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Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

Mystifying the Technical Particulars

Consider the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, the ephemeral lavishness of which fascinated Walter Benjamin, namely due to correlations between such lavishness and free trade. There are also Thomas Edison’s demonstrations of electric light at the 1881 Paris Exhibition and the phonograph at the 1889 Paris Centennial of the French Revolution. The list goes on, and one persuasive interpretation of these demonstrations is that they foster myths of the lone inventor, often a textbook hero of some entrepreneurial class in US culture. Such myths reduce a set of complex activities (e.g., the labors of production, research, and advertising) to a single product borne by a genius scientist or engineer. They also bolster bootstrap narratives of upward mobility not unlike a Horatio Alger story. Moreover, the mystification of a technology enables what Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) calls a “medial ideology,” or mass attention to the formal qualities of a given medium at the expense of a technology’s material particulars. In the case of the telegraphone, the aesthetic appeal of magnetic wire’s perfect record overshadowed the physical limitations of the technology’s hardware and the labor involved in creating it. In many ways, the telegraphone was vaporware at the turn of the century.

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Borne by a Genius Scientist or Engineer Sterne (2003, 181) directly addresses the “male-birth model of technological history,” noting how it naturalizes reproduction while also mystifying the conditions of reproduction. Of course, one of the most well-known male-birth narratives in the histories of technology and literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")
Medial Ideology In Mechanisms, Kirschenbaum (2008, 36) contextualizes and defines medial ideology in the following way: “Jerome McGann has used the phrase ‘Romantic ideology’ to describe the manner in which modern literary criticism of the Romantic poets has been characterized by ‘an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.’ I believe electronic textual theory has labored under similar uncritical absorptions of the medium’s self- or seemingly self-evident representations. While often precisely Romantic in their celebration of the fragile half-life of the digital, the ‘ideology’ I want to delineate below is perhaps better thought of as medial—that is, one that substitutes popular representations of a medium, socially constructed and culturally activated to perform specific kinds of work, for a more comprehensive treatment of the material particulars of a given technology.” (This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")
Fascinated Walter Benjamin At several moments in The Arcades Project, Benjamin mentions the Crystal Palace Exhibition (or the Great Exhibition). Of most interest to him is the colossal character of the event, the ephemeral architecture (a palace made of glass) built for it, and the relationship of both with free trade and commodity culture.
(This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")
Myths of the Lone Inventor Or as Marx (1997, 493 n4) poignantly writes in Capital: “A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist.” (This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")
Textbook Hero For more on the textbook hero, see Hounshell (1975, 1), who argues: “Most professional historians of technology recognize . . . textbook accounts as myths and discount their simplistic treatment of what is really a complex story of invention, development, and innovation. They wish the history of technology to be given more prominence in general textbooks, but first to be freed of old myths.” (This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")

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