Free The Dead Media Notebook by Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Tom Jennings, Tom Whitwell Page A

war. The Jenny Lind Doll Company of Chicago produced a doll in 1916 which could sing, talk and recite.
    “Some of the dolls must have been unwieldy indeed. The ‘Primadonna’ produced by the Giebeler Folk Corporation of New York was not only made of aluminium but when the real hair wig on the crown of her hinged head was lifted up it contained a turntable for playing 3 ½ inch records! The doll was made in sizes 25 or 30 inches and the mechanism in the body was wound from the back.
    “In 1923 the Averill Manufacturing Company also designed a phonograph doll, called Dolly Rekord, in their famous Madame Hendren line.
    “Talking dolls, one suspects, became far less of a novelty when the radio and gramophone proper became more generally in use, just as cinematograph toys were displaced by television. Each phase of development introduced its new toys. and some interesting and ingenious working models were allied to the gramophone and its revolving turntable. Some were actually distributed by the company involved in producing the machines (figures 84-86).”
    [FIGURE 84. Page from Scientific American, 1890, showing Edison’s Talking Doll and manufacturing processes.]
    [FIGURE 85. Rare phonograph doll, Siam Soo, 1909; she shimmies and twists her head when mounted on a record shaft, as the record revolves. “SIAM SOO She puts the O- O in Grafonola. Strikingly new and novel. Works on any phonograph with a Columbia Record. Patented.”]
    [FIGURE 86. Uncle Sam appears to chase the Mexican bandit, Pancho Villa, as the record revolves.]
    Source: AUTOMATA AND MECHANICAL TOYS, an illustrated history by Mary Hillier. Bloomsbury Books, London 1976, 1988. ISBN 1 870630 27 0.
     

IBM Letterwriter
    From Bradley O’Neill
    IBM LETTERWRITER: 1941-1942. Analytical/data processing machines cobbled together as a stopgap immediately following Pearl Harbor, built for the US Naval cryptanalytic branch, OP-20-G.
    “[Letterwriters] linked teletype, tape, card, and film media together. From unpretentious beginnings as data input equipment, the IBM Letterwriters blossomed into a number of increasingly complex machines that were used for a wide range of analytical tasks. The Letterwriter system tied special electric typewriters to automatic tape and card punches and eventually to film processing machines. Such automation of data processing was badly needed at OP- 20-G. Without automation, [OP-20-G] would have been unable to receive and process its wartime load of a million words a day.”
    “The system centered about a special electric typewriter, a tape punch, and a tape reader. The typewriter was a modified version of IBM’s expensive Electromatic machine. The tape punch and tape reader were bread-box sized metal frames filled with relays and sensing pins. The relays controlled reading and punching and were used to convert the teletype code to the signals needed by OP-20-G’s other machines. Linked together, the punch, the reader, and typewriter covered the top of a large desk. It was hoped they would eventually allow the creation of machine-ready data directly from OP-20-G’s new international telegraph system.”
    “Simple changes made the Letterwriter equipment useful for another very important but time consuming task, the analysis of [encryption device] wheel settings. When an analyst thought he had found the correct combinations on an enemy system he would set a copy of the encryption machine’s wheels, lugs, and plugboards and type in parts of the encrypted message. He then examined the output to see if it was sensible.”
    “Despite their usefulness and reliability, there was a drawback to the Letterwriters. They were not rapid machines. Because of the limits set by the mechanical nature of typewriters and the punches, the system ran at eight characters per second or only 480 characters per minute.”
    Source: Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex, by Colin Burke, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen N.J. 1994. LC#