Department of Regrettably Discarded Technology

Radio Bogblog in Diagram Form

Long before the era of the famous internet boom we were offered a chance at the technology illustrated here "on the ground floor," a position from which the thing never rose, in point of fact. Rushing along in tandem with its development a herd of more useful methodologies came on, sweeping it aside in their better way of doing the thing it strove to do.

Still, at the time the idea of a private club of lookers was attractive, giving rise to the proposed Radio Bogblog, through which the collected daily output of those who preceded us here at HCE could be forwarded, "narrowcast" is the word coined for it, to its select audience, assembled as they might be in home or office or, as was particularly hoped, clubs in the better precincts where all those who wished to receive it could gather. Victuals and spirits in the main room, a fully equipped laundry room around the side, to give another good reason for being there. No dancing before noon.

The diagram graced the pages of our business plan, a document offered up in mendicity to the few sources of ready cash who ever bothered to listen to what we had in mind, let alone glance abruptly if politely through the few pages it contained. Often enough, we thought, those who looked drew up before the diagram, gave a go at the comprehending of it. Little it did to turn them toward our plan in the end: No it was.

The cabinets housing the facsimile's receiver were nice in fact, oak things lapped in a fine walnut veneer, with handsome knobs of darkest red bakelite for controls. Splendid addition to any decor — home, office or club — we thought at the time. But a burdensome price put the box just outside the reach of most of those we'd hoped to communicate with using the technology, making its adoption problematic. We wavered with our pen over the necessary documents, then rested it on the table without emitting our signature.

Something so attractive in the business plan, the advance in the technology permitting the production of actual piano rolls at the receiving end with the insertion in the cabinet of a clever electronically operated punch press, came to mind.

From the first it had seemed an advance likely to increase the fundamental desirability of the box, and thus perhaps its sale. Sure the clubs would need a steady stream of the things, the current sounds of all the most popular songs. And Radio Bogblog the sole distributor, through its transmissions to the cabinet.

We saw some money there, though none of those we plumped for cash agreed.

Had we attended to the piano roll crash of the earlier part of the century, we now realized, when radio and phonographs had beaten the pulp out of that technology in the marketplace, we would have always shared their qualms.

It came to us that no matter how charming a means of codifying song, the piano roll had peaked, perhaps to the point where the fair sized crowd we'd hoped to attract might insist on tearing the club down that played the things as incessantly as our business plan required. The gathered pack of them might well decide that if that same roll was going to be played over and over and over again, they might as well keep time to it with the sounds of splintering furniture.

Even happily discovering instead the rolls changed on a regular basis (depending of course entirely on the club's choice of licensing plans with Radio Bogblog), undoubtedly the crowd of them would make a grim determined bunch at the very least should they set about to lay the club low for all the other reasons.

For more on which, the popinjay