The Alchemy of Us by Ainissa Ramirez

Author:Ainissa Ramirez [Ramirez, Ainissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology, unintended consequences, social history, Science, engineering, materials science, history of science, history of technology, STEM, maker, time, Transportation, Communication, data, privacy, light, pollution, Neuroscience, photography, scientific racism, intersectional, History, Language, creativity, think, transistor, Muybridge, Goodwin, Stanford, Caroline Hunter, Polaroid, Ruth Belville, Strowger, Coy, switchboard, Alexander Bell, Samuel Morse, Edison, Golden Record, Bell Laboratories, phonograph, assassination, president, Lincoln, jazz, Einstein, Christmas, IBM, Pyrex.
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Edison created a new way to represent information in addition to written language. Words on a page had two lives—a spoken existence and a written one. But sound only had one life to live. Sound was confined to a short time span and a habitat confined between one person’s lips and another’s ears. Beyond these bounds, sound, like a snowflake, left no signature. For these reasons, when Edison spoke “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into his phonograph, his words were a milestone of human progress equivalent to Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” while stepping onto the moon. With the phonograph, utterances, like a baby’s first words, could be heard and cherished at any time. Without Edison’s—or humanity’s—realizing it, however, Edison changed the shape of data. Information had undergone a metamorphosis from scribbles on parchment and words stamped on paper with Gutenberg’s printing press to Edison’s pricks in tin.

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