Yesterday’s post of German soldiers in World War I spooling out telephone wire is a bit comic. But it is  comic much in the same way that Jules Verne stories or early science fiction movies where prosaic and comic. But on a much more serious note they indicate humans’ drive and belief that technology holds the answer and the key. That is the dream in the case of yesterdays’ image that we could have telephones without wires, that we could communicate across the ocean without having to lay down underwater cables, that we could broadcast music or even video across the oceans, or that we would have digital film-free camera with images ready to transmit across a paperless worldwide web.

All of this is , of course, exactly what we saw, And how rapidly it all evolved and unfolded. What are our dreams today? Wireless charging, interplanetary even interstellar space travel. Do we dare to dream of time travel or teleportation?  While we must be cautious about our dreams, while we must concede to physical law and limits, it is so much fun to exercise our imaginations to dream and to imagine. I am reminded of the time traveler in HG Wells’ “The Time Machine,” who is driven to dream of the end of the end of the world.

‘A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.’

And there is also a curious bifurcation. We do not always dream within the confines of technological reality. Sometimes it works the other way, where we dream and dream becomes reality.So we should not be too quick to draw lines.

So as a photograph to illustrate this wonderful story I have chosen Figure 1. On 13 May 1897, Guglielmo Marconi sent the world’s first wireless communication over open sea. The experiment involved transmission from Flat Holm in Wales transversed over the Bristol Channel to Lavernock Point in Penarth, a distance of 6 kilometers (3.7 mi). The message sent was appropriate then, and still appropriate for us dreamers today. It said simply:

“Are you ready?”

It is a curious point that when we look at an old daguerreotype we get the impression that the people are glum. I have always assumed that this does not reflect that fact that the people of that age were particularly dour. More likely they took the process and act of photography more seriously than we do. Such was the requisite way to portray oneself. In addition the long exposure – and certainly the price you were paying for your portrait made you take seriously the photographers approbation to hold still. Worse, you were subject to the contrivance of a chair that held your head in place. Children were particularly pained by this. Rigidity is the opposite of childhood, and these little people decked out in their Sunday best seem as rigid as dolls – designed to portray not children but mini-adults. The only children that seem relaxed lie in the disturbing postmortem photographs.

It all makes one wonder how the people of the daguerreotype era themselves viewed these images in amalgam. An excellent hint is given by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contemporary account in his story “The House of Seven Gables,” which by the way still stands and is a gorgeous museum to the author in Salem, MA. Daguerreotypes feature strong in this story.

 “If you would permit me,” said the artist, looking at Phoebe, “I should like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is because the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original wears, to common eyes, a very different expression. It would gratify me to have your judgment on this character.”

There is the magic of photography again. You can hide the darker regions of your soul and disposition behind a disingenuous small. But the photograph, the daguerreotype penetrates. It reveals your true character. Like Anubis it weighs the value of your heart.

I received an advertisement/invitation from my alma mater the other day, suggesting that I might want to join a tour of Eastern Europe. There, I was promised, I could sit once more in a telephone booth.  This was touted as the ultimate retro experiment. But it got me wondering why the payphone was something worth reliving. When I grew up these were everywhere around NYC and most of them didn’t work. Worse, most of them first took your money and then didn’t work. But the most unappealing aspect of the pay phone or telephone booth was the stench of tobacco, body odor, and the proliferation of germs. It was the key target of enterprising young reporters investigative reports, who had their sights on the legacy of Nellie Bly and who would have them swabbed and the swabs cultured to reveal a plethora of bacterial species, many only to be found, well how shall I put this, in your nether regions. Same is true of support bars and straps in subway trains. It is best to assume a self-protective disposition.

But the point that I am making is a simple one. There’s a reason that they call it progress. And this is a significant one. Cellphones are a lot cleaner than payphones ever were. It’s a matter of preserving the species. 

So I went in search of a decent copyright-free payphone image, and this to no avail. There were of course all sorts of tardis images for “Dr. Who” aficionados. There were also a few images of 1940’s and 1950’s  pinup-girls sitting in phone booths and a very famous portrait of the Beetles. . But not what I was looking for. So I have chosen instead to go with the image of Figure 1, which shows Alexander Graham Bell himself making the first call from NYC to Chicago in 1881.  There is also I pretty cool recording of Bell experimenting with the telephone from 1885.  As we have discuss in the past everyone one of these communications advances: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, represented in its own right an internet. The Lily Tomlin character of the condescending telephone operator, Ernestine, with her plug in network comes to mind as the poster child for the brave new world of internets. “Is this the party with whom I am speaking?”

So I am thinking that I should pay a bit more attention to payphones and antique phones as I encounter them. Evern the “princess phone,” once such a strylistic advance is now an antique. Perhaps a few retrospective and nostalgic photographs are in order, even if they werre disgusting or is it “grody to the max?“

It was a surreal weekend here in the United States as White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer and the White House declaring the fact that there is no way to accurately estimate crowds from photographs, and the fact that the crowds at the Trump Inauguration were the biggest ever.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

As he stormed out, one reporter did ask how he knew this, if there was no way to measure it? 

But this fact/alternative fact universe is not my subject here. What I am here concerned about is that the validity of photography or more accurately of photometry has been threatened. Photography, already under threat because of the incipient demise of film, has been challenged! Someone must come to its defense.

So can you estimate crowd size from photographs? The answer is yes, absolutely, of course you can. Indeed, we have been using such aerial reconnaissance since the American Civil war to estimate troop concentrations. And the key point, or the key word here, is estimate.  Any such estimation is just that an estimate. It offers a level of uncertainty. The more controlled the measurement the more certain of the number you are. Meaning equivalent camera position … In the olden days, we scientists used to do numerical integration by taking pictures and then weighing the filled parts and the unfilled parts. There is nothing genius there. To get to an absolute number, not just which is bigger [now termed “more bigly”], you need to perform some kind of calibration, you know like have a bunch of people stand on a lawn. And with such crowd estimation the information can be “backed up” with, for instance, subway ridership.

And back to the “which is bigger” question, I refer you to the New York Times [now referred to as the Evil Empire].  I mean, people, it’s obvious. You can trust both the photograph and your eyes. And more importantly, in the present case particularly, who really cares? It’s not important! It’s like worrying about the size of someone’s hands or other body parts.

Where the subject gets really interesting is when you ask the arguably more interesting question whether there is a better way. And the answer to that is, probably yes. It takes us, once again, into the world of the singularity. A recent scientific paper in the Open Journal of the Royal Society demonstrates that crowd size can be estimated pretty accurately by monitoring cell phone activity. While it may introduce an economic bias towards people with smart phones, it is a more accurate approach than simple photometry. And, needless-to-say, the best way to achieve an accurate estimate is to use multiple techniques simultaneously. If your goal is to get an accurate measurement it can be done. Somehow, I suspect that accuracy is not the issue here. No matter how accurate, you can always deny it and weave (Oh no! I’m going to say it.) an alternative truth.*

It strikes me that we have a curious tautology here. An “alternative truth” is, in fact, a lie. But an “alternative lie” is still a lie.

Good lenses are expensive. But this is ever a matter of perspective; so I thought that I would post today about what might well be one of the biggest and most expensive cameras ever. Try buying the optics of Figure 1 on BHPhotovideo or Amazon!

This past month the next, great, space telescope was revealed. This is the James Webb Space Telescope and is scheduled for launch in October 2018. It has been twenty years and $8.7 B in the making, which are sobering numbers.The telescope is named after NASA James Webb, who led NASA during the glory days of the 1960s. It is the long awaited heir to the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s kind of like being a short person and having a giant child. Figure 1 shows the main optic a 20-foot giameter array of 18 hexagonal mirrors The James Webb Space telescope has seven times the light gathering power of Hubble. That means that it can see much fainter (often translating to more distant) objects. The cost of the new space telescope has consumed much of NASA’s budget. Originally, it was budgeted as costing $500M, but …  A major aspect of the telescope is its ability to take infrared or heat images. To do this it will be placed a million miles from the Earth and it will be equipped with giant umbrella to shield it from sun and moonlight.

Regular readers of this blog know my fondness for discussing captured moments from the past. The James Webb telescope will redefine this concept, when it images events from the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, which occurred 13 billion years ago. It is certainly fun to speak with certainty about scientific discovery, but the really amazing images will not be those we imagine but those we cannot.