Tedium - Old Stories, New Eyes 👁👁

Today in Tedium: Throughout 2021, Tedium has covered a variety of stories with all sorts of weird angles. Like your crankiest uncle, I’ve fired off numerous “letters to the editor” (emails to Ernie) after reading a Tedium article and thinking there was something left out. Join me as I expand these letters into several short takes on jet-age photography, the vestigial properties of the Nintendo 2DS, the metadata of novelty songs, and a little family history. — Michael @ Tedium

The typical color feature in a 1950s magazine with a typically absurd 1950s recipe, in the June 8, 1953 issue of Life. (Google Books)

Photography in the Jet Age

In November, Ernie wrote about the long history of sending news photographs over literal wires. A great book that I picked up last year, Vanessa R. Schwartz’s Jet Age Aesthetic, alerted me to a different mash-up of photography and fast-moving technology: the jet plane and the color news photo.

Color photography was a staple of glossy American magazines from the 1950s, especially Life. Advertisers led the way. The typical issue of Life from the 1950s still had most news photos printed in cheaper black and white. In contrast, ads like this strange combination of lemon Jell-o and tomato sauce were in glorious color.

That’s not to say all news and entertainment was in black and white. Some “evergreen” stories that wouldn’t get stale in the six weeks it took to print in color got the color treatment. One such story from the same issue of Life with the Jell-O ad was Part IV of Lincoln Barnett’s “The World We Live In.” This feature on the Earth’s skies and seas included some spectacular color photos of clouds.

(This six-week delay for color printing has not entirely gone away. My local paper, the Seattle Times, still finalizes the Pacific NW Magazine insert a month and a half ahead of time before stashing it in between the Sunday coupons.)

For certain news events, Life’s editors would make an exception and rush out color photojournalism. Schwartz’s book documents how the magazine pulled this off for the June 2, 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

This event is often seen as a watershed for television since it was the first coronation broadcast live. But the TV audience of 1953 was still modest. The best TVs available had small screens capable only of displaying in black and white. And TV producers were still figuring out live coverage. Life’s writers gleefully pointed out the many screw-ups in the coronation broadcast. Magazines, therefore, would be most Americans’ first chance to see the queen in high-resolution color.

But because the coronation was in England, getting photos printed for an American magazine presented a huge logistical challenge.

The June 8, 1953 issue of Life contained a message from publisher Andrew Heiskell on how the magazine was reserving “space on 42 different flights [for] 90,000 pounds of printed color pages” in a bold attempt to print a color cover story. Given the many risks involved, Heiskell admitted, “at this point, your guess is as good as ours as to what kind of Coronation story you will see in LIFE next week.”

A map accompanying a letter from Life publisher Andrew Heiskell on how the magazine plans to fast-print color photos of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. (Google Books)

A subsequent feature titled “How a Record Was Set in Color Printing” explains how the staff at Life succeeded in getting a color feature out. Using special Ektachrome color film (faster to print and more durable for the harrowing plane journey), Life’s photojournalists rushed the shots of the coronation from London on the era’s new jet planes. Although a refueling stop at Gander, Newfoundland was still necessary, jet travel cut down transit enough to get the photos to the US and distribute them in time for printing. As one admiring Life reader later wrote in, “They just had to come through. It wouldn’t have been Life if they hadn’t.”

Ektachrome film. (Wikipedia)

These days, photojournalists and filmmakers typically send shots digitally. But sometimes physically transporting media is still necessary. While under house arrest, Iranian director Jafar Panahi famously smuggled his documentary This Is Not a Film out of the country in a flash drive hidden in a cake.

How I Research Stuff

I love learning the particulars of how people work. So, Ernie’s piece on how he researches material for Tedium was particularly fascinating.

As someone who often does extensive research in writing quizbowl questions or the particulars of the 1980s coin-op scene in bars, I thought I’d share a few research techniques not covered in Ernie’s article.

One neat resource I found this year for exploring more early-web content is Marginalia, a search engine that prioritizes text-only content. This usually isn’t my first option when researching a topic, but it’s a great way to filter out the low-value SEO content that often pollutes Google searches.

The biggest secret to getting access to interesting research databases not mentioned in Ernie’s essay is to find a friend in college and do a Netflix-style password sharing deal. The typical university library will have access to a ton of paywalled content. One of my favorite such databases is ArtStor, JStor’s visual cousin. It’s the best place for extremely high-resolution art.

Another is Oxford Scholarship Online. It has plaintext entries from many of the books published by Oxford University Press. I like these because they’re easy to convert to machine-read audiobooks via something like Google’s WaveNet text-to-speech API. Yes, having a machine read a book to you is a worse experience than a professional actor. But I have way more time to listen to content than to read it.

On that note, let me make a confession. Ernie is justly proud of the custom design of Tedium. It was even featured on Product Hunt. But I’ve got a lot of stuff to read each week. I don’t always have 15 minutes each Wednesday and Friday to read Tedium when it arrives. For several years, I’ve used Pocket, a read-it-later service to store interesting content from the internet and get around paywalls. I’m sure Ernie already didn’t love converting a lovingly designed Tedium piece into Pocket’s native format.

Tedium in Pocket. Not exactly the design you’re used to.

But what’s surely against the spirit of Tedium is what I’ve done since the most recent redesign. Something in Pocket’s parsing logic broke, meaning I could no longer directly save Tedium posts. My workaround for this and other Pocket-unfriendly websites is to scrape the site for the plain text, upload it to my otherwise defunct home page, and then save that version in Pocket. On top of that, I usually then take advantage of Pocket’s “listen to this article” feature to “read” it. And so I’ve had a machine read to me a lot of this year’s Tedium content.

It’s like a Facebook version of Tedium, except without the newsfeed ads.

A patent filing with improbable odds. (Google Patents)

When your great-grandfather’s small business shows up in a Tedium piece

The most surreal experience reading Tedium this year was when I came across this passage in Ernie’s article on the rise of braided nylon in charging cables.

The first example I can find of nylon being used in cable-style settings is in the form of a 1950 patent filing by Howard J. Shive of the Bentley-Harris Manufacturing Company. As the patent filing makes clear, this was not an easy thing that the company was trying to do:

The application of a continuous coating to a fabric tubing, in the manufacture of electrical insulation material, presents many problems. In the first place, the coating must be of uniform thickness throughout the length and periphery of the product. Thin areas exposing the underlying fabric tubular sleeving, as well as thick and uneven portions due to the running of the coating solution, cannot be tolerated. Moreover, it is often necessary to employ a heat stabilizing to prevent deterioration of the coating when equipment containing the insulating material becomes heated in assembly or operation. It has been found that due to the tendency of such a stabilizing agent to settle out from a vinyl resin Solution, it is a very difficult matter to incorporate the desired amount of stabilizing agent in the coating by using such a solution.

Astute readers may have noticed that I share a surname with Bentley in the Bentley-Harris Manufacturing Company. This is because the company was co-founded by my great-grandfather, William H. Bentley, Sr.

(As far as I’m aware, we’re unrelated to the much more famous line of Bentleys that founded the luxury car brand. We’re also not related to Snowflake Bentley, the most famous snowflake photographer until Nathan Myrhvold went all Modernist Cuisine on them.)

This company never had more than a few hundred employees, so it came as a shock to see it inadvertently dug up by Ernie. In the spirit of adding a personal connection to your writing, let me conclude with a potted history of Bentley-Harris as it intersects with many Tedium themes.

Ironically, the research techniques I mentioned above were not very helpful in finding information about Bentley-Harris. There just isn’t very much about the company’s early history on the internet. However, talking to some of my relatives I’ve learned that they indeed were known for sleeving and sheathing. The most recognizable product they made was a heat-resistant gasket for self-cleaning ovens. You may not know it by name, but chances are your oven has a ring on the door like this:

The gasket on my oven, which could use some self-cleaning.

My dad claims that Bentley-Harris also manufactured parts for the lifeline used by NASA astronauts when conducting spacewalks. I can’t find anything to back this up, but it’s neat if true.

Bob Smyth in an Apollo space suit. The lifelines might use Bentley-Harris tech. (NASA)

I was born after the company was sold to Federal-Mogul, a firm that mainly makes auto-parts. Bentley-Harris lives on as a niche B2B brand under Tenneco Systems Protection. They’re still known for the type of “sleeving and shielding solutions” highlighted in that braided nylon patent.

As I searched for more information on the company and thought about how I might end this piece, I was reminded that my grandfather, who sold the company to Federal-Mogul and died when I was young, wrote regular editorials for IEEE’s Electrical Insulation Magazine. This was a technical journal he founded after “retiring from the sleeving business.”

My grandfather’s editorial from Volume 2, Number 5 of IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine.

His musings on the quest for universal magnet wire at “Coil Winding ‘86” is perhaps not much different than this very essay summarizing a years’ worth of work—it even has the same self-deprecating asides. I’d like to thank Ernie for this unintentional shoutout that got me motivated to dig through this virtual archive. Here’s to another great year for Tedium in 2022!