive and staying one’s course, and (2) not depending on shoddy goods (a cheap paddle breaks, and the canoe capsizes). Tom returns to the store, puts up a sign apologizing to customers about the poor goods sold during his absence, and promises to make good on any returns.

THE   INCO N HARD   ARE CO. is the lettering of the decrepit sign above the store Tom takes on.

Something about W. O. Stoddard (1835-1925) here, and more here. Stoddard worked in the Lincoln White House for a time, and was a prolific author. Remarks by his granddaughter Eleanor Stoddard in her contribution to a new edition of Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard suggests that he wasn’t a great businessman himself. It may be this trait that explains the sympathy shown in this novel to Jethro Lincoln, whose store Tom takes over, who prefers to read Virgil and has gotten used to failure.

N. B. : This entry properly belongs in, and may eventually migrate to the fiction section of my Hardware Store Literature page.
 

a system of caring for hardware literature     16 May 2010

ex Arrangement of Catalogues and Price-Lists (pp 93-102) in Richard Richardson Williams, Hardware Store Business Methods (1901) here

More on this volume later; several new instances of hardware store literature listed, for now, at delicious. It looks so organized! Roughly contemporaneous with the Sweet’s Catalogue (first appeared in 1906), Library Bureau products, &c., &c. Note copies of Iron Age stacked second from top, at left. Can the system hold up once the cabinet is full? Luckily, there’s an index, and numbered shelves and drawers.
 

W. H. Donaldson, lithographer, codist, publisher     28 March 2010

Not a code, but analytical, and evidence of the knowledge of the amusement domain that would support Donaldson’s creation, with a partner, of The Billboard in 1894.
 

private collection
 

The Donaldson Guide... to which is added the Complete Code of the Donaldson Cipher.
Cincinnati, Ohio: W. H. Donaldson, 1894
7w x 10 1/2 inches;
theatrical, pp 4-52 of a 418-page compendium entitled, in full :

The Donaldson Guide,
containing a list of all opera-houses in the United States and Canada, together with description of their stages, their seating capacity, and the names of the managers of each; the populations of cities, and the names and populations of adjacent towns to draw from; the names of city bill-posters, baggage expressmen, hotels, boarding-houses, newspapers, vaudeville resorts, museums, beer gardens, fairs, race meetings, circus licenses, and miscellaneous facts, dates, etc., of great value to managers, ¶ in conjunction with
The Showman’s Encyclopedia,
a compilation of information for showmen, performers, agents, and everyone identified with the theatrical, vaudeville, or circus business, such as ticket tables, interest tables, the address of show-printers, costumers, dramatic agents, theatrical architects, scenic artists, aeronauts, playwrights, etc., ¶ and the
International Professional Register,
a directory of the names and address of dramatic people, variety people, minstrel people, freaks, acrobats, operatic artists, musicians, and farce-comedy artists, ¶ to which is added
The Complete Code of the Donaldson Cipher.
 

More on this code, and Donaldson, here.
 

the universal baroque     19 January 2010

I’ve long been a casual and amateur fan of emblems. I believe it goes back to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s forays into the genre with his Heroic Emblems, and other of his lapidary experiments with word and picture. I’ve fashioned my own emblems on various occasions, and frequently bring emblems and emblem-making into my teaching. I try to stay current with the literature, at least as manifested in the scholarly journal Emblematica.

In that journal’s volume 17 appeared Michael Bath’s review of Peter Davidson’s The Universal Baroque (Manchester UP, 2007), that led to my reading the book. Before presenting some thoughts on the latter, however, I should provide at least some description of emblems. A few pages in my own website are devoted to the topic, starting here, and from those pages I borrow this sketch —

Emblems were a genre that deployed word and image for rhetorical, ethical and/or educational purposes. Their economy of expression typically took the three-part form of motto, allegorical image and explication, that served to contain their baroque piling-on of detail in a tight, formalist forcefield.

Emblems came into being as a genre with the unauthorized publication in 1531, of Emblematum Liber, which incorporated epigrammatic writing that Andrea Alciato had compiled some years earlier. The Augsburg edition drove Alciato to prepare a second (and now authorized) edition for publication in Paris in 1534. This incorporated pictures and a different organization, and together with later editions of Alciato, who wrote 212 emblems in all, enjoyed great acceptance. Over 150 editions of Alciati’s collection, alone, appeared over the next century, and something like 2000 emblem books were published in the heyday of the genre. They were used in religious and other education, but also by artists, architects, decorators and others as visual dictionaries or pattern books. The most famous in this regard was probably Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593).

Emblems are open, not closed. The cut-up, paste-up, juxtapositional nature of the emblematic mode lends itself to new occasions of inquiry and meaning. Now back to Davidson’s book.

The Universal Baroque finds in the baroque not a style nor period, but an open system of inclusion, a system of international discourses, a way of proceeding, a symbolic language, an agreed set of conventions overriding all of the alegiances of religious confession or nationality which have come to seem, since the turn of the nineteenth century, unavoidable descriptors of all cultural endeavour. (1) In Davidson’s baroque, there is no center, no metropolis. Its practitioners might be anywhere and, he finds, are often at their most creative in the margins — Scotland, China, Mexico, Brazil. The nation state is the enemy of the baroque, he writes at the start of his chapter on British Baroque.

Davidson derives some of his argument and evidence from Giovanni Careri’s stunning (and stunningly beautiful) Baroques (2002; Princeton UP, 2003), including Careri’s discussion of the mestizo character of baroque art in the Americas. Davidson takes this up and argues that the baroque is fundamentally mixed, hybrid; it delights in the marvelous and in curiosity, in queer juxtapositions. It takes its selections from both the vernacular and the international, the indigenous and global. It is oriented to antiquities plural, those known and those not yet uncovered. The baroque is an open system that operates with variations. Its practitioners moved between, or within, competing frames of reference. (85)

He introduces twelve aphoristic theses on the baroque, that are developed throughout the book. A couple of favorites : (1) Baroque art is never at a loss: it has evolved ways of dealing with reality; (2) The Baroque has no metropolis; and (5) The Baroque has reached the last possible point in eclecticism. Each of these and the other theses is followed up by an elaboration, almost in the form of corollaries. For example, to Thesis 1, The baroque system can find an artistic response for any occasion... it need not be original, but it must be accomplished. (p13)

The largest part of the book is devoted to instances of baroque literature, art, architecture and music in England, Ireland and Scotland, in the New World, and in the East (China, Japan, Goa). It is at the frontiers, Davidson writes, that the baroque arts become more interesting and compelling. There is much about the Jesuits in here. As for England, Davidson shows that much of the evidence is in Latin which, because not in the nation-building tongue, has been expurgated from the canon. (Metaphysical is a way of having a baroque that is native, unconnected to the continent or anywhere else.) He finds energetic examples of baroque literature in the English, Scottish and Irish diaspora on the continent, and also notes how many Scots doctors of medicine, theologians and jurists sought their education abroad. Davidson’s examples were almost completely unknown to me, and to follow his account required frequent reference to the internet, as well as Careri’s book, and Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s (very readable) Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (1999). Many of my own delicious.com bookmarks tagged baroque are the result of searches triggered by Davidson — Giardino Buonaccorsi east of Macerata, near the Adriatic; the Sedlec Ossuary; the composer Doménico Zípoli (1688-1726).

Why did this book so amaze me? Probably because I like lost or forgotten or marginalized things. Probably because I gather and compile until overwhelmed by my own mess, whose secretary I become. The Universal Baroque came into my view as I was contemplating Umberto Eco’s list book, and thinking about compilations. The emblematic mind seeks to select and deploy unlike things in a composition: parataxis, hypotaxis, any device that can yield a thought or idea from the congeries, for rhetorical and cognitive purposes. It might be said that (graphic) designers also seek to bring significance out of the chaotic, by classificatory and visual means. And too, I see the baroque in many (not all) of the artists that interest me, including Ian Kiaer, whose work I became aware of around the time I was reading Davidson.

And more — Davidson draws from Eugenio D’Ors and others to argue for a new map of the baroque world. He would replace that chart in which lines of influence radiate out from European capitals to their colonial holdings, to another that would look much more like a net, whose nodal points or knots connect to every other knot, the medium being Latin and the shared visual systems of iconography and emblem ultimately derived from a plurality of antiquities. (183) As I think about education in the arts, say as discussed by Ken Lum in his Dear Steven essay in the collection Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (MIT Press, 2009), the orientation cannot be solely to the center: What students need to be taught is that art is about making everything in the world relevant. (339)

I’d encountered another Davidson book years ago, his collaboration with artist Hugh Buchanan entitled The eloquence of shadows : a book of emblems = emblemata nova (Fife : Thirdpart, 1994). Its text (including introduction) is in parallel Latin and English. I’ve shown it to students for 15 years now, as evidence that the emblem form remains alive even in our day.
 

index rerum     1 January 2010

For Material Cultures 2010, Edinburgh, this proposal has been accepted under the heading readers and reading practices —

Indexing as autobiographical practice in the 19th century :
an examination of copies of John Todd’s Index Rerum

John Todd’s Index Rerum (1833, and much reprinted) was a personal database system designed to facilitate indexing of all the reading done by the student and the professional man. The system was borrowed from John Locke’s own. Key (index) words would be entered on the page whose two letters at the top — the first for a word’s initial, the second for the first vowel following that initial — matched that word. As a one-volume index to many volumes, Todd’s Index Rerum was obviously suited to the needs of ministers, lawyers, and physicians, among others. It was widely used. And yet only two of the eight copies that I have closely examined used the book exclusively for its designated indexing purpose. Instead, we find short and lengthy extracts; personal resolutions; diaries; pressed flowers; autographs; ready reckoner data and computations for mill and other engineering work; drafts of (unsent?) letters; a personal memoir. We find multiple users, in cases where a daughter or widow takes over the unused or lightly-used book of father or late husband. We find experiments in writing one’s signature. We find receipts, drafts of poetry, and other matter loosely inserted.

How are these various practices — all captured in these Index Rerum — to be understood? This small sampling represents only a tiny reading experience database, but the reading is woven in with other practices. Taken together, I argue, these activities were instrumental in developing and maintaining a personal identity, one that indexing helped assure was connected to a larger intellectual milieu.

My reading takes into account critical contemporary views of Todd’s Index Rerum (there were competing systems, of course), and is informed in part by recent scholarship on what may be its closest analogue, zibaldoni (copybooks) of Renaissance Italy.

Reference: some scans, transcriptions and ongoing analysis of these copies is presented here.
 

telegraphic brevity     2 October 2009

from Notes and Queries, 5th series, volume 10, 28 December 1878 —

Telegraphic Brevity. — The art of concisely expressing ideas is worthy of acquisition by all who write for the press. But the Queen has gone ahead of them all by her pithy telegram sent to Princess Louise from Windsor Castle, December 1, Delighted at reception. Say so. On this text a man writes in the New York Sun:— Were there a medal or chromo on offer for the tersest comprehensive telegram, Queen Victoria would probably win it by her Sunday’s Delighted at reception. Say so. This despatch quite surpasses in compactness Caesar’s famous Veni, vidi, vici, since two-thirds of that was plainly surplusage, vici being all that was required. When cable despatches are paid for word by word, to combine fulness and brevity in them is a triumph of economy; and to transmit fully and fairly the Queen’s two distinct burdens of information and command in fewer than five words would puzzle most people. At all events, to exceed this royal brevity without sacrificing sense or sound would occupy an amount of time (which is money) that might cease to make success economical. Had the Queen and her daughter been experts in the tongue of the former’s great-grandfather, she might have accumulated into one formidable German polysyllable, several inches long, the latest domestic or political news; but, using only the Queen’s English, as she did, we think her clearly entitled to the championship. John E. Norcross. Brooklyn, U.S.

A Boston Transcript article looks for further economy in the Queen’s despatch —
The Queen’s dispatch to the Princess Louise is pronounced extravagant, the last two words being superfluous, since the Princess would certainly Say so, and the second and third being equally unnecessary, since the reception was the only thing at which the Queen could have been delighted. Moreover, the dispatch should have been sent at night rates, and the Queen by neglecting to be economical has set a bad example to Canada and its new rulers.

It would appear, however, that the Princess did not say so, hence the Queen’s instruction.
 

on dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s     13 August 2009

One encounters variants of this expression in the introductions of early telegraphic codes. Thus :
Be extremely cautious in writing the words in a plain hand to the dotting of i’s and the crossing of t’s. Invariably write the T at the beginning of a word thus, T, as printed, or thus t, to prevent the operator mistaking it for an F. Use no hyphens. John Wills, his Electro-magnetic telegraph vocabulary, or, Condensing correspondent, designed to communicate commercial and other general intelligence, in abbreviated form and at small expense (Baltimore, 1846),

and In sending messages in cypher, write each word legibly. Begin each word with a capital letter, be sure to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and no mistake can occur, in George W. Phillips, his Telegraphic cypher for transmitting commercial intelligence, &c. by telegraph or otherwise (Third edition, revised and corrected, Cincinnati, 1860).

In telegraphic communication, one codeword might unpack into a sentence-length’s intelligence. A clerk’s or operator’s misreading could occasion a failed transaction, even significant loss. Nor would there have been much context to help; nor was much redundancy built into these early codes, as there would be subsequently. (Though Wills provided figures and letters — indicating columns and rows in a table, respectively — to follow codewords, where usage warranted. Example: the codeword Drumming might also be expressed as Drumming—3—U.)
 

telegraphic swimming meets     20 July 2009

My younger son is a swimmer. I swim and am absorbed by telegraphy. And so Spalding’s 1935 Athletic Library handbook containing rules for National Telegraphic Meets came my way.

I wondered if telegraphic meets had appeared as a means to save travel costs, and even if they might provide a solution should high fuel costs and an eroded economy make a dent on the swim meet world, in which parents SUV and otherwise motor their swimmers many miles to weekend meets. But no. Telegraphic meets in the 1920s and 30s were motivated not by economy but rather by gender politics and principle.

There was tremendous pressure, from within the ranks of women physical educators, to reduce and even avoid competition, as competition was not viewed as consistent with encouraging physical activity among all women. There may also have been concern to avoid excesses that had emerged in men’s intercollegiate sports. Solutions included play and sports days, as well as telegraphic meets which latter provided a means, particularly in the 1930s, for schools to engage in competition in a form that by its nature was non-intensive and precluded emotionalism and spectators. (Gerber, 1975: 4) They also avoided fatiguing travel over long distances.

On play days, athletes from several colleges would meet for a day of competition and socializing; here, mixed teams were formed of players from different colleges, to ensure against competition between colleges. Cahn (1994: 66) explains that sports days were more competitive, allowing schools to form teams in advance, practice several times, and then gather to compete in a single day or weekend of competition. It is not clear to me that either play or sports days were formed for swimming. But splash parties (found at Radcliffe in 1960-61) certainly would have been!

How did telegraphic meets actually work? The students of one college put forth their best efforts and then wired their times and distances to their rivals at another school, writes Allen Guttmann (1991: 137). But it is not clear from the Official Rules that telegraphy was involved at all. Instead, we find instructions for recording of times on Results Blanks a carbon copy being made, which would be sent to a Regional Sponsor, who would in turn send these forms, and tabulations thereof, on to the National Sponsor, not later than April 3. Were the results blanks designed for telegraphic messages? These reports would be sent by night letter, a reduced-rate class of telegram introduced ca. 1915, where messages would be accepted up to 2:00 am for delivery during morning of ensuing business day, plain English (no code).

There would have been no instantaneous reporting during a meet : no reporting of split times in the way that innings or even at-bats in a baseball game might have been, or results of a horseracing heat. There could have been nothing live about the reporting of the short events that were run in meets lasting under 90 minutes (max), taking place in different pools and possibly at different times of a day. The official system required collection of data at a central point, where it was tabulated, vetted, and sent out (by telegraph? by post?).

There is some evidence — and I’ll continue to look for more — about the use of telegraphs, at least in non-National meets. The Radcliffe News of May 28, 1926, reports on a meet

...which was conducted between Radcliffe and Smith by telegraph [and] was an innovation here. As soon as a race was completed here the first, second, and third places were sent to the gym office, from which they were telephoned to the Cambridge Western Union, with whom Radcliffe had previously arranged a special wire to Northhamption. Smith did the same from Northampton.

Surely times would have been telegraphed, in addition to placings. The events were short: 40 yards free style, 40 yards breast, 20 yards back stroke, the so-called plunge*, 20 yards free style, 20 yards side stroke, and a relay. The final score was Smith 50, Radcliffe 12. This was a friendly meet arranged between two sister colleges, and does not relate to the National Telegraphic Meets in which neither school participated. Still, reports of results in between events might have motivated swimmers (and plungers!) in subsequent events.

What were the events in the National Telegraphic Meets?

National Records could also be kept for the 220 yard free style, but apparently not for Telegraphic Meets.

The Spalding’s book provides times and points for the top five finishers in every event (combined, and for Major and Minor colleges), and long (75+) and short (60-75) course records. Amazingly, five out of a total of 46 colleges competing in the 1935 National Telegraphic Meet were disqualified. The disqualified institutions might not have met reporting deadlines, or certified their pools or timing. It might also be that there were doubts about reported times. Jane Fauntz Manske (Olympic swimmer in 1928 and diver in 1932), states in a 1987 interview that We had a swimming team but we had what we called telegraphic meets. We would swim our event against the clock, and then we would telegraph our times to the other schools. So who knows who was telling the truth or who was really champion. And then there is the insistence on scrupulous honesty for competition by communication, in the Handbook language.

fast forward —
What might a telegraphic meet be today, using current technology? Could telegraphic meets provide an alternative to traveling to distant meets, multiplied each weekend in long and short course seasons by many thousands of swimmers across the country? Could they allow a sense of real competition to participants? And if all of this is too grandiose, does there remain at least some place for telegraphic competition in swimming?

I think that telegraphic meets might have a future, even if only a limited one. I assume this future would involve rethinking so-called swimmer treadmills like the Endless Pool or the Swimex 400-OS. With these devices, one swims in place, held not by a harness — as was done historically — but by swimming against a current generated by pump or paddlewheel. At least two things would need to be developed: a means of registering swimmer speed, and a means of communicating one swimmer’s speed to another swimmer — in a visual or some other representation. For the first, I imagine that waterflow speed would be controlled by the swimmer’s (telemetered?) action; water flow speed would proxy swimmer speed. For the second, I envision flat screen displays, along both lengthwise sides of the pool, that would show the remote swimmer(s) in action. (Naturally, swimmers would be video’ed as well, for transmission to their competitors’ displays.) The respective displayed swimmers would be shown falling behind, or pulling ahead — and even out of view entirely — based on their telemetered speeds relative to each other’s.

I don’t see these as supplanting conventional swim meets and competitions, but as paralleling these amongst individuals with access to the swimmer treadmills. I can imagine live virtual competitions between swimmers at great distances from each other — say, at Antarctic and Arctic science bases. I can also imagine these telemetered swimmer treadmills as providing the visually impaired with an equal playing field with sighted competitors; here, cues about the performance of competitors would not be visual but audible, coded to signal changes in relative position and perhaps also indicating elapsed distance, and so on.

and —

from the Official Rules 1936 Third Annual National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meet, this introduction —

The annual National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meets have evolved from a genuine interest in and appreciation of proficiency in swimming among university and college women throughout the country. As planned and organized they give women, in good standing academically, who enjoy swimming races, an opportunity to compete and compare times with other university and college women.

Practices other than those of scrupulous honesty are entirely foreign to the whole idea of competition by communication. Such practices as giving athletic scholarships to induce talented swimmers to enroll, and laxness by those in charge in obtaining skilled timers and in obtaining exact pool measurements, are violations against good sportsmanlike conduct and absolute honesty, and cannot be tolerated.

It is the function of the National Watersports Committee, the Advisory Committee of the National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meets, to disqualify, when presented with good and sufficient evidence of violations, any college or university which does not value these essentials to fair competition by communications. (p19)

Pageants (see cover photo above), water polo, canoeing and diving all have sections in the same Handbook. One also finds a Crawl Form Swimming Rating Scale, by Ann Avery Smith (Head of Swimming, University of Illinois), which has been found to be of real value in rating swimming performances accurately according to accepted standards. (Radcliffe swimmers competed in both speed and form events in the 1920s — it occurs to me that form provides an intersection between the swimming and diving worlds.) And renewed attention to form provides one alternative to the imperatives of the Olympic motto — Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) — that, it is argued, may be anachronistic (see Roan 2010). (Last sentence added on 21 February 2010.)

* the plunge —

The plunge was a timed event in which the swimmer would dive into the pool and glide (strokeless) to the opposite end (if able?). Was it done underwater? Were bends and flexes of the body permitted? Might this have involved an early form of the butterfly kick? Not sure how this relates to the distance plunge, described here and there as a long-jump in water.

sources —

• Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong : Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (1994) here.
• Ellen Gerber, The Controlled Development of Collegiate Sport for Women, 1923-1936. Journal of Sport History 2:1 (1975): 1-28 here.
• Allen Guttmann, Women's Sports : A History (1991) here.
• Interview with Jane Fauntz Manske (1928 Amsterdam Olympics, 200 meter breast stroke; 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, springboard diving, Bronze Medalist) by George A. Hodak (July 1987) here (The inline link to this interview, above, is to a family site, that includes a photo of Fauntz).
• Sheri Roan, Have Olympic athletes done all they can?, Los Angeles Times (17 February 2010), here.

The patent literature on swimming-related equipment, such as J Marwick’s exercising swimming tank (US1,630,797, 1927) can be reviewed via espacenet, using the IPC classification A63B69/12 and a keyword like swimming or tank in the title and abstract field, and limiting years as need be. View original document, then save full document (as a pdf). The classification denotes arrangements in swimming pools for teaching swimming [N: or for training].
 

artificial / physical intelligence     29 May 2009

How one might write poetry not for a human reader, but for an artificial/physical intelligence of the future, not a reader but an inclination to find and parse language against and even ignorant of the poetic grain, for purposes of its own. my notes to my son, from whom the PI link:

sounds like a version of AI that incorporates physical materials into its algorithms. soft/hard ware. ultimately unpredictable, because not fully programmed. Materials are that way — contain flaws — and also react in unforeseen ways to other materials, in various conditions.

and thought — dreamed, actually — of nails, anything, love, war, failure that abrades, stops us, provides gravity, traction, a here or a there or a no where.

recent weeks read these: Samantha Hunt her The Invention of Everything Else (2008/09) and The Seas (2004) and Deborah Moggach her In the Dark (2007), the latter on the strength of an installment in the Guardian series on Writers’ Rooms. Fathers are typesetters in both The Seas and In the Dark. Reading Ryszard Kapuscinski his Another Day of Life (on the Portuguese egress from Angola, 1976/87, that puts me in mind of the other messy Lusitanian egress, from Timor), and the poet Anne Blonstein (who may write for that future artificial intelligence). more anon.

ah, and some writing by Elatia Harris at 3quarksdaily, including My Mother’s Secret Travel Diaries, whence this :

Leaving aside whether the salient point of a thing eluded her — and believe me, it often did — my mother held ephemera in a tight grasp.

That could describe me.
 

noisesome nothing here     21 March 2009

ex ABC Telegraphic Code (Fourth Edition, 1880); and aphorisms of W. Ross Ashby.
 

real poets do not use poetry machines     12 March 2009

A search for poetry machine turns up several instances in 19th century popular fiction. I’ve tagged some of these under machinery at asfaltics. Another is a story of that title by one Samuel Barnard, in Oliver Optic’s Magazine Our Boys and Girls (August 1872): 509-512. Oliver Optic was William T. Adams, author of a popular strain of energetic children’s literature, and may have written this story as Barnard.

The story. Samuel’s mother Mrs. Susan Squaffles, widow, takes on boarders, gentlemen only. One of the boarders writes for newspapers but is a miserable sham because he has purchased a poetry machine with which he goes into the poem business. He’s highly secretive about the machine, and well he should be.

He was not really a poet; he was a poetling. Poetling means a little poet, just as codling means a little cod. ¶ The real poets do not use poetry machines. They make the rhymes out of their heads. This I know to be a fact, for I distinctly remember seeing the man who told me. The poetlings all use the machines. They never tell of it, for if the newspaper editors found it out they would not buy the poems. Machine made poetry does not sell very well. It is like machine-made pants for boys; it rips badly if you read it too fast, just as the pants burst dreadfully when the boys who wear them climb too many fences or play leap-frog too hard.

Samuel is a curious boy with a passion for things that worked and for understanding what makes them go, and so one day while the tenant is out, steals into the room and beholds the machine. —

He went up to the table and stood before the wonderful array of cranks, wheels, and levers. The machine was about three feet long and two feet wide and high. There was a clockwork attachment, with a weight that hung on a pulley under the table. It resembled a telegraph machine. There was a long ribbon of paper rolled on two wheels, and it had a marker, just as Morse's instrument has, to print the words. On one side were a number of stops or handles, with ivory heads, having curious words marked upon them. One was marked Serious, another, Comic, another, Serenades, and so on; one was marked, Stopped rhymes, another, Open rhymes, and there was one marked Metre.

Samuel pulls up a ribbon of output hanging out of the machine — reading Dear creature, from an egg brought forth / O, thou art sweet in chicken broth — and accidentally sets the device in motion. There follows a sequence in which the output shifts in style as Samuel tries first one stop then another, from serious (yielding tragic lines), to metre (yielding something in an elaborate metric), stopped rhyme (yielding one-syllable end-rhymes, including one-syllable words), and finally open rhymes (yielding several lines in each of which five dashes for the insertion of other words are followed by one and two-word rhyming phrases that end the line.

Mr. Poetling returns to discover Samuel at the machine, and flees, never to be seen again.

I wonder if the appearance of several poetry machines in literature of the period — in which they tend to be cast in a negative light — evidences an emerging dissatisfaction with a certain kind of tired versifying, clichéd and mechanical. (I think also of Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary which in its 1888 edition (one of many in the 19th century) included a section on how it might be used to correct apparent telegraphic errors.) Here perhaps may lie a different framework in which receptivity, however limited, to a new poetic practice such as Dickinson’s and Whitman’s, might be understood. Mind you, I’m not necessarily aligning myself with the critics of machine poetry. I take these instances of poetry machine as metaphor for a mechanical, sausage-grinding means of producing a tired romantic verse whose sell-by date had — by 1872 — long since passed.

Watch this neighborhood for a full transcription.
 

curatorial practice     8 March 2009

I have been trawling through a year or two’s bookmarks of reads and leads, detours and accidental discoveries. My intention is to put some not all of these on my asfaltics page at del.icio.us. It’s an inconstant process, done between other tasks. It involves validating links, wondering in some cases why I’d bookmarked the place (topos) to begin with, deciding on what is significant, what isn’t, what is and isn’t useful to me, potentially to others. Then there’s the issue of what to include in the notes, and how to tag the thing — all and both of which amount to curating.

It’s odd to put these links up in no particular order, save for those associations found in the tags. Some are old, some more current. Some I can’t recall, though I’m happy now to find them. Some require more context than I’m able to provide at this time. And then there are — or aren’t — the hundreds of bookmarks lost in abandoned browsers, in defunct or abandoned machines.

These leads — I'll call them here — are a randomized trace of their curator's wanderings. They point elsewhere, an exercise in deixis. I suppose there can enter into it an element of vanity : number of links, exoticism, high heterogeneity whose only glue is subtle principle. Still, an honest mirror. I wonder sometimes if we’re turning back to an earlier time, a Dark Ages in which we pore over old books, mining them — like bookworms? — in new ways, using new discovery techniques, to get the most out of that fossil fuel reservoir. But it’s the nature of language to lend itself to recombinations.

Subsequent to this initial post, and now a few weeks into this project, I see that not all of these bookmarks perform the same function. Some are closer to aphorisms and even emblems, than to entries in a modern-day index rerum. You’ve got title, notes, and a variety of tags. Lots of potential for expressive as well as descriptive uses. Add to that the option of including 72 pixel-square images, provided they’re from flickr; this seems to me fine, a way of keeping the focus on "thick" notes and smart tags, and away from the visual. I’ve used the flickr images more extensively in a separate set for my teaching, design stories.

Weeks later (20 April) I wonder about the singularity of my links — they frequently coincide with noone else’s. Good, maybe? Michal Migurski’s teczno post on diverselessness speaks to this, maybe. I conclude that I’m not watching anything from a hilltop shared by others. Good comments, about ways to encourage/ensure serendipity, new perspectives.
 

read color cut and paste     7 March 2009

Read, Color, Cut, Paste : for children from 5 to 7 years old, by Maud C. Stubbings and Genevieve Byrnes Watts; Cover by Eleanor Campbell. The Merrill Publishing Company, Chicago, Illinois. 1936

Includes instructions like: Cut out these words and paste them under the right picture. Eleanor Campbell (1894-1986) would later illustrate the Dick and Jane series.
 

code condensers 2     11 February 2009

Teaching and other duties slow preparation of new installments on code condensers. But consider the simple 10 figure / 10 letter condenser provided by the Westinghouse Code, published in 1902.

 

An explanation of the condenser on page xv provides these examples of artificial and suitably euphonious 10L words : egvocoudan, acapibilty, and epirrabado. The table on page xvi (shown at right) provides a consonant-vowel equivalent for every figure 00-99. The code is indifferent about cv or vc order : one might reverse as required to achieve euphony. A column of substitute letter pairs is also provided for 31 figures, to afford a more euphonious construction of the transmitted word. How might this work? An example is 2312480025 / jeratibale, which might be written Charitable. There is no concern about mistaking a condenser code word for others in the code: Condenser words can be recognized easily because they contain ten letters, versus no more than nine letters for other codewords in the book.

No provision is made for checking — more elaborate condensers might, for example, use the order of cv and vc syllables to indicate something about the codeword. Some other discussion of the Westinghouse Code can be found here.
 

code condensers 1     1 February 2009

ex M. B. Dickie, US901,957 (1908), Telegraphic Code Condenser (substantially same as GB27,010 (1907))

From the above —
In transmitting—suppose it is desired to send two sentences or words of which the code numbers are 93804 and 132601 — first find the number 04 in scale a, then turn scale c till the number 38 upon it comes in line with 04 in scale a and then turn scale d so that any 9 upon it comes in the same line. This gives the word Neyam. Similarly, by turning the scales c and d till 26 and any 13 are in line with 01 we get Sekad and adding this to the former word we get Neyamsekad which can be cabled for the price of one word.

I have neglected condensers because they do not have a semantic dimension. They are solely concerned with reducing a sequence of figures to a safe sequence of letters, often pronounceable by exhibiting a vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel order, and offering some means of error checking. Why letters? Because letters (and pronounceable syllables and words) held up better in transit through telegraph operators and poor cable conditions, and because they offered potentially 26 symbols for every position, versus only 10 for figures (ordinarily, figures were not sent as such, but as codewords).

Condensers took several forms : tables, tables converted to slide-rule and even wheel form, and mechanical devices. Their compilers were encouraged by the International Telegraphic Convention of 1903, where a telegraphic word was defined as being a pronounceable combination of not more than ten letters. An earlier prompting had been the publication in 1894 of the Official Vocabulary for Telegrams in Preconcerted Language, prepared by the International Telegraph Office in Berne. Every codeword in that volume was numbered : 000000 / Aabam to 213949 / Zythogala.

The numbering of the words in the official vocabulary introduced a new element in codistics i.e. codistic science as far as the term applies here... This important evolution caused the birth of figure codes which were combined with and assisted by the vocabulary as code condenser. (C. B. Barto, Economy and Technique of Codes and Code-Condensers, 1934 : 10.)

Pronounceable (also characterized as euphonious) artificial words were achieved by biliteral, vc or cv syllables. Numerous condensers appeared, able to generate hundreds of thousands, and even many millions, of artificial words — three trillion, theoretically, with Ernest Kendall’s Eureka Cipher Code of 1919.

Condensers are closer to, or lend themselves, to encryption, and it comes as no surprise that one of the key patents in cryptography — one of the steps on the way to the Enigma machine — shows the wheel encryption device attached to a Remington #10 typewriting machine bearing a Western Union Cablegram blank. The link between typewriting and computing was not the keyboard, but automatic printing telegraphy and the introduction of mechanical condensers.

ex Edward H. Hebern, US1,510,441 (1924), Electric coding machine

I will be writing more about code condensers in this space. An example of one can be seen here. See Darren Wershler-Henry’s discussion of Kittler’s arguments, in The Iron Whim : A Fragmented History of Typewriting (2005).
 

catatan     1 February 2009

Catatan is an Indonesian (and Malay) expression for hasil mencatat — what is written, as in a notebook, so it is not lost. I maintain plenty of notes, extracts, bibliographic descriptions : plenty of analysis. It is my hope that this page will encourage synthesis as well. Much of the writing in this website — on asphalt, on Eagle Rock, on radio, on hardware stores — was commenced years ago, and has evolved ever since. I don’t promise that these blog entries won’t mutate like those predecessors.

It is odd to launch this blog on so obscure a topic, even within the obscurity and thickets of detail that are telegraphic codes. But if this is what it takes to force me to hammer out a survey of code condensers, so be it.