tutorial with michael
Tancre
5 years ago
commit
0192821bc0
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# This script takes a txt file and use a template to create
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# html pages linked in a linear sequence and containing each a line of the txt
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# It generate also the css out of a template.
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# I would like to make also a circular version. A loop that arrived at the last page reconnects with the first page.
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# and eventually try other possible sequences and links (such as metarefresh etc..)
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# This could become a commad, like > htgen [chose if linear (-l) or circular (-c) or ...] [input file] [input html template]
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from jinja2 import Template
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file = "./filoXX_fN.txt"
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#ask name input file and use it also for name output file
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# read formatted text
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with open(file, "r") as sentences_file:
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for n, line in enumerate(sentences_file.readlines()):
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# CHECK IF THE FORMAT IS CORRECT FIRST - comment all the above print()
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print(line)
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# format text again if needed - comment if not needed
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line = line.replace("\n", "")
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# link to next page
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nxt_n = n + 1
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nxt_n = str(nxt_n)
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file_name_next = "file_{}.html".format(nxt_n.zfill(2))
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# file name
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n = str(n)
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file_name = "file_{}.html".format(n.zfill(2))
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# jinja html template
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template_html = Template('''
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> {{ sentence }} </p>
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<a href="{{ next }}" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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''')
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# render template
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html_list = template_html.render(sentence = line, next = file_name_next)
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# write html
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with open(file_name, "w") as output:
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output.write(html_list)
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# css template
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template_css = '''
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body {
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background-color: black;
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color: red;
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}
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p {font-size: 100px;}
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.button {
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font: bold 11px Arial;
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text-decoration: none;
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background-color: #EEEEEE;
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color: #333333;
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padding: 2px 6px 2px 6px;
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border-top: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
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border-right: 1px solid #333333;
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border-bottom: 1px solid #333333;
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border-left: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
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}
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'''
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# write css
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with open("style.css", "w") as output:
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output.write(template_css)
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# This script convert a txt file into a js containing an array with each line of the txt
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# I would like make a command from this, like > arraygen [name var] [input file] [outputfile]
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fl = open("filoXX_nF.txt", "rt")
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rd = fl.read()
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lst = rd.splitlines()
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with open("filoXX.js", "w") as output:
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output.write(str(lst))
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fl.close()
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with open('filoXX.js', 'r') as original:
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data = original.read()
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with open('filoXX.js', 'w') as modified:
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modified.write("var x = " + data + ";")
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> Everybody on earth knowing </p>
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<a href="file_01.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> that beauty is beautiful </p>
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<a href="file_02.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> makes ugliness. </p>
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<a href="file_03.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> Everybody knowing </p>
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<a href="file_04.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> that goodness is good </p>
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<a href="file_05.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> makes wickedness. </p>
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<a href="file_06.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> For being and nonbeing </p>
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<a href="file_07.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> arise together; </p>
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<a href="file_08.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> hard and easy </p>
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<a href="file_09.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> complete each other; </p>
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<a href="file_10.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> long and short </p>
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<a href="file_11.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> shape each other; </p>
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<a href="file_12.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> high and low </p>
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<a href="file_13.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> depend on each other; </p>
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<a href="file_14.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> note and voice </p>
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<a href="file_15.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> make the music together; </p>
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<a href="file_16.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> before and after </p>
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<a href="file_17.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> follow each other. </p>
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<a href="file_18.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> does without doing, </p>
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<a href="file_20.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> teaches without talking. </p>
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<a href="file_21.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> The things ofthis world </p>
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<a href="file_22.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Tao one</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> exist, they are; </p>
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<a href="file_23.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
|
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<html>
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<head>
|
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<title>Tao one</title>
|
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p> To bear and not to own; </p>
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<a href="file_25.html" class="button">next</a>
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</body>
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</html>
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body {
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background-color: black;
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color: red;
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}
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p {font-size: 100px;}
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|
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.button {
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font: bold 11px Arial;
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text-decoration: none;
|
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background-color: #EEEEEE;
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color: #333333;
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padding: 2px 6px 2px 6px;
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border-top: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
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border-right: 1px solid #333333;
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border-bottom: 1px solid #333333;
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border-left: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
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}
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________________________________________________________________________________________PHILOSOPHY XX
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Antroposophy(1910)
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steiner
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Last NeoHeghelists (1910)
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croce
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gentile
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mctaggart
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royce
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<< FILOSOFIA CONTINENTALE
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Psychoanalysis (1900)
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freud - totem e tabu, tre saggi sulla teoria sessuale, psicologia della vita amorosa
|
||||
jung - il problema dell'inconscio nella psicologia moderna
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adler
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Trascendental Phenomenology(1900)
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Husserl
|
||||
>>Realist Phenomenology - Munich Phenomenology(1910)
|
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Scheler
|
||||
Reinach
|
||||
Daubert
|
||||
Pfänder
|
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Geiger
|
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Hildebrand
|
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>>Existential Phenomenology (1925)
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heidegger - intro essere e tempo, che cos'è metafisica
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jasper - del tragico
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merleau ponty
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>>Ateist/Umanistic Existentialism(1940)
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sartre - la nausea, il muro, le mani sporche, le mosche, morti senza tomba, a porte chiuse
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camus - lo straniero, il mito di sisifo
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de beauvoir
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Levinas
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Nietzschean Reneissance & Limit Experience (1930)
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Bataille - storia dell'occhio, il blu del cielo, madame edwarda
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Blanchot
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Klossowski - le dame romane
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Colli - la nascita della filosofia
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Frankfurt School (beginning of NeoMarxism - Critical Theory) (1920)
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Adorno
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Benjamin
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Horkheimer
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Marcuse
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+
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Luckas
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Gramsci - vari, on ideology,
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Habermas
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Aaron
|
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Arendt
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della volpe
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Workerism (1960) / Autonomia (70)
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Negri
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Berardi
|
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Tronti
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+
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Gorz (Political Ecology)
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||||
Debord (Situationism) (1960) - la società dello spettacolo
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MediaTheory (1950)
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||||
McLuhan
|
||||
Flusser
|
||||
Kittler
|
||||
Jenkins
|
||||
Murray
|
||||
>>Cutlural studies (1964)
|
||||
Hoggart
|
||||
Hall - encoding/decoding
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||||
Hebdige - Sub Culture, the Meaning of Style
|
||||
Willis
|
||||
Dyer
|
||||
Denning
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||||
Grossberg
|
||||
Chambers
|
||||
McLennan
|
||||
Gilroy
|
||||
McRobbie
|
||||
Bland
|
||||
Webster
|
||||
Lorrain
|
||||
Plant (cyberfeminism + cybernetic culture research unit)
|
||||
Schwarz
|
||||
Hobson
|
||||
Carby
|
||||
williams
|
||||
dyer
|
||||
mcrobbie
|
||||
gilroy
|
||||
irigeray
|
||||
>> Cyberculture - Internet culture (1960s)
|
||||
De Landa
|
||||
Kelly
|
||||
Schirmacher
|
||||
Levy
|
||||
Gunkel
|
||||
Vitanza
|
||||
Ulmer
|
||||
Laughlin
|
||||
>> Cyberpunk (1984)
|
||||
Gibson - hippy hat brain parasite
|
||||
Sterling
|
||||
>> Cyberfeminism (1985)
|
||||
Haraway
|
||||
Paasonen
|
||||
Hayles
|
||||
Senft
|
||||
Gajjala
|
||||
|
||||
<< FILOSOFIA ANALITCA
|
||||
Logicism/Logic Atomism (1910)
|
||||
Frege
|
||||
Russel
|
||||
moore
|
||||
Wittgenstein - tractatus logico philosophicus / -------
|
||||
+
|
||||
Whithead -----
|
||||
Elizabeth Anscombe (Analytic Thomism)
|
||||
Iris Murdoch (Analytic philosophy/ Virtue ethics/ Modern Platonism)
|
||||
Goedel
|
||||
Ramsey
|
||||
susanne langer
|
||||
ernst cassier
|
||||
>>Logic Positivism/NeoPositivism - Vienna's Circle - Berlin's Circle (1920)
|
||||
carnap
|
||||
neurath
|
||||
reichenbach
|
||||
+
|
||||
ryle
|
||||
quine
|
||||
ayer
|
||||
hempel
|
||||
|
||||
>>Contemporary Epistemology (1930)
|
||||
popper
|
||||
bachelard
|
||||
khun
|
||||
fayerabend
|
||||
|
||||
Bell Labs(1925)
|
||||
>>Cybernetics ((30)1948)
|
||||
Wiener
|
||||
McCulloch
|
||||
Rosenbluet
|
||||
Ashby
|
||||
grey walter
|
||||
glushkov
|
||||
von foerster
|
||||
bateson
|
||||
berg
|
||||
>>Computer Science ((30)1948)
|
||||
Hilbert
|
||||
Turing (Artificial Intelligence 1950)
|
||||
Goedel
|
||||
Church
|
||||
Von Neumann
|
||||
>>Cognitive Science (1956)
|
||||
searle
|
||||
dennett
|
||||
chalmers - the hard problem of consciousness / extended mind
|
||||
chomsky (linguistic)
|
||||
edelman
|
||||
fodor
|
||||
hofstadter - goedel, echer, bach
|
||||
johnsinlaiard
|
||||
longuet higgins
|
||||
minsky
|
||||
dummett
|
||||
neisser
|
||||
papert
|
||||
pinker
|
||||
|
||||
>>Ordinary Language Philosophy (1950) / Oxford Philosphy / New Wittgenstein
|
||||
Austin
|
||||
Cavell
|
||||
Diamond
|
||||
>>NeoPragmatism (1970)
|
||||
sellars
|
||||
rorty
|
||||
rescher
|
||||
haak
|
||||
brandom
|
||||
west
|
||||
putnam - minds and machines
|
||||
davidson
|
||||
|
||||
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
Structuralism (1916)
|
||||
de saussure - corso di linguistica generale
|
||||
>>PostStructuralism (1945)
|
||||
levi-strauss (anthropologiy)
|
||||
lacan (psychoanalysis)
|
||||
althusser (critical theory)
|
||||
foucault (critical theory & postmodernism) - il sogno, prefazione alla trasgressione
|
||||
barthes (literary criticism) - la metafora dell'occhio, l'impero dei segni, il piacere del testo
|
||||
todorov (literary criticism)
|
||||
>> derrida (Deconstructivism)
|
||||
>> lyotard (PostModernism)
|
||||
deleuze - postscritto sulla società di controllo
|
||||
guattari - on machines
|
||||
d&g
|
||||
kristeva
|
||||
baudrillard - l'altro visto da se, il complotto dell'arte
|
||||
butler
|
||||
badieu
|
||||
+
|
||||
agamben
|
||||
boltanski
|
||||
|
||||
Scientific Futurology (1973)
|
||||
club of Rome
|
||||
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________PHILOSOPHY XXI
|
||||
|
||||
Zizek
|
||||
Sloterdijk
|
||||
|
||||
PostHumanism
|
||||
Pepperell
|
||||
Marchesini
|
||||
Haraway - a cyborg manifesto
|
||||
Hayles - How we became post human? (conclusion) / the traumas of code / Unthought
|
||||
latour
|
||||
|
||||
>>TransHumanism
|
||||
Esfandiary (FM-2030)
|
||||
>>Supermodernity
|
||||
augè
|
||||
eagleton
|
||||
>>Hypermodernity
|
||||
Lipovetsky
|
||||
Aubert
|
||||
Charles
|
||||
Stiegler
|
||||
|
||||
Post-Autonomia - Foucauldians discourse analysis
|
||||
Virno
|
||||
Lazzarato
|
||||
Marazzi
|
||||
Pasquinelli - augmented intelligence / the eye of the algorithm /
|
||||
Federici
|
||||
+
|
||||
Byung-Chul Han
|
||||
|
||||
Cybernetic Center Research Unit (1995)
|
||||
Plant
|
||||
Software Studies (2008)
|
||||
kittler - there is no software
|
||||
manovich - info aesthetics / the language of new media / soft cinema / software takes command / instagram and contemporary image / ai aesthetics
|
||||
cramer - on software (x4)
|
||||
fuller - it seems like you are writing a letter
|
||||
Speculative realism (2007)
|
||||
Quentin Meillassoux
|
||||
Object Oriented Ontology (2009)
|
||||
Graham Harman
|
||||
Levi Bryant
|
||||
Ian Bogost
|
||||
Trancendental Materialism (2011)
|
||||
Iain Hamilton Grant
|
||||
Eugene Thacker
|
||||
Steven Shaviro
|
||||
Jane Bennett
|
||||
Transcendental Nihilism (2012)
|
||||
Ray Brassier
|
||||
Capitalist realism (2009)
|
||||
Mark Fisher - nick land:mind games
|
||||
Accellerationism (2013)
|
||||
Nick land - cyberpositive / fanged noumena (hypervirus)
|
||||
Negarestani
|
||||
|
||||
New atheism
|
||||
|
||||
New materialism
|
||||
barad
|
||||
parisi
|
||||
braidotti
|
||||
bennett
|
||||
grosz
|
||||
parikka
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Barbrook - the californian ideology
|
||||
Fred Turner - from counterculture to cyberculture
|
||||
Chantel Mouffe - art and democracy
|
||||
|
||||
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (decostruttivismo, post-colonialismo, feminismo marxista)
|
||||
Luce Irigeray (psicanalisi, femminismo)
|
||||
Simon Critchley (decostruttivismo)
|
||||
Catherine Malabou (psicanalisi, neuroscienza. /hegel. derrida, femminismo)
|
||||
Avital Ronell (psicanalisi, post-strutturalismo etc.)
|
||||
Mary Midgley (filosofia della scienza, post-analitica, etica)
|
||||
Lars Iyer
|
||||
Preciado
|
||||
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
|
||||
<title>01</title>
|
||||
<script src="http://blizardjs.ueuo.com/blizard.js"></script>
|
||||
<style type="text/css">
|
||||
body {
|
||||
font-family: sans-serif;
|
||||
background-color: black;
|
||||
color: white;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
div {
|
||||
position: relative;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
span {
|
||||
position: absolute;
|
||||
text-align: center;
|
||||
}
|
||||
</style>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body id="thisBody" >
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<script type="text/javascript">
|
||||
sl.createElement("DIV", "BODY", "first");
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
var arr = ['|','_','*', ' ','<a href="#">x</a>'];
|
||||
|
||||
function selectBin() {
|
||||
var x = Math.floor(Math.random() * arr.length);
|
||||
return x;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
var add = 0;
|
||||
for (i = 0; i < 2; i++){
|
||||
sl.createElement("SPAN","DIV","test"+ [i]);
|
||||
|
||||
for (j = 0; j < 3000; j++){
|
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|
||||
document.getElementById("test" + [i]).innerHTML += arr[selectBin()];
|
||||
document.getElementById("test" + [i]).style.top = add +"px";
|
||||
document.getElementById("test" + [i]).style.lineHeight = (Math.floor(Math.random()*10)+13) + "px";
|
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document.getElementById("test" + [i]).style.letterSpacing = (Math.floor(Math.random()*10)+13) + "px";
|
||||
document.getElementById("test" + [i]).style.fontSize = (Math.floor(Math.random()*15)+5) + "px";
|
||||
}
|
||||
add += 6;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
</script>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,861 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>aswemaythink</title>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<style type="text/css">
|
||||
body{
|
||||
position: relative;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#vBush {
|
||||
text-align: center;
|
||||
width: 860px;
|
||||
letter-spacing: 40px;
|
||||
margin-left: 300px;
|
||||
font-family: sans-serif;
|
||||
font-size: 11px;
|
||||
}
|
||||
</style>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<div id="vBush">
|
||||
AS WE MAY THINK
|
||||
by VANNEVAR BUSH
|
||||
|
||||
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr.
|
||||
Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand
|
||||
leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
|
||||
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists
|
||||
when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should
|
||||
then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our
|
||||
bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have
|
||||
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.
|
||||
Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the
|
||||
eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the
|
||||
end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are
|
||||
at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and
|
||||
command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of
|
||||
these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our
|
||||
scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous
|
||||
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush
|
||||
calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
|
||||
knowledge. - The Editor
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all
|
||||
have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional
|
||||
competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and
|
||||
learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective
|
||||
partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.
|
||||
What are the scientists to do next?
|
||||
|
||||
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there
|
||||
can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them
|
||||
to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their
|
||||
war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their
|
||||
objectives remain much the same.
|
||||
|
||||
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,
|
||||
who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive
|
||||
gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated
|
||||
assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it
|
||||
possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort
|
||||
with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
|
||||
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,
|
||||
as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy
|
||||
of their best.
|
||||
|
||||
1
|
||||
|
||||
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new
|
||||
instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they
|
||||
have increased his control of his material environment. They have
|
||||
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his
|
||||
security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.
|
||||
They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
|
||||
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
|
||||
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
|
||||
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an
|
||||
improved mental health.
|
||||
|
||||
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;
|
||||
it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate
|
||||
and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and
|
||||
endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an
|
||||
individual.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased
|
||||
evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization
|
||||
extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and
|
||||
conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he
|
||||
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
|
||||
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the
|
||||
effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
|
||||
|
||||
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results
|
||||
of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for
|
||||
their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works
|
||||
and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these
|
||||
amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously
|
||||
attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,
|
||||
by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an
|
||||
examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's
|
||||
efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
|
||||
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his
|
||||
publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and
|
||||
extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
|
||||
repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in
|
||||
the mass of the inconsequential.
|
||||
|
||||
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view
|
||||
of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that
|
||||
publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
|
||||
real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being
|
||||
expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
|
||||
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
|
||||
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
|
||||
|
||||
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities
|
||||
come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical
|
||||
sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what
|
||||
is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under
|
||||
the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,
|
||||
cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by
|
||||
comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will
|
||||
carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human
|
||||
operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of
|
||||
mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific
|
||||
records.
|
||||
|
||||
Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which
|
||||
embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
|
||||
but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation
|
||||
were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the
|
||||
days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,
|
||||
since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of
|
||||
pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent
|
||||
breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
|
||||
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
|
||||
|
||||
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not
|
||||
produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,
|
||||
but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a
|
||||
Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and
|
||||
had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources
|
||||
of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single
|
||||
car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
|
||||
|
||||
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great
|
||||
economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.
|
||||
Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
|
||||
Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.
|
||||
Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands
|
||||
of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed
|
||||
in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,
|
||||
the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,
|
||||
tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its
|
||||
gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its
|
||||
construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for
|
||||
months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an
|
||||
age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is
|
||||
bound to come of it.
|
||||
|
||||
2
|
||||
|
||||
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously
|
||||
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
|
||||
Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,
|
||||
followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on
|
||||
magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
|
||||
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of
|
||||
modification and extension.
|
||||
|
||||
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster
|
||||
material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive
|
||||
compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all
|
||||
imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not
|
||||
inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his
|
||||
forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
|
||||
millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all
|
||||
involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
|
||||
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,
|
||||
simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in
|
||||
photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,
|
||||
which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.
|
||||
There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for
|
||||
operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when
|
||||
the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It
|
||||
may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for
|
||||
striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the
|
||||
corner.
|
||||
|
||||
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within
|
||||
easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken.
|
||||
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top
|
||||
of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an
|
||||
object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the
|
||||
scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every
|
||||
time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter
|
||||
and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic?
|
||||
The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
|
||||
pictures as would result from its use.
|
||||
|
||||
Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When
|
||||
Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time
|
||||
of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the
|
||||
future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been
|
||||
films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without
|
||||
development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has
|
||||
been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye,
|
||||
and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined.
|
||||
The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
|
||||
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy.
|
||||
Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to
|
||||
look at the picture immediately.
|
||||
|
||||
Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For
|
||||
fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every
|
||||
point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the
|
||||
chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the
|
||||
paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving
|
||||
across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
|
||||
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
|
||||
accordance with the potential.
|
||||
|
||||
This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws
|
||||
a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As
|
||||
it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current
|
||||
received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are
|
||||
produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At
|
||||
every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to
|
||||
the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
|
||||
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica
|
||||
appears at the receiving end.
|
||||
|
||||
A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the
|
||||
photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole
|
||||
apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be
|
||||
dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is
|
||||
slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another
|
||||
process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon
|
||||
as it is taken.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will
|
||||
always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
|
||||
equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and
|
||||
it involves only two essential differences from the process described
|
||||
above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons
|
||||
rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can
|
||||
sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
|
||||
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
|
||||
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
|
||||
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for
|
||||
motion pictures rather than stills are the object.
|
||||
|
||||
Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the
|
||||
apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a
|
||||
rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to
|
||||
be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could
|
||||
be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve
|
||||
putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave
|
||||
normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could
|
||||
be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
|
||||
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this
|
||||
partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through
|
||||
perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out
|
||||
sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be
|
||||
constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
|
||||
|
||||
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go.
|
||||
The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it
|
||||
by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be
|
||||
ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic
|
||||
reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly
|
||||
purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
|
||||
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and
|
||||
still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for
|
||||
examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the
|
||||
excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light
|
||||
sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
|
||||
|
||||
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the
|
||||
same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be
|
||||
usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of
|
||||
10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its
|
||||
microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to
|
||||
the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be
|
||||
compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced
|
||||
since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
|
||||
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs,
|
||||
correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the
|
||||
whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
|
||||
moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
|
||||
only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
|
||||
this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
|
||||
is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
|
||||
|
||||
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The
|
||||
material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it
|
||||
could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a
|
||||
million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition,
|
||||
costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the
|
||||
Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and
|
||||
one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the
|
||||
photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large
|
||||
quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the
|
||||
cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That
|
||||
introduces the next aspect of the subject.
|
||||
|
||||
3
|
||||
|
||||
To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then
|
||||
comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an
|
||||
intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To
|
||||
consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the
|
||||
future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the
|
||||
record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax
|
||||
cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his
|
||||
talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take
|
||||
advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.
|
||||
|
||||
At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl
|
||||
stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal
|
||||
cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined
|
||||
some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
|
||||
loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this
|
||||
machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a
|
||||
microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding
|
||||
keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.
|
||||
|
||||
The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
|
||||
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl
|
||||
strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at
|
||||
the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip
|
||||
which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
|
||||
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped
|
||||
into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible
|
||||
only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
|
||||
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
|
||||
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
|
||||
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one
|
||||
which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording
|
||||
speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
|
||||
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
|
||||
intelligible to the layman.
|
||||
|
||||
One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
|
||||
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
|
||||
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded
|
||||
to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be
|
||||
connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in
|
||||
the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed
|
||||
record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
|
||||
he projects them for examination.
|
||||
|
||||
Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and
|
||||
observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing
|
||||
record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body
|
||||
of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical
|
||||
substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought
|
||||
are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
|
||||
powerful mechanical aids.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was
|
||||
long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is
|
||||
sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in
|
||||
reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this
|
||||
is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures
|
||||
by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
|
||||
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits
|
||||
for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for
|
||||
interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys
|
||||
down.
|
||||
|
||||
All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we
|
||||
have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally,
|
||||
simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic
|
||||
reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the
|
||||
dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by
|
||||
Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout
|
||||
business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
|
||||
without these machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation
|
||||
involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in
|
||||
addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from
|
||||
storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by
|
||||
printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard
|
||||
machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the
|
||||
insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
|
||||
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
|
||||
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of
|
||||
machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another.
|
||||
Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are
|
||||
concerned, both are still embryo.
|
||||
|
||||
Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it
|
||||
desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists
|
||||
promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting
|
||||
electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced
|
||||
arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and
|
||||
they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial
|
||||
machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of
|
||||
operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they
|
||||
will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the
|
||||
instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical
|
||||
computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
|
||||
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
|
||||
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites.
|
||||
One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls
|
||||
armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of
|
||||
computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of
|
||||
things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing
|
||||
complicated things.
|
||||
|
||||
4
|
||||
|
||||
The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to
|
||||
matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one
|
||||
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical
|
||||
processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the
|
||||
selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the
|
||||
manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter
|
||||
to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along
|
||||
these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done,
|
||||
primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of
|
||||
business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the
|
||||
advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as
|
||||
production methods were sufficiently advanced.
|
||||
|
||||
With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for
|
||||
there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of
|
||||
manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are,
|
||||
however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional
|
||||
and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special
|
||||
machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides.
|
||||
There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
|
||||
scientist and in small numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
|
||||
arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical
|
||||
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely
|
||||
by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its
|
||||
beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration
|
||||
and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world;
|
||||
and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting
|
||||
machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the
|
||||
future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where
|
||||
he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed
|
||||
manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to
|
||||
free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
|
||||
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician
|
||||
is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He
|
||||
is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of
|
||||
equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who
|
||||
is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and
|
||||
especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the
|
||||
manipulative processes he employs.
|
||||
|
||||
All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as
|
||||
confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the
|
||||
intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be
|
||||
practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics
|
||||
to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry,
|
||||
metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more
|
||||
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of
|
||||
them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
|
||||
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
|
||||
|
||||
5
|
||||
|
||||
The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data
|
||||
and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes,
|
||||
although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the
|
||||
fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British
|
||||
labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of
|
||||
thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along
|
||||
an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
|
||||
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his
|
||||
trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a
|
||||
machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal
|
||||
logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
|
||||
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily
|
||||
pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical
|
||||
law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard
|
||||
adding machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be
|
||||
well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher
|
||||
analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to
|
||||
appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the
|
||||
relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
|
||||
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude
|
||||
way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ
|
||||
a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
|
||||
strange fact in that most logical field.
|
||||
|
||||
A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the
|
||||
reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then,
|
||||
on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application
|
||||
of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on
|
||||
a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash
|
||||
register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash
|
||||
register, even a streamlined model.
|
||||
|
||||
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the
|
||||
record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can
|
||||
enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can
|
||||
hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the
|
||||
extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it
|
||||
involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
|
||||
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we
|
||||
are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
|
||||
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within
|
||||
stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can
|
||||
get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not
|
||||
likely to keep up with the current scene.
|
||||
|
||||
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a
|
||||
cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something
|
||||
has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel
|
||||
officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards
|
||||
into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
|
||||
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all
|
||||
employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
|
||||
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
|
||||
fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
|
||||
this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
|
||||
data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
|
||||
microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
|
||||
and will print out duplicates of those selected.
|
||||
|
||||
This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining
|
||||
in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those
|
||||
which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form
|
||||
of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange.
|
||||
You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a
|
||||
million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays
|
||||
attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus
|
||||
proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It
|
||||
requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process
|
||||
could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted.
|
||||
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting
|
||||
thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full
|
||||
selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would
|
||||
wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone
|
||||
system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a
|
||||
charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The
|
||||
inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit
|
||||
for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important,
|
||||
the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been
|
||||
developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The
|
||||
salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
|
||||
card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards.
|
||||
When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery
|
||||
at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and
|
||||
the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the
|
||||
customer.
|
||||
|
||||
But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the
|
||||
store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to
|
||||
select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid
|
||||
selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant
|
||||
or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however.
|
||||
Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its
|
||||
computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry
|
||||
photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read
|
||||
by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
|
||||
|
||||
The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They
|
||||
must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into
|
||||
position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them.
|
||||
Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine
|
||||
can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With
|
||||
tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
|
||||
switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
|
||||
into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
|
||||
whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
|
||||
if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
|
||||
scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
|
||||
method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
|
||||
photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
|
||||
enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
|
||||
television equipment.
|
||||
|
||||
One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection
|
||||
for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before
|
||||
an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding
|
||||
notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in
|
||||
libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some
|
||||
interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a
|
||||
microphone, in the manner described in connection with the
|
||||
speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would
|
||||
certainly beat the usual file clerk.
|
||||
|
||||
6
|
||||
|
||||
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a
|
||||
lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of
|
||||
development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at
|
||||
the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of
|
||||
indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed
|
||||
alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is)
|
||||
by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one
|
||||
place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
|
||||
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one
|
||||
item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a
|
||||
new path.
|
||||
|
||||
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
|
||||
With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
|
||||
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
|
||||
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has
|
||||
other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
|
||||
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
|
||||
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
|
||||
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
|
||||
|
||||
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially,
|
||||
but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he
|
||||
may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first
|
||||
idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection.
|
||||
Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be
|
||||
mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility
|
||||
with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
|
||||
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
|
||||
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
|
||||
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
|
||||
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
|
||||
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
|
||||
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
|
||||
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
|
||||
|
||||
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
|
||||
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
|
||||
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
|
||||
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
|
||||
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
|
||||
|
||||
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
|
||||
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
|
||||
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
|
||||
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
|
||||
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
|
||||
material freely.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
|
||||
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
|
||||
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
|
||||
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
|
||||
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are
|
||||
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
|
||||
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
|
||||
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
|
||||
dry photography being employed.
|
||||
|
||||
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the
|
||||
usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain
|
||||
book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book
|
||||
promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing
|
||||
positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom
|
||||
consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
|
||||
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On
|
||||
deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book
|
||||
before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just
|
||||
allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the
|
||||
right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at
|
||||
100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same
|
||||
control backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
|
||||
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
|
||||
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
|
||||
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
|
||||
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
|
||||
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
|
||||
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
|
||||
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
|
||||
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
|
||||
|
||||
7
|
||||
|
||||
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of
|
||||
present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step,
|
||||
however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a
|
||||
provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately
|
||||
and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
|
||||
memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
|
||||
thing.
|
||||
|
||||
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in
|
||||
his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the
|
||||
two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At
|
||||
the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a
|
||||
pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a
|
||||
single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space
|
||||
appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is
|
||||
inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these
|
||||
dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
|
||||
|
||||
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other
|
||||
can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the
|
||||
corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been
|
||||
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn,
|
||||
rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning
|
||||
the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
|
||||
been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for
|
||||
any item can be joined into numerous trails.
|
||||
|
||||
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
|
||||
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
|
||||
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
|
||||
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
|
||||
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
|
||||
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
|
||||
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
|
||||
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
|
||||
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
|
||||
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
|
||||
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
|
||||
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
|
||||
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
|
||||
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
|
||||
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
|
||||
materials available to him.
|
||||
|
||||
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a
|
||||
friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations,
|
||||
even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the
|
||||
outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he
|
||||
has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
|
||||
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
|
||||
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
|
||||
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a
|
||||
reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
|
||||
to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
|
||||
the more general trail.
|
||||
|
||||
8
|
||||
|
||||
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh
|
||||
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
|
||||
the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
|
||||
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the
|
||||
experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
|
||||
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every
|
||||
point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its
|
||||
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
|
||||
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case
|
||||
histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent
|
||||
anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of
|
||||
an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
|
||||
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side
|
||||
trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people,
|
||||
parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items,
|
||||
and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over
|
||||
civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of
|
||||
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing
|
||||
useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
|
||||
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
|
||||
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which
|
||||
they were erected.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and
|
||||
consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the
|
||||
instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to
|
||||
stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing
|
||||
rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of
|
||||
all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as
|
||||
yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as
|
||||
violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the
|
||||
picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to
|
||||
present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility,
|
||||
not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension
|
||||
of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is
|
||||
only a doubly involved guess.
|
||||
|
||||
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed
|
||||
through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral
|
||||
when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible
|
||||
that some day the path may be established more directly?
|
||||
|
||||
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is
|
||||
transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the
|
||||
channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
|
||||
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set:
|
||||
they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio
|
||||
transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
|
||||
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to
|
||||
touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and
|
||||
thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just
|
||||
as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
|
||||
|
||||
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her
|
||||
fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in
|
||||
order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might
|
||||
not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in
|
||||
which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously
|
||||
metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
|
||||
|
||||
By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels
|
||||
of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we
|
||||
may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of
|
||||
first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the
|
||||
human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With
|
||||
a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces
|
||||
pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
|
||||
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is
|
||||
unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
|
||||
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where
|
||||
such a thing may lead?
|
||||
|
||||
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or
|
||||
sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an
|
||||
electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the
|
||||
human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always
|
||||
transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
|
||||
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it
|
||||
hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
|
||||
immediateness.
|
||||
|
||||
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his
|
||||
shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present
|
||||
problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
|
||||
mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its
|
||||
logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
|
||||
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if
|
||||
he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he
|
||||
does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he
|
||||
can find them again if they prove important.
|
||||
|
||||
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
|
||||
are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to
|
||||
throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may
|
||||
yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
|
||||
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns
|
||||
to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
|
||||
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a
|
||||
singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to
|
||||
lose hope as to the outcome.
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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<title>aswemaythink</title>
|
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<div id="vBush">
|
||||
AS WE MAY THINK
|
||||
by VANNEVAR BUSH
|
||||
|
||||
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr.
|
||||
Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand
|
||||
leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
|
||||
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists
|
||||
when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should
|
||||
then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our
|
||||
bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have
|
||||
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.
|
||||
Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the
|
||||
eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the
|
||||
end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are
|
||||
at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and
|
||||
command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of
|
||||
these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our
|
||||
scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous
|
||||
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush
|
||||
calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
|
||||
knowledge. - The Editor
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all
|
||||
have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional
|
||||
competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and
|
||||
learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective
|
||||
partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.
|
||||
What are the scientists to do next?
|
||||
|
||||
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there
|
||||
can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them
|
||||
to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their
|
||||
war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their
|
||||
objectives remain much the same.
|
||||
|
||||
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,
|
||||
who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive
|
||||
gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated
|
||||
assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it
|
||||
possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort
|
||||
with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
|
||||
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,
|
||||
as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy
|
||||
of their best.
|
||||
|
||||
1
|
||||
|
||||
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new
|
||||
instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they
|
||||
have increased his control of his material environment. They have
|
||||
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his
|
||||
security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.
|
||||
They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
|
||||
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
|
||||
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
|
||||
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an
|
||||
improved mental health.
|
||||
|
||||
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;
|
||||
it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate
|
||||
and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and
|
||||
endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an
|
||||
individual.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased
|
||||
evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization
|
||||
extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and
|
||||
conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he
|
||||
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
|
||||
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the
|
||||
effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
|
||||
|
||||
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results
|
||||
of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for
|
||||
their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works
|
||||
and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these
|
||||
amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously
|
||||
attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,
|
||||
by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an
|
||||
examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's
|
||||
efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
|
||||
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his
|
||||
publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and
|
||||
extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
|
||||
repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in
|
||||
the mass of the inconsequential.
|
||||
|
||||
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view
|
||||
of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that
|
||||
publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
|
||||
real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being
|
||||
expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
|
||||
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
|
||||
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
|
||||
|
||||
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities
|
||||
come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical
|
||||
sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what
|
||||
is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under
|
||||
the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,
|
||||
cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by
|
||||
comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will
|
||||
carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human
|
||||
operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of
|
||||
mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific
|
||||
records.
|
||||
|
||||
Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which
|
||||
embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
|
||||
but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation
|
||||
were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the
|
||||
days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,
|
||||
since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of
|
||||
pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent
|
||||
breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
|
||||
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
|
||||
|
||||
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not
|
||||
produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,
|
||||
but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a
|
||||
Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and
|
||||
had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources
|
||||
of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single
|
||||
car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
|
||||
|
||||
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great
|
||||
economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.
|
||||
Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
|
||||
Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.
|
||||
Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands
|
||||
of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed
|
||||
in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,
|
||||
the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,
|
||||
tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its
|
||||
gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its
|
||||
construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for
|
||||
months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an
|
||||
age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is
|
||||
bound to come of it.
|
||||
|
||||
2
|
||||
|
||||
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously
|
||||
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
|
||||
Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,
|
||||
followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on
|
||||
magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
|
||||
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of
|
||||
modification and extension.
|
||||
|
||||
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster
|
||||
material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive
|
||||
compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all
|
||||
imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not
|
||||
inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his
|
||||
forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
|
||||
millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all
|
||||
involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
|
||||
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,
|
||||
simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in
|
||||
photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,
|
||||
which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.
|
||||
There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for
|
||||
operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when
|
||||
the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It
|
||||
may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for
|
||||
striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the
|
||||
corner.
|
||||
|
||||
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within
|
||||
easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken.
|
||||
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top
|
||||
of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an
|
||||
object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the
|
||||
scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every
|
||||
time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter
|
||||
and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic?
|
||||
The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
|
||||
pictures as would result from its use.
|
||||
|
||||
Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When
|
||||
Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time
|
||||
of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the
|
||||
future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been
|
||||
films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without
|
||||
development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has
|
||||
been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye,
|
||||
and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined.
|
||||
The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
|
||||
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy.
|
||||
Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to
|
||||
look at the picture immediately.
|
||||
|
||||
Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For
|
||||
fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every
|
||||
point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the
|
||||
chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the
|
||||
paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving
|
||||
across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
|
||||
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
|
||||
accordance with the potential.
|
||||
|
||||
This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws
|
||||
a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As
|
||||
it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current
|
||||
received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are
|
||||
produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At
|
||||
every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to
|
||||
the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
|
||||
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica
|
||||
appears at the receiving end.
|
||||
|
||||
A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the
|
||||
photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole
|
||||
apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be
|
||||
dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is
|
||||
slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another
|
||||
process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon
|
||||
as it is taken.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will
|
||||
always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
|
||||
equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and
|
||||
it involves only two essential differences from the process described
|
||||
above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons
|
||||
rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can
|
||||
sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
|
||||
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
|
||||
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
|
||||
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for
|
||||
motion pictures rather than stills are the object.
|
||||
|
||||
Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the
|
||||
apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a
|
||||
rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to
|
||||
be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could
|
||||
be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve
|
||||
putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave
|
||||
normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could
|
||||
be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
|
||||
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this
|
||||
partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through
|
||||
perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out
|
||||
sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be
|
||||
constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
|
||||
|
||||
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go.
|
||||
The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it
|
||||
by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be
|
||||
ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic
|
||||
reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly
|
||||
purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
|
||||
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and
|
||||
still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for
|
||||
examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the
|
||||
excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light
|
||||
sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
|
||||
|
||||
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the
|
||||
same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be
|
||||
usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of
|
||||
10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its
|
||||
microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to
|
||||
the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be
|
||||
compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced
|
||||
since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
|
||||
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs,
|
||||
correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the
|
||||
whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
|
||||
moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
|
||||
only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
|
||||
this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
|
||||
is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
|
||||
|
||||
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The
|
||||
material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it
|
||||
could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a
|
||||
million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition,
|
||||
costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the
|
||||
Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and
|
||||
one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the
|
||||
photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large
|
||||
quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the
|
||||
cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That
|
||||
introduces the next aspect of the subject.
|
||||
|
||||
3
|
||||
|
||||
To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then
|
||||
comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an
|
||||
intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To
|
||||
consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the
|
||||
future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the
|
||||
record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax
|
||||
cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his
|
||||
talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take
|
||||
advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.
|
||||
|
||||
At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl
|
||||
stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal
|
||||
cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined
|
||||
some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
|
||||
loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this
|
||||
machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a
|
||||
microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding
|
||||
keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.
|
||||
|
||||
The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
|
||||
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl
|
||||
strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at
|
||||
the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip
|
||||
which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
|
||||
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped
|
||||
into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible
|
||||
only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
|
||||
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
|
||||
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
|
||||
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one
|
||||
which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording
|
||||
speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
|
||||
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
|
||||
intelligible to the layman.
|
||||
|
||||
One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
|
||||
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
|
||||
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded
|
||||
to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be
|
||||
connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in
|
||||
the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed
|
||||
record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
|
||||
he projects them for examination.
|
||||
|
||||
Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and
|
||||
observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing
|
||||
record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body
|
||||
of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical
|
||||
substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought
|
||||
are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
|
||||
powerful mechanical aids.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was
|
||||
long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is
|
||||
sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in
|
||||
reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this
|
||||
is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures
|
||||
by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
|
||||
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits
|
||||
for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for
|
||||
interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys
|
||||
down.
|
||||
|
||||
All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we
|
||||
have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally,
|
||||
simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic
|
||||
reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the
|
||||
dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by
|
||||
Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout
|
||||
business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
|
||||
without these machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation
|
||||
involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in
|
||||
addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from
|
||||
storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by
|
||||
printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard
|
||||
machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the
|
||||
insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
|
||||
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
|
||||
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of
|
||||
machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another.
|
||||
Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are
|
||||
concerned, both are still embryo.
|
||||
|
||||
Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it
|
||||
desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists
|
||||
promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting
|
||||
electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced
|
||||
arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and
|
||||
they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial
|
||||
machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of
|
||||
operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they
|
||||
will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the
|
||||
instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical
|
||||
computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
|
||||
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
|
||||
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites.
|
||||
One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls
|
||||
armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of
|
||||
computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of
|
||||
things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing
|
||||
complicated things.
|
||||
|
||||
4
|
||||
|
||||
The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to
|
||||
matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one
|
||||
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical
|
||||
processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the
|
||||
selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the
|
||||
manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter
|
||||
to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along
|
||||
these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done,
|
||||
primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of
|
||||
business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the
|
||||
advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as
|
||||
production methods were sufficiently advanced.
|
||||
|
||||
With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for
|
||||
there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of
|
||||
manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are,
|
||||
however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional
|
||||
and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special
|
||||
machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides.
|
||||
There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
|
||||
scientist and in small numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
|
||||
arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical
|
||||
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely
|
||||
by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its
|
||||
beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration
|
||||
and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world;
|
||||
and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting
|
||||
machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the
|
||||
future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where
|
||||
he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed
|
||||
manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to
|
||||
free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
|
||||
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician
|
||||
is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He
|
||||
is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of
|
||||
equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who
|
||||
is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and
|
||||
especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the
|
||||
manipulative processes he employs.
|
||||
|
||||
All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as
|
||||
confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the
|
||||
intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be
|
||||
practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics
|
||||
to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry,
|
||||
metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more
|
||||
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of
|
||||
them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
|
||||
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
|
||||
|
||||
5
|
||||
|
||||
The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data
|
||||
and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes,
|
||||
although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the
|
||||
fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British
|
||||
labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of
|
||||
thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along
|
||||
an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
|
||||
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his
|
||||
trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a
|
||||
machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal
|
||||
logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
|
||||
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily
|
||||
pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical
|
||||
law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard
|
||||
adding machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be
|
||||
well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher
|
||||
analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to
|
||||
appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the
|
||||
relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
|
||||
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude
|
||||
way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ
|
||||
a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
|
||||
strange fact in that most logical field.
|
||||
|
||||
A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the
|
||||
reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then,
|
||||
on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application
|
||||
of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on
|
||||
a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash
|
||||
register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash
|
||||
register, even a streamlined model.
|
||||
|
||||
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the
|
||||
record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can
|
||||
enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can
|
||||
hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the
|
||||
extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it
|
||||
involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
|
||||
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we
|
||||
are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
|
||||
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within
|
||||
stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can
|
||||
get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not
|
||||
likely to keep up with the current scene.
|
||||
|
||||
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a
|
||||
cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something
|
||||
has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel
|
||||
officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards
|
||||
into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
|
||||
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all
|
||||
employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
|
||||
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
|
||||
fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
|
||||
this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
|
||||
data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
|
||||
microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
|
||||
and will print out duplicates of those selected.
|
||||
|
||||
This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining
|
||||
in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those
|
||||
which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form
|
||||
of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange.
|
||||
You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a
|
||||
million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays
|
||||
attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus
|
||||
proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It
|
||||
requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process
|
||||
could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted.
|
||||
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting
|
||||
thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full
|
||||
selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would
|
||||
wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone
|
||||
system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a
|
||||
charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The
|
||||
inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit
|
||||
for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important,
|
||||
the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been
|
||||
developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The
|
||||
salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
|
||||
card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards.
|
||||
When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery
|
||||
at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and
|
||||
the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the
|
||||
customer.
|
||||
|
||||
But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the
|
||||
store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to
|
||||
select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid
|
||||
selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant
|
||||
or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however.
|
||||
Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its
|
||||
computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry
|
||||
photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read
|
||||
by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
|
||||
|
||||
The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They
|
||||
must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into
|
||||
position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them.
|
||||
Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine
|
||||
can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With
|
||||
tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
|
||||
switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
|
||||
into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
|
||||
whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
|
||||
if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
|
||||
scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
|
||||
method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
|
||||
photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
|
||||
enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
|
||||
television equipment.
|
||||
|
||||
One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection
|
||||
for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before
|
||||
an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding
|
||||
notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in
|
||||
libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some
|
||||
interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a
|
||||
microphone, in the manner described in connection with the
|
||||
speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would
|
||||
certainly beat the usual file clerk.
|
||||
|
||||
6
|
||||
|
||||
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a
|
||||
lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of
|
||||
development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at
|
||||
the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of
|
||||
indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed
|
||||
alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is)
|
||||
by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one
|
||||
place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
|
||||
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one
|
||||
item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a
|
||||
new path.
|
||||
|
||||
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
|
||||
With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
|
||||
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
|
||||
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has
|
||||
other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
|
||||
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
|
||||
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
|
||||
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
|
||||
|
||||
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially,
|
||||
but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he
|
||||
may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first
|
||||
idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection.
|
||||
Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be
|
||||
mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility
|
||||
with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
|
||||
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
|
||||
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
|
||||
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
|
||||
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
|
||||
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
|
||||
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
|
||||
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
|
||||
|
||||
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
|
||||
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
|
||||
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
|
||||
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
|
||||
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
|
||||
|
||||
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
|
||||
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
|
||||
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
|
||||
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
|
||||
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
|
||||
material freely.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
|
||||
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
|
||||
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
|
||||
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
|
||||
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are
|
||||
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
|
||||
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
|
||||
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
|
||||
dry photography being employed.
|
||||
|
||||
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the
|
||||
usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain
|
||||
book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book
|
||||
promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing
|
||||
positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom
|
||||
consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
|
||||
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On
|
||||
deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book
|
||||
before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just
|
||||
allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the
|
||||
right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at
|
||||
100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same
|
||||
control backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
|
||||
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
|
||||
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
|
||||
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
|
||||
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
|
||||
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
|
||||
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
|
||||
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
|
||||
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
|
||||
|
||||
7
|
||||
|
||||
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of
|
||||
present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step,
|
||||
however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a
|
||||
provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately
|
||||
and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
|
||||
memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
|
||||
thing.
|
||||
|
||||
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in
|
||||
his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the
|
||||
two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At
|
||||
the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a
|
||||
pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a
|
||||
single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space
|
||||
appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is
|
||||
inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these
|
||||
dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
|
||||
|
||||
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other
|
||||
can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the
|
||||
corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been
|
||||
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn,
|
||||
rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning
|
||||
the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
|
||||
been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for
|
||||
any item can be joined into numerous trails.
|
||||
|
||||
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
|
||||
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
|
||||
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
|
||||
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
|
||||
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
|
||||
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
|
||||
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
|
||||
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
|
||||
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
|
||||
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
|
||||
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
|
||||
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
|
||||
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
|
||||
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
|
||||
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
|
||||
materials available to him.
|
||||
|
||||
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a
|
||||
friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations,
|
||||
even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the
|
||||
outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he
|
||||
has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
|
||||
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
|
||||
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
|
||||
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a
|
||||
reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
|
||||
to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
|
||||
the more general trail.
|
||||
|
||||
8
|
||||
|
||||
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh
|
||||
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
|
||||
the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
|
||||
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the
|
||||
experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
|
||||
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every
|
||||
point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its
|
||||
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
|
||||
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case
|
||||
histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent
|
||||
anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of
|
||||
an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
|
||||
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side
|
||||
trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people,
|
||||
parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items,
|
||||
and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over
|
||||
civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of
|
||||
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing
|
||||
useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
|
||||
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
|
||||
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which
|
||||
they were erected.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and
|
||||
consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the
|
||||
instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to
|
||||
stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing
|
||||
rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of
|
||||
all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as
|
||||
yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as
|
||||
violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the
|
||||
picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to
|
||||
present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility,
|
||||
not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension
|
||||
of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is
|
||||
only a doubly involved guess.
|
||||
|
||||
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed
|
||||
through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral
|
||||
when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible
|
||||
that some day the path may be established more directly?
|
||||
|
||||
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is
|
||||
transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the
|
||||
channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
|
||||
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set:
|
||||
they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio
|
||||
transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
|
||||
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to
|
||||
touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and
|
||||
thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just
|
||||
as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
|
||||
|
||||
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her
|
||||
fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in
|
||||
order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might
|
||||
not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in
|
||||
which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously
|
||||
metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
|
||||
|
||||
By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels
|
||||
of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we
|
||||
may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of
|
||||
first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the
|
||||
human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With
|
||||
a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces
|
||||
pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
|
||||
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is
|
||||
unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
|
||||
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where
|
||||
such a thing may lead?
|
||||
|
||||
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or
|
||||
sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an
|
||||
electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the
|
||||
human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always
|
||||
transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
|
||||
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it
|
||||
hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
|
||||
immediateness.
|
||||
|
||||
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his
|
||||
shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present
|
||||
problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
|
||||
mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its
|
||||
logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
|
||||
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if
|
||||
he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he
|
||||
does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he
|
||||
can find them again if they prove important.
|
||||
|
||||
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
|
||||
are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to
|
||||
throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may
|
||||
yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
|
||||
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns
|
||||
to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
|
||||
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a
|
||||
singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to
|
||||
lose hope as to the outcome.
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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|
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|
||||
AS WE MAY THINK
|
||||
by VANNEVAR BUSH
|
||||
|
||||
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr.
|
||||
Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand
|
||||
leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
|
||||
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists
|
||||
when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should
|
||||
then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our
|
||||
bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have
|
||||
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.
|
||||
Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the
|
||||
eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the
|
||||
end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are
|
||||
at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and
|
||||
command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of
|
||||
these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our
|
||||
scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous
|
||||
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush
|
||||
calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
|
||||
knowledge. - The Editor
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all
|
||||
have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional
|
||||
competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and
|
||||
learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective
|
||||
partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.
|
||||
What are the scientists to do next?
|
||||
|
||||
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there
|
||||
can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them
|
||||
to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their
|
||||
war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their
|
||||
objectives remain much the same.
|
||||
|
||||
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,
|
||||
who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive
|
||||
gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated
|
||||
assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it
|
||||
possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort
|
||||
with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
|
||||
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,
|
||||
as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy
|
||||
of their best.
|
||||
|
||||
1
|
||||
|
||||
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new
|
||||
instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they
|
||||
have increased his control of his material environment. They have
|
||||
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his
|
||||
security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.
|
||||
They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
|
||||
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
|
||||
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
|
||||
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an
|
||||
improved mental health.
|
||||
|
||||
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;
|
||||
it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate
|
||||
and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and
|
||||
endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an
|
||||
individual.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased
|
||||
evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization
|
||||
extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and
|
||||
conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he
|
||||
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
|
||||
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the
|
||||
effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
|
||||
|
||||
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results
|
||||
of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for
|
||||
their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works
|
||||
and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these
|
||||
amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously
|
||||
attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,
|
||||
by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an
|
||||
examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's
|
||||
efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
|
||||
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his
|
||||
publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and
|
||||
extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
|
||||
repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in
|
||||
the mass of the inconsequential.
|
||||
|
||||
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view
|
||||
of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that
|
||||
publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
|
||||
real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being
|
||||
expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
|
||||
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
|
||||
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
|
||||
|
||||
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities
|
||||
come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical
|
||||
sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what
|
||||
is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under
|
||||
the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,
|
||||
cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by
|
||||
comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will
|
||||
carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human
|
||||
operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of
|
||||
mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific
|
||||
records.
|
||||
|
||||
Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which
|
||||
embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
|
||||
but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation
|
||||
were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the
|
||||
days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,
|
||||
since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of
|
||||
pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent
|
||||
breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
|
||||
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
|
||||
|
||||
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not
|
||||
produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,
|
||||
but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a
|
||||
Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and
|
||||
had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources
|
||||
of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single
|
||||
car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
|
||||
|
||||
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great
|
||||
economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.
|
||||
Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
|
||||
Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.
|
||||
Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands
|
||||
of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed
|
||||
in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,
|
||||
the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,
|
||||
tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its
|
||||
gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its
|
||||
construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for
|
||||
months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an
|
||||
age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is
|
||||
bound to come of it.
|
||||
|
||||
2
|
||||
|
||||
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously
|
||||
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
|
||||
Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,
|
||||
followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on
|
||||
magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
|
||||
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of
|
||||
modification and extension.
|
||||
|
||||
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster
|
||||
material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive
|
||||
compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all
|
||||
imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not
|
||||
inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his
|
||||
forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
|
||||
millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all
|
||||
involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
|
||||
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,
|
||||
simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in
|
||||
photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,
|
||||
which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.
|
||||
There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for
|
||||
operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when
|
||||
the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It
|
||||
may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for
|
||||
striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the
|
||||
corner.
|
||||
|
||||
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within
|
||||
easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken.
|
||||
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top
|
||||
of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an
|
||||
object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the
|
||||
scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every
|
||||
time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter
|
||||
and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic?
|
||||
The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
|
||||
pictures as would result from its use.
|
||||
|
||||
Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When
|
||||
Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time
|
||||
of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the
|
||||
future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been
|
||||
films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without
|
||||
development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has
|
||||
been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye,
|
||||
and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined.
|
||||
The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
|
||||
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy.
|
||||
Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to
|
||||
look at the picture immediately.
|
||||
|
||||
Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For
|
||||
fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every
|
||||
point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the
|
||||
chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the
|
||||
paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving
|
||||
across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
|
||||
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
|
||||
accordance with the potential.
|
||||
|
||||
This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws
|
||||
a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As
|
||||
it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current
|
||||
received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are
|
||||
produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At
|
||||
every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to
|
||||
the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
|
||||
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica
|
||||
appears at the receiving end.
|
||||
|
||||
A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the
|
||||
photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole
|
||||
apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be
|
||||
dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is
|
||||
slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another
|
||||
process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon
|
||||
as it is taken.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will
|
||||
always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
|
||||
equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and
|
||||
it involves only two essential differences from the process described
|
||||
above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons
|
||||
rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can
|
||||
sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
|
||||
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
|
||||
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
|
||||
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for
|
||||
motion pictures rather than stills are the object.
|
||||
|
||||
Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the
|
||||
apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a
|
||||
rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to
|
||||
be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could
|
||||
be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve
|
||||
putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave
|
||||
normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could
|
||||
be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
|
||||
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this
|
||||
partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through
|
||||
perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out
|
||||
sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be
|
||||
constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
|
||||
|
||||
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go.
|
||||
The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it
|
||||
by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be
|
||||
ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic
|
||||
reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly
|
||||
purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
|
||||
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and
|
||||
still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for
|
||||
examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the
|
||||
excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light
|
||||
sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
|
||||
|
||||
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the
|
||||
same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be
|
||||
usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of
|
||||
10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its
|
||||
microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to
|
||||
the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be
|
||||
compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced
|
||||
since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
|
||||
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs,
|
||||
correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the
|
||||
whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
|
||||
moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
|
||||
only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
|
||||
this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
|
||||
is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
|
||||
|
||||
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The
|
||||
material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it
|
||||
could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a
|
||||
million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition,
|
||||
costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the
|
||||
Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and
|
||||
one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the
|
||||
photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large
|
||||
quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the
|
||||
cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That
|
||||
introduces the next aspect of the subject.
|
||||
|
||||
3
|
||||
|
||||
To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then
|
||||
comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an
|
||||
intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To
|
||||
consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the
|
||||
future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the
|
||||
record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax
|
||||
cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his
|
||||
talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take
|
||||
advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.
|
||||
|
||||
At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl
|
||||
stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal
|
||||
cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined
|
||||
some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
|
||||
loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this
|
||||
machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a
|
||||
microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding
|
||||
keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.
|
||||
|
||||
The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
|
||||
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl
|
||||
strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at
|
||||
the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip
|
||||
which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
|
||||
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped
|
||||
into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible
|
||||
only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
|
||||
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
|
||||
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
|
||||
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one
|
||||
which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording
|
||||
speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
|
||||
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
|
||||
intelligible to the layman.
|
||||
|
||||
One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
|
||||
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
|
||||
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded
|
||||
to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be
|
||||
connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in
|
||||
the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed
|
||||
record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
|
||||
he projects them for examination.
|
||||
|
||||
Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and
|
||||
observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing
|
||||
record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body
|
||||
of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical
|
||||
substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought
|
||||
are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
|
||||
powerful mechanical aids.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was
|
||||
long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is
|
||||
sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in
|
||||
reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this
|
||||
is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures
|
||||
by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
|
||||
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits
|
||||
for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for
|
||||
interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys
|
||||
down.
|
||||
|
||||
All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we
|
||||
have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally,
|
||||
simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic
|
||||
reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the
|
||||
dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by
|
||||
Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout
|
||||
business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
|
||||
without these machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation
|
||||
involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in
|
||||
addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from
|
||||
storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by
|
||||
printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard
|
||||
machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the
|
||||
insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
|
||||
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
|
||||
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of
|
||||
machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another.
|
||||
Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are
|
||||
concerned, both are still embryo.
|
||||
|
||||
Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it
|
||||
desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists
|
||||
promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting
|
||||
electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced
|
||||
arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and
|
||||
they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial
|
||||
machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of
|
||||
operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they
|
||||
will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the
|
||||
instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical
|
||||
computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
|
||||
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
|
||||
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites.
|
||||
One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls
|
||||
armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of
|
||||
computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of
|
||||
things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing
|
||||
complicated things.
|
||||
|
||||
4
|
||||
|
||||
The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to
|
||||
matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one
|
||||
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical
|
||||
processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the
|
||||
selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the
|
||||
manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter
|
||||
to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along
|
||||
these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done,
|
||||
primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of
|
||||
business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the
|
||||
advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as
|
||||
production methods were sufficiently advanced.
|
||||
|
||||
With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for
|
||||
there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of
|
||||
manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are,
|
||||
however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional
|
||||
and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special
|
||||
machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides.
|
||||
There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
|
||||
scientist and in small numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
|
||||
arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical
|
||||
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely
|
||||
by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its
|
||||
beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration
|
||||
and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world;
|
||||
and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting
|
||||
machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the
|
||||
future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where
|
||||
he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed
|
||||
manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to
|
||||
free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
|
||||
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician
|
||||
is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He
|
||||
is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of
|
||||
equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who
|
||||
is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and
|
||||
especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the
|
||||
manipulative processes he employs.
|
||||
|
||||
All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as
|
||||
confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the
|
||||
intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be
|
||||
practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics
|
||||
to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry,
|
||||
metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more
|
||||
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of
|
||||
them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
|
||||
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
|
||||
|
||||
5
|
||||
|
||||
The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data
|
||||
and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes,
|
||||
although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the
|
||||
fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British
|
||||
labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of
|
||||
thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along
|
||||
an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
|
||||
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his
|
||||
trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a
|
||||
machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal
|
||||
logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
|
||||
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily
|
||||
pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical
|
||||
law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard
|
||||
adding machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be
|
||||
well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher
|
||||
analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to
|
||||
appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the
|
||||
relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
|
||||
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude
|
||||
way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ
|
||||
a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
|
||||
strange fact in that most logical field.
|
||||
|
||||
A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the
|
||||
reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then,
|
||||
on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application
|
||||
of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on
|
||||
a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash
|
||||
register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash
|
||||
register, even a streamlined model.
|
||||
|
||||
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the
|
||||
record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can
|
||||
enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can
|
||||
hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the
|
||||
extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it
|
||||
involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
|
||||
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we
|
||||
are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
|
||||
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within
|
||||
stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can
|
||||
get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not
|
||||
likely to keep up with the current scene.
|
||||
|
||||
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a
|
||||
cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something
|
||||
has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel
|
||||
officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards
|
||||
into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
|
||||
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all
|
||||
employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
|
||||
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
|
||||
fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
|
||||
this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
|
||||
data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
|
||||
microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
|
||||
and will print out duplicates of those selected.
|
||||
|
||||
This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining
|
||||
in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those
|
||||
which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form
|
||||
of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange.
|
||||
You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a
|
||||
million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays
|
||||
attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus
|
||||
proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It
|
||||
requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process
|
||||
could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted.
|
||||
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting
|
||||
thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full
|
||||
selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would
|
||||
wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone
|
||||
system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a
|
||||
charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The
|
||||
inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit
|
||||
for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important,
|
||||
the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been
|
||||
developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The
|
||||
salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
|
||||
card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards.
|
||||
When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery
|
||||
at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and
|
||||
the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the
|
||||
customer.
|
||||
|
||||
But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the
|
||||
store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to
|
||||
select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid
|
||||
selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant
|
||||
or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however.
|
||||
Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its
|
||||
computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry
|
||||
photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read
|
||||
by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
|
||||
|
||||
The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They
|
||||
must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into
|
||||
position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them.
|
||||
Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine
|
||||
can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With
|
||||
tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
|
||||
switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
|
||||
into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
|
||||
whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
|
||||
if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
|
||||
scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
|
||||
method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
|
||||
photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
|
||||
enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
|
||||
television equipment.
|
||||
|
||||
One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection
|
||||
for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before
|
||||
an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding
|
||||
notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in
|
||||
libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some
|
||||
interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a
|
||||
microphone, in the manner described in connection with the
|
||||
speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would
|
||||
certainly beat the usual file clerk.
|
||||
|
||||
6
|
||||
|
||||
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a
|
||||
lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of
|
||||
development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at
|
||||
the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of
|
||||
indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed
|
||||
alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is)
|
||||
by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one
|
||||
place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
|
||||
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one
|
||||
item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a
|
||||
new path.
|
||||
|
||||
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
|
||||
With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
|
||||
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
|
||||
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has
|
||||
other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
|
||||
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
|
||||
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
|
||||
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
|
||||
|
||||
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially,
|
||||
but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he
|
||||
may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first
|
||||
idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection.
|
||||
Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be
|
||||
mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility
|
||||
with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
|
||||
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
|
||||
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
|
||||
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
|
||||
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
|
||||
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
|
||||
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
|
||||
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
|
||||
|
||||
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
|
||||
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
|
||||
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
|
||||
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
|
||||
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
|
||||
|
||||
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
|
||||
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
|
||||
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
|
||||
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
|
||||
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
|
||||
material freely.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
|
||||
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
|
||||
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
|
||||
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
|
||||
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are
|
||||
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
|
||||
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
|
||||
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
|
||||
dry photography being employed.
|
||||
|
||||
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the
|
||||
usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain
|
||||
book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book
|
||||
promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing
|
||||
positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom
|
||||
consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
|
||||
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On
|
||||
deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book
|
||||
before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just
|
||||
allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the
|
||||
right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at
|
||||
100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same
|
||||
control backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
|
||||
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
|
||||
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
|
||||
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
|
||||
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
|
||||
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
|
||||
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
|
||||
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
|
||||
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
|
||||
|
||||
7
|
||||
|
||||
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of
|
||||
present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step,
|
||||
however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a
|
||||
provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately
|
||||
and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
|
||||
memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
|
||||
thing.
|
||||
|
||||
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in
|
||||
his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the
|
||||
two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At
|
||||
the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a
|
||||
pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a
|
||||
single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space
|
||||
appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is
|
||||
inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these
|
||||
dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
|
||||
|
||||
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other
|
||||
can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the
|
||||
corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been
|
||||
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn,
|
||||
rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning
|
||||
the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
|
||||
been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for
|
||||
any item can be joined into numerous trails.
|
||||
|
||||
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
|
||||
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
|
||||
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
|
||||
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
|
||||
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
|
||||
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
|
||||
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
|
||||
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
|
||||
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
|
||||
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
|
||||
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
|
||||
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
|
||||
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
|
||||
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
|
||||
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
|
||||
materials available to him.
|
||||
|
||||
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a
|
||||
friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations,
|
||||
even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the
|
||||
outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he
|
||||
has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
|
||||
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
|
||||
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
|
||||
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a
|
||||
reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
|
||||
to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
|
||||
the more general trail.
|
||||
|
||||
8
|
||||
|
||||
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh
|
||||
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
|
||||
the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
|
||||
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the
|
||||
experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
|
||||
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every
|
||||
point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its
|
||||
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
|
||||
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case
|
||||
histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent
|
||||
anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of
|
||||
an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
|
||||
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side
|
||||
trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people,
|
||||
parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items,
|
||||
and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over
|
||||
civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of
|
||||
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing
|
||||
useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
|
||||
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
|
||||
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which
|
||||
they were erected.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and
|
||||
consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the
|
||||
instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to
|
||||
stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing
|
||||
rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of
|
||||
all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as
|
||||
yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as
|
||||
violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the
|
||||
picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to
|
||||
present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility,
|
||||
not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension
|
||||
of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is
|
||||
only a doubly involved guess.
|
||||
|
||||
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed
|
||||
through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral
|
||||
when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible
|
||||
that some day the path may be established more directly?
|
||||
|
||||
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is
|
||||
transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the
|
||||
channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
|
||||
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set:
|
||||
they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio
|
||||
transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
|
||||
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to
|
||||
touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and
|
||||
thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just
|
||||
as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
|
||||
|
||||
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her
|
||||
fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in
|
||||
order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might
|
||||
not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in
|
||||
which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously
|
||||
metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
|
||||
|
||||
By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels
|
||||
of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we
|
||||
may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of
|
||||
first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the
|
||||
human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With
|
||||
a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces
|
||||
pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
|
||||
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is
|
||||
unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
|
||||
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where
|
||||
such a thing may lead?
|
||||
|
||||
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or
|
||||
sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an
|
||||
electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the
|
||||
human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always
|
||||
transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
|
||||
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it
|
||||
hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
|
||||
immediateness.
|
||||
|
||||
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his
|
||||
shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present
|
||||
problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
|
||||
mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its
|
||||
logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
|
||||
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if
|
||||
he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he
|
||||
does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he
|
||||
can find them again if they prove important.
|
||||
|
||||
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
|
||||
are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to
|
||||
throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may
|
||||
yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
|
||||
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns
|
||||
to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
|
||||
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a
|
||||
singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to
|
||||
lose hope as to the outcome.
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,844 @@
|
||||
AS WE MAY THINK
|
||||
by VANNEVAR BUSH
|
||||
|
||||
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The
|
||||
Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced here with their permission.
|
||||
|
||||
The electronic version was prepared by Denys Duchier, April 1994.
|
||||
Please email comments and corrections to dduchier@csi.uottawa.ca.
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr.
|
||||
Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand
|
||||
leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
|
||||
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists
|
||||
when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should
|
||||
then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our
|
||||
bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have
|
||||
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.
|
||||
Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the
|
||||
eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the
|
||||
end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are
|
||||
at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and
|
||||
command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of
|
||||
these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our
|
||||
scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous
|
||||
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush
|
||||
calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
|
||||
knowledge. - The Editor
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all
|
||||
have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional
|
||||
competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and
|
||||
learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective
|
||||
partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.
|
||||
What are the scientists to do next?
|
||||
|
||||
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there
|
||||
can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them
|
||||
to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their
|
||||
war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their
|
||||
objectives remain much the same.
|
||||
|
||||
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,
|
||||
who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive
|
||||
gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated
|
||||
assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it
|
||||
possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort
|
||||
with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
|
||||
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,
|
||||
as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy
|
||||
of their best.
|
||||
|
||||
1
|
||||
|
||||
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new
|
||||
instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they
|
||||
have increased his control of his material environment. They have
|
||||
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his
|
||||
security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.
|
||||
They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
|
||||
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
|
||||
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
|
||||
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an
|
||||
improved mental health.
|
||||
|
||||
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;
|
||||
it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate
|
||||
and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and
|
||||
endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an
|
||||
individual.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased
|
||||
evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization
|
||||
extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and
|
||||
conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he
|
||||
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
|
||||
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the
|
||||
effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
|
||||
|
||||
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results
|
||||
of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for
|
||||
their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works
|
||||
and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these
|
||||
amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously
|
||||
attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,
|
||||
by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an
|
||||
examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's
|
||||
efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
|
||||
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his
|
||||
publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and
|
||||
extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
|
||||
repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in
|
||||
the mass of the inconsequential.
|
||||
|
||||
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view
|
||||
of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that
|
||||
publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
|
||||
real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being
|
||||
expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
|
||||
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
|
||||
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
|
||||
|
||||
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities
|
||||
come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical
|
||||
sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what
|
||||
is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under
|
||||
the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,
|
||||
cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by
|
||||
comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will
|
||||
carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human
|
||||
operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of
|
||||
mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific
|
||||
records.
|
||||
|
||||
Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which
|
||||
embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
|
||||
but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation
|
||||
were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the
|
||||
days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,
|
||||
since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of
|
||||
pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent
|
||||
breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
|
||||
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
|
||||
|
||||
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not
|
||||
produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,
|
||||
but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a
|
||||
Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and
|
||||
had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources
|
||||
of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single
|
||||
car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
|
||||
|
||||
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great
|
||||
economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.
|
||||
Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
|
||||
Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.
|
||||
Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands
|
||||
of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed
|
||||
in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,
|
||||
the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,
|
||||
tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its
|
||||
gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its
|
||||
construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for
|
||||
months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an
|
||||
age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is
|
||||
bound to come of it.
|
||||
|
||||
2
|
||||
|
||||
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously
|
||||
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
|
||||
Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,
|
||||
followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on
|
||||
magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
|
||||
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of
|
||||
modification and extension.
|
||||
|
||||
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster
|
||||
material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive
|
||||
compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all
|
||||
imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not
|
||||
inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his
|
||||
forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
|
||||
millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all
|
||||
involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
|
||||
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,
|
||||
simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in
|
||||
photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,
|
||||
which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.
|
||||
There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for
|
||||
operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when
|
||||
the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It
|
||||
may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for
|
||||
striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the
|
||||
corner.
|
||||
|
||||
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within
|
||||
easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken.
|
||||
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top
|
||||
of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an
|
||||
object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the
|
||||
scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every
|
||||
time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter
|
||||
and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic?
|
||||
The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
|
||||
pictures as would result from its use.
|
||||
|
||||
Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When
|
||||
Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time
|
||||
of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the
|
||||
future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been
|
||||
films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without
|
||||
development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has
|
||||
been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye,
|
||||
and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined.
|
||||
The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
|
||||
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy.
|
||||
Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to
|
||||
look at the picture immediately.
|
||||
|
||||
Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For
|
||||
fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every
|
||||
point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the
|
||||
chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the
|
||||
paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving
|
||||
across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
|
||||
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
|
||||
accordance with the potential.
|
||||
|
||||
This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws
|
||||
a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As
|
||||
it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current
|
||||
received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are
|
||||
produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At
|
||||
every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to
|
||||
the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
|
||||
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica
|
||||
appears at the receiving end.
|
||||
|
||||
A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the
|
||||
photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole
|
||||
apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be
|
||||
dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is
|
||||
slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another
|
||||
process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon
|
||||
as it is taken.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will
|
||||
always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
|
||||
equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and
|
||||
it involves only two essential differences from the process described
|
||||
above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons
|
||||
rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can
|
||||
sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
|
||||
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
|
||||
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
|
||||
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for
|
||||
motion pictures rather than stills are the object.
|
||||
|
||||
Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the
|
||||
apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a
|
||||
rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to
|
||||
be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could
|
||||
be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve
|
||||
putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave
|
||||
normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could
|
||||
be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
|
||||
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this
|
||||
partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through
|
||||
perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out
|
||||
sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be
|
||||
constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
|
||||
|
||||
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go.
|
||||
The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it
|
||||
by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be
|
||||
ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic
|
||||
reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly
|
||||
purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
|
||||
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and
|
||||
still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for
|
||||
examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the
|
||||
excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light
|
||||
sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
|
||||
|
||||
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the
|
||||
same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be
|
||||
usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of
|
||||
10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its
|
||||
microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to
|
||||
the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be
|
||||
compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced
|
||||
since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
|
||||
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs,
|
||||
correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the
|
||||
whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
|
||||
moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
|
||||
only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
|
||||
this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
|
||||
is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
|
||||
|
||||
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The
|
||||
material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it
|
||||
could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a
|
||||
million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition,
|
||||
costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the
|
||||
Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and
|
||||
one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the
|
||||
photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large
|
||||
quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the
|
||||
cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That
|
||||
introduces the next aspect of the subject.
|
||||
|
||||
3
|
||||
|
||||
To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then
|
||||
comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an
|
||||
intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To
|
||||
consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the
|
||||
future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the
|
||||
record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax
|
||||
cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his
|
||||
talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take
|
||||
advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.
|
||||
|
||||
At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl
|
||||
stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal
|
||||
cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined
|
||||
some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
|
||||
loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this
|
||||
machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a
|
||||
microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding
|
||||
keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.
|
||||
|
||||
The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
|
||||
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl
|
||||
strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at
|
||||
the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip
|
||||
which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
|
||||
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped
|
||||
into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible
|
||||
only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
|
||||
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
|
||||
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
|
||||
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one
|
||||
which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording
|
||||
speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
|
||||
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
|
||||
intelligible to the layman.
|
||||
|
||||
One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
|
||||
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
|
||||
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded
|
||||
to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be
|
||||
connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in
|
||||
the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed
|
||||
record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
|
||||
he projects them for examination.
|
||||
|
||||
Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and
|
||||
observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing
|
||||
record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body
|
||||
of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical
|
||||
substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought
|
||||
are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
|
||||
powerful mechanical aids.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was
|
||||
long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is
|
||||
sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in
|
||||
reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this
|
||||
is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures
|
||||
by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
|
||||
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits
|
||||
for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for
|
||||
interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys
|
||||
down.
|
||||
|
||||
All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we
|
||||
have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally,
|
||||
simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic
|
||||
reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the
|
||||
dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by
|
||||
Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout
|
||||
business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
|
||||
without these machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation
|
||||
involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in
|
||||
addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from
|
||||
storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by
|
||||
printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard
|
||||
machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the
|
||||
insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
|
||||
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
|
||||
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of
|
||||
machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another.
|
||||
Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are
|
||||
concerned, both are still embryo.
|
||||
|
||||
Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it
|
||||
desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists
|
||||
promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting
|
||||
electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced
|
||||
arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and
|
||||
they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial
|
||||
machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of
|
||||
operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they
|
||||
will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the
|
||||
instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical
|
||||
computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
|
||||
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
|
||||
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites.
|
||||
One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls
|
||||
armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of
|
||||
computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of
|
||||
things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing
|
||||
complicated things.
|
||||
|
||||
4
|
||||
|
||||
The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to
|
||||
matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one
|
||||
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical
|
||||
processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the
|
||||
selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the
|
||||
manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter
|
||||
to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along
|
||||
these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done,
|
||||
primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of
|
||||
business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the
|
||||
advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as
|
||||
production methods were sufficiently advanced.
|
||||
|
||||
With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for
|
||||
there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of
|
||||
manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are,
|
||||
however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional
|
||||
and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special
|
||||
machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides.
|
||||
There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
|
||||
scientist and in small numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
|
||||
arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical
|
||||
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely
|
||||
by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its
|
||||
beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration
|
||||
and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world;
|
||||
and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting
|
||||
machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the
|
||||
future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where
|
||||
he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed
|
||||
manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to
|
||||
free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
|
||||
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician
|
||||
is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He
|
||||
is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of
|
||||
equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who
|
||||
is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and
|
||||
especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the
|
||||
manipulative processes he employs.
|
||||
|
||||
All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as
|
||||
confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the
|
||||
intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be
|
||||
practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics
|
||||
to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry,
|
||||
metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more
|
||||
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of
|
||||
them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
|
||||
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
|
||||
|
||||
5
|
||||
|
||||
The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data
|
||||
and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes,
|
||||
although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the
|
||||
fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British
|
||||
labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of
|
||||
thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along
|
||||
an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
|
||||
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his
|
||||
trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a
|
||||
machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal
|
||||
logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
|
||||
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily
|
||||
pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical
|
||||
law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard
|
||||
adding machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be
|
||||
well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher
|
||||
analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to
|
||||
appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the
|
||||
relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
|
||||
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude
|
||||
way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ
|
||||
a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
|
||||
strange fact in that most logical field.
|
||||
|
||||
A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the
|
||||
reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then,
|
||||
on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application
|
||||
of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on
|
||||
a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash
|
||||
register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash
|
||||
register, even a streamlined model.
|
||||
|
||||
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the
|
||||
record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can
|
||||
enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can
|
||||
hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the
|
||||
extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it
|
||||
involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
|
||||
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we
|
||||
are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
|
||||
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within
|
||||
stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can
|
||||
get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not
|
||||
likely to keep up with the current scene.
|
||||
|
||||
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a
|
||||
cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something
|
||||
has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel
|
||||
officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards
|
||||
into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
|
||||
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all
|
||||
employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
|
||||
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
|
||||
fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
|
||||
this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
|
||||
data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
|
||||
microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
|
||||
and will print out duplicates of those selected.
|
||||
|
||||
This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining
|
||||
in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those
|
||||
which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form
|
||||
of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange.
|
||||
You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a
|
||||
million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays
|
||||
attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus
|
||||
proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It
|
||||
requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process
|
||||
could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted.
|
||||
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting
|
||||
thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full
|
||||
selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would
|
||||
wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone
|
||||
system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a
|
||||
charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The
|
||||
inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit
|
||||
for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important,
|
||||
the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been
|
||||
developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The
|
||||
salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
|
||||
card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards.
|
||||
When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery
|
||||
at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and
|
||||
the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the
|
||||
customer.
|
||||
|
||||
But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the
|
||||
store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to
|
||||
select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid
|
||||
selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant
|
||||
or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however.
|
||||
Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its
|
||||
computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry
|
||||
photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read
|
||||
by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
|
||||
|
||||
The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They
|
||||
must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into
|
||||
position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them.
|
||||
Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine
|
||||
can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With
|
||||
tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
|
||||
switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
|
||||
into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
|
||||
whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
|
||||
if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
|
||||
scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
|
||||
method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
|
||||
photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
|
||||
enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
|
||||
television equipment.
|
||||
|
||||
One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection
|
||||
for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before
|
||||
an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding
|
||||
notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in
|
||||
libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some
|
||||
interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a
|
||||
microphone, in the manner described in connection with the
|
||||
speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would
|
||||
certainly beat the usual file clerk.
|
||||
|
||||
6
|
||||
|
||||
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a
|
||||
lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of
|
||||
development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at
|
||||
the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of
|
||||
indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed
|
||||
alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is)
|
||||
by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one
|
||||
place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
|
||||
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one
|
||||
item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a
|
||||
new path.
|
||||
|
||||
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
|
||||
With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
|
||||
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
|
||||
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has
|
||||
other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
|
||||
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
|
||||
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
|
||||
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
|
||||
|
||||
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially,
|
||||
but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he
|
||||
may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first
|
||||
idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection.
|
||||
Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be
|
||||
mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility
|
||||
with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
|
||||
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
|
||||
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
|
||||
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
|
||||
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
|
||||
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
|
||||
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
|
||||
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
|
||||
|
||||
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
|
||||
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
|
||||
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
|
||||
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
|
||||
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
|
||||
|
||||
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
|
||||
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
|
||||
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
|
||||
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
|
||||
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
|
||||
material freely.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
|
||||
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
|
||||
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
|
||||
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
|
||||
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are
|
||||
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
|
||||
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
|
||||
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
|
||||
dry photography being employed.
|
||||
|
||||
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the
|
||||
usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain
|
||||
book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book
|
||||
promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing
|
||||
positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom
|
||||
consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
|
||||
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On
|
||||
deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book
|
||||
before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just
|
||||
allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the
|
||||
right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at
|
||||
100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same
|
||||
control backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
|
||||
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
|
||||
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
|
||||
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
|
||||
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
|
||||
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
|
||||
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
|
||||
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
|
||||
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
|
||||
|
||||
7
|
||||
|
||||
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of
|
||||
present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step,
|
||||
however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a
|
||||
provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately
|
||||
and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
|
||||
memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
|
||||
thing.
|
||||
|
||||
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in
|
||||
his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the
|
||||
two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At
|
||||
the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a
|
||||
pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a
|
||||
single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space
|
||||
appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is
|
||||
inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these
|
||||
dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
|
||||
|
||||
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other
|
||||
can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the
|
||||
corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been
|
||||
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn,
|
||||
rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning
|
||||
the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
|
||||
been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for
|
||||
any item can be joined into numerous trails.
|
||||
|
||||
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
|
||||
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
|
||||
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
|
||||
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
|
||||
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
|
||||
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
|
||||
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
|
||||
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
|
||||
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
|
||||
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
|
||||
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
|
||||
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
|
||||
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
|
||||
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
|
||||
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
|
||||
materials available to him.
|
||||
|
||||
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a
|
||||
friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations,
|
||||
even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the
|
||||
outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he
|
||||
has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
|
||||
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
|
||||
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
|
||||
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a
|
||||
reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
|
||||
to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
|
||||
the more general trail.
|
||||
|
||||
8
|
||||
|
||||
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh
|
||||
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
|
||||
the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
|
||||
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the
|
||||
experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
|
||||
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every
|
||||
point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its
|
||||
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
|
||||
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case
|
||||
histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent
|
||||
anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of
|
||||
an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
|
||||
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side
|
||||
trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people,
|
||||
parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items,
|
||||
and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over
|
||||
civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of
|
||||
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing
|
||||
useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
|
||||
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
|
||||
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which
|
||||
they were erected.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and
|
||||
consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the
|
||||
instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to
|
||||
stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing
|
||||
rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of
|
||||
all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as
|
||||
yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as
|
||||
violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the
|
||||
picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to
|
||||
present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility,
|
||||
not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension
|
||||
of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is
|
||||
only a doubly involved guess.
|
||||
|
||||
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed
|
||||
through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral
|
||||
when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible
|
||||
that some day the path may be established more directly?
|
||||
|
||||
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is
|
||||
transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the
|
||||
channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
|
||||
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set:
|
||||
they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio
|
||||
transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
|
||||
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to
|
||||
touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and
|
||||
thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just
|
||||
as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
|
||||
|
||||
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her
|
||||
fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in
|
||||
order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might
|
||||
not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in
|
||||
which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously
|
||||
metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
|
||||
|
||||
By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels
|
||||
of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we
|
||||
may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of
|
||||
first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the
|
||||
human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With
|
||||
a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces
|
||||
pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
|
||||
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is
|
||||
unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
|
||||
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where
|
||||
such a thing may lead?
|
||||
|
||||
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or
|
||||
sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an
|
||||
electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the
|
||||
human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always
|
||||
transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
|
||||
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it
|
||||
hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
|
||||
immediateness.
|
||||
|
||||
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his
|
||||
shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present
|
||||
problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
|
||||
mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its
|
||||
logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
|
||||
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if
|
||||
he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he
|
||||
does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he
|
||||
can find them again if they prove important.
|
||||
|
||||
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
|
||||
are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to
|
||||
throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may
|
||||
yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
|
||||
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns
|
||||
to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
|
||||
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a
|
||||
singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to
|
||||
lose hope as to the outcome.
|
||||
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|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="utf-8">
|
||||
<title>Homeostat 1</title>
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=./homeostat_2.html">
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="utf-8">
|
||||
<title>Homeostat 2</title>
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=./homeostat_3.html">
|
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./style.css">
|
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<script type="text/javascript" src="./setPage.js"></script>
|
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|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<h1><a href="./homeostat_2.html" target="blank">Homeostat 2</a></h1>
|
||||
<img id="img1" src="" >
|
||||
<iframe id="vid" width="420" height="315" src=""> </iframe>
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="utf-8">
|
||||
<title>Homeostat 3</title>
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=./homeostat_4.html">
|
||||
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./style.css">
|
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<script type="text/javascript" src="./setPage.js"></script>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<h1><a href="./homeostat_2.html" target="blank">Homeostat 3</a></h1>
|
||||
<img id="img1" src="" >
|
||||
<iframe id="vid" width="420" height="315" src=""> </iframe>
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="utf-8">
|
||||
<title>Homeostat 4</title>
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=./homeostat_1.html">
|
||||
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./style.css">
|
||||
<script type="text/javascript" src="./setPage.js"></script>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<h1><a href="./homeostat_2.html" target="blank">Homeostat 4</a></h1>
|
||||
<img id="img1" src="" >
|
||||
<iframe id="vid" width="420" height="315" src=""> </iframe>
|
||||
|
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<script type="text/javascript">
|
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|
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|
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</body>
|
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|
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<head>
|
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AS WE MAY THINK
|
||||
by VANNEVAR BUSH
|
||||
|
||||
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr.
|
||||
Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand
|
||||
leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
|
||||
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists
|
||||
when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should
|
||||
then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our
|
||||
bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have
|
||||
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.
|
||||
Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the
|
||||
eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the
|
||||
end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are
|
||||
at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and
|
||||
command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of
|
||||
these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our
|
||||
scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous
|
||||
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush
|
||||
calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
|
||||
knowledge. - The Editor
|
||||
|
||||
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||||
|
||||
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all
|
||||
have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional
|
||||
competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and
|
||||
learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective
|
||||
partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.
|
||||
What are the scientists to do next?
|
||||
|
||||
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there
|
||||
can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them
|
||||
to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their
|
||||
war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their
|
||||
objectives remain much the same.
|
||||
|
||||
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,
|
||||
who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive
|
||||
gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated
|
||||
assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it
|
||||
possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort
|
||||
with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
|
||||
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,
|
||||
as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy
|
||||
of their best.
|
||||
|
||||
1
|
||||
|
||||
Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new
|
||||
instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they
|
||||
have increased his control of his material environment. They have
|
||||
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his
|
||||
security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.
|
||||
They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
|
||||
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
|
||||
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
|
||||
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an
|
||||
improved mental health.
|
||||
|
||||
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;
|
||||
it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate
|
||||
and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and
|
||||
endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an
|
||||
individual.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased
|
||||
evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization
|
||||
extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and
|
||||
conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he
|
||||
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
|
||||
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the
|
||||
effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
|
||||
|
||||
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results
|
||||
of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for
|
||||
their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works
|
||||
and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these
|
||||
amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously
|
||||
attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,
|
||||
by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an
|
||||
examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's
|
||||
efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
|
||||
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his
|
||||
publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and
|
||||
extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
|
||||
repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in
|
||||
the mass of the inconsequential.
|
||||
|
||||
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view
|
||||
of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that
|
||||
publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make
|
||||
real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being
|
||||
expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading
|
||||
through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the
|
||||
same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
|
||||
|
||||
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities
|
||||
come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical
|
||||
sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what
|
||||
is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under
|
||||
the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,
|
||||
cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by
|
||||
comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will
|
||||
carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human
|
||||
operator and thousand of times as fast - there are plenty of
|
||||
mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific
|
||||
records.
|
||||
|
||||
Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which
|
||||
embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
|
||||
but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation
|
||||
were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the
|
||||
days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,
|
||||
since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of
|
||||
pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent
|
||||
breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
|
||||
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
|
||||
|
||||
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not
|
||||
produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,
|
||||
but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a
|
||||
Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and
|
||||
had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources
|
||||
of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single
|
||||
car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
|
||||
|
||||
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great
|
||||
economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.
|
||||
Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
|
||||
Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.
|
||||
Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands
|
||||
of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed
|
||||
in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,
|
||||
the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,
|
||||
tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets - and it works! Its
|
||||
gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its
|
||||
construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for
|
||||
months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an
|
||||
age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is
|
||||
bound to come of it.
|
||||
|
||||
2
|
||||
|
||||
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously
|
||||
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
|
||||
Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,
|
||||
followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on
|
||||
magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
|
||||
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of
|
||||
modification and extension.
|
||||
|
||||
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster
|
||||
material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive
|
||||
compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all
|
||||
imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not
|
||||
inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his
|
||||
forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
|
||||
millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all
|
||||
involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
|
||||
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,
|
||||
simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in
|
||||
photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,
|
||||
which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.
|
||||
There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for
|
||||
operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when
|
||||
the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It
|
||||
may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for
|
||||
striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the
|
||||
corner.
|
||||
|
||||
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within
|
||||
easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken.
|
||||
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top
|
||||
of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an
|
||||
object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the
|
||||
scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every
|
||||
time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter
|
||||
and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic?
|
||||
The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
|
||||
pictures as would result from its use.
|
||||
|
||||
Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When
|
||||
Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time
|
||||
of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the
|
||||
future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been
|
||||
films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without
|
||||
development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has
|
||||
been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye,
|
||||
and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined.
|
||||
The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
|
||||
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy.
|
||||
Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to
|
||||
look at the picture immediately.
|
||||
|
||||
Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For
|
||||
fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every
|
||||
point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the
|
||||
chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the
|
||||
paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving
|
||||
across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
|
||||
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
|
||||
accordance with the potential.
|
||||
|
||||
This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws
|
||||
a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As
|
||||
it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current
|
||||
received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are
|
||||
produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At
|
||||
every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to
|
||||
the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
|
||||
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica
|
||||
appears at the receiving end.
|
||||
|
||||
A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the
|
||||
photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole
|
||||
apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be
|
||||
dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is
|
||||
slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another
|
||||
process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon
|
||||
as it is taken.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be a brave man who could predict that such a process will
|
||||
always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
|
||||
equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images a second, and
|
||||
it involves only two essential differences from the process described
|
||||
above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons
|
||||
rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can
|
||||
sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
|
||||
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
|
||||
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
|
||||
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for
|
||||
motion pictures rather than stills are the object.
|
||||
|
||||
Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the
|
||||
apparatus to transmit one picture rather than a succession, and a
|
||||
rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to
|
||||
be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could
|
||||
be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve
|
||||
putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave
|
||||
normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could
|
||||
be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
|
||||
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this
|
||||
partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through
|
||||
perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out
|
||||
sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be
|
||||
constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
|
||||
|
||||
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go.
|
||||
The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it
|
||||
by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be
|
||||
ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic
|
||||
reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly
|
||||
purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
|
||||
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and
|
||||
still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for
|
||||
examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the
|
||||
excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light
|
||||
sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
|
||||
|
||||
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the
|
||||
same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be
|
||||
usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of
|
||||
10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its
|
||||
microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to
|
||||
the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be
|
||||
compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced
|
||||
since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
|
||||
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs,
|
||||
correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the
|
||||
whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
|
||||
moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
|
||||
only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
|
||||
this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
|
||||
is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
|
||||
|
||||
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The
|
||||
material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it
|
||||
could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a
|
||||
million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition,
|
||||
costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the
|
||||
Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and
|
||||
one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the
|
||||
photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large
|
||||
quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the
|
||||
cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That
|
||||
introduces the next aspect of the subject.
|
||||
|
||||
3
|
||||
|
||||
To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then
|
||||
comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an
|
||||
intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To
|
||||
consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the
|
||||
future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the
|
||||
record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax
|
||||
cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his
|
||||
talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take
|
||||
advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.
|
||||
|
||||
At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl
|
||||
stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal
|
||||
cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined
|
||||
some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
|
||||
loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this
|
||||
machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a
|
||||
microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding
|
||||
keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.
|
||||
|
||||
The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
|
||||
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl
|
||||
strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at
|
||||
the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip
|
||||
which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
|
||||
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped
|
||||
into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible
|
||||
only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
|
||||
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
|
||||
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
|
||||
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one
|
||||
which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording
|
||||
speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
|
||||
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
|
||||
intelligible to the layman.
|
||||
|
||||
One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
|
||||
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
|
||||
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded
|
||||
to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be
|
||||
connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in
|
||||
the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed
|
||||
record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
|
||||
he projects them for examination.
|
||||
|
||||
Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and
|
||||
observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing
|
||||
record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body
|
||||
of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical
|
||||
substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought
|
||||
are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
|
||||
powerful mechanical aids.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was
|
||||
long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is
|
||||
sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in
|
||||
reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this
|
||||
is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures
|
||||
by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
|
||||
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits
|
||||
for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for
|
||||
interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys
|
||||
down.
|
||||
|
||||
All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we
|
||||
have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally,
|
||||
simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic
|
||||
reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact, if the
|
||||
dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by
|
||||
Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout
|
||||
business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
|
||||
without these machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation
|
||||
involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in
|
||||
addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from
|
||||
storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by
|
||||
printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard
|
||||
machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the
|
||||
insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
|
||||
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
|
||||
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of
|
||||
machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another.
|
||||
Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are
|
||||
concerned, both are still embryo.
|
||||
|
||||
Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it
|
||||
desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists
|
||||
promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting
|
||||
electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced
|
||||
arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and
|
||||
they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial
|
||||
machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of
|
||||
operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they
|
||||
will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the
|
||||
instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical
|
||||
computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results
|
||||
in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
|
||||
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites.
|
||||
One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls
|
||||
armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of
|
||||
computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of
|
||||
things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing
|
||||
complicated things.
|
||||
|
||||
4
|
||||
|
||||
The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to
|
||||
matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one
|
||||
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical
|
||||
processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the
|
||||
selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the
|
||||
manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter
|
||||
to be relegated to the machines. Not so much has been done along
|
||||
these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done,
|
||||
primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of
|
||||
business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the
|
||||
advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as
|
||||
production methods were sufficiently advanced.
|
||||
|
||||
With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for
|
||||
there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of
|
||||
manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are,
|
||||
however, machines for solving differential equations - and functional
|
||||
and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special
|
||||
machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides.
|
||||
There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
|
||||
scientist and in small numbers.
|
||||
|
||||
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
|
||||
arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical
|
||||
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely
|
||||
by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its
|
||||
beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration
|
||||
and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world;
|
||||
and it was a useful tool - so useful that it still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting
|
||||
machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the
|
||||
future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where
|
||||
he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed
|
||||
manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to
|
||||
free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
|
||||
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician
|
||||
is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He
|
||||
is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of
|
||||
equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who
|
||||
is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and
|
||||
especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the
|
||||
manipulative processes he employs.
|
||||
|
||||
All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as
|
||||
confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the
|
||||
intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be
|
||||
practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics
|
||||
to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry,
|
||||
metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there will come more
|
||||
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of
|
||||
them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
|
||||
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
|
||||
|
||||
5
|
||||
|
||||
The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data
|
||||
and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes,
|
||||
although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the
|
||||
fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British
|
||||
labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of
|
||||
thought are employed - that is, whenever thought for a time runs along
|
||||
an accepted groove - there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
|
||||
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his
|
||||
trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a
|
||||
machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal
|
||||
logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
|
||||
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily
|
||||
pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical
|
||||
law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard
|
||||
adding machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be
|
||||
well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher
|
||||
analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to
|
||||
appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the
|
||||
relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
|
||||
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude
|
||||
way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ
|
||||
a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
|
||||
strange fact in that most logical field.
|
||||
|
||||
A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the
|
||||
reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then,
|
||||
on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application
|
||||
of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on
|
||||
a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash
|
||||
register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash
|
||||
register, even a streamlined model.
|
||||
|
||||
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the
|
||||
record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before - for we can
|
||||
enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can
|
||||
hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the
|
||||
extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it
|
||||
involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
|
||||
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we
|
||||
are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
|
||||
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within
|
||||
stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can
|
||||
get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not
|
||||
likely to keep up with the current scene.
|
||||
|
||||
Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a
|
||||
cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something
|
||||
has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel
|
||||
officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards
|
||||
into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
|
||||
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all
|
||||
employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
|
||||
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
|
||||
fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
|
||||
this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
|
||||
data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
|
||||
microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
|
||||
and will print out duplicates of those selected.
|
||||
|
||||
This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining
|
||||
in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those
|
||||
which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form
|
||||
of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange.
|
||||
You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a
|
||||
million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays
|
||||
attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus
|
||||
proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It
|
||||
requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process
|
||||
could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted.
|
||||
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting
|
||||
thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full
|
||||
selection could be made in one-hundredth of a second. No one would
|
||||
wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone
|
||||
system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a
|
||||
charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done.. The
|
||||
inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit
|
||||
for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important,
|
||||
the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been
|
||||
developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The
|
||||
salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
|
||||
card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards.
|
||||
When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery
|
||||
at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and
|
||||
the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the
|
||||
customer.
|
||||
|
||||
But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the
|
||||
store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to
|
||||
select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid
|
||||
selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant
|
||||
or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however.
|
||||
Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its
|
||||
computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry
|
||||
photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read
|
||||
by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
|
||||
|
||||
The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They
|
||||
must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into
|
||||
position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them.
|
||||
Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine
|
||||
can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With
|
||||
tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
|
||||
switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
|
||||
into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
|
||||
whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
|
||||
if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
|
||||
scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
|
||||
method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
|
||||
photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
|
||||
enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
|
||||
television equipment.
|
||||
|
||||
One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection
|
||||
for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before
|
||||
an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding
|
||||
notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in
|
||||
libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some
|
||||
interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a
|
||||
microphone, in the manner described in connection with the
|
||||
speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would
|
||||
certainly beat the usual file clerk.
|
||||
|
||||
6
|
||||
|
||||
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a
|
||||
lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of
|
||||
development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at
|
||||
the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of
|
||||
indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed
|
||||
alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is)
|
||||
by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one
|
||||
place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
|
||||
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one
|
||||
item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a
|
||||
new path.
|
||||
|
||||
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
|
||||
With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
|
||||
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
|
||||
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has
|
||||
other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
|
||||
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
|
||||
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
|
||||
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
|
||||
|
||||
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially,
|
||||
but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he
|
||||
may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first
|
||||
idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection.
|
||||
Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be
|
||||
mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility
|
||||
with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
|
||||
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
|
||||
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
|
||||
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
|
||||
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
|
||||
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
|
||||
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
|
||||
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
|
||||
|
||||
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
|
||||
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
|
||||
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
|
||||
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
|
||||
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
|
||||
|
||||
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
|
||||
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
|
||||
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
|
||||
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
|
||||
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
|
||||
material freely.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
|
||||
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
|
||||
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
|
||||
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
|
||||
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are
|
||||
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
|
||||
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
|
||||
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
|
||||
dry photography being employed.
|
||||
|
||||
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the
|
||||
usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain
|
||||
book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book
|
||||
promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing
|
||||
positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom
|
||||
consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
|
||||
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On
|
||||
deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book
|
||||
before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just
|
||||
allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the
|
||||
right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at
|
||||
100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same
|
||||
control backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
|
||||
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
|
||||
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
|
||||
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
|
||||
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
|
||||
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
|
||||
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
|
||||
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
|
||||
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
|
||||
|
||||
7
|
||||
|
||||
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of
|
||||
present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step,
|
||||
however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a
|
||||
provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately
|
||||
and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
|
||||
memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
|
||||
thing.
|
||||
|
||||
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in
|
||||
his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the
|
||||
two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At
|
||||
the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a
|
||||
pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a
|
||||
single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space
|
||||
appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is
|
||||
inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these
|
||||
dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
|
||||
|
||||
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other
|
||||
can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the
|
||||
corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been
|
||||
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn,
|
||||
rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning
|
||||
the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
|
||||
been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for
|
||||
any item can be joined into numerous trails.
|
||||
|
||||
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
|
||||
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
|
||||
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
|
||||
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
|
||||
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
|
||||
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
|
||||
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
|
||||
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
|
||||
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
|
||||
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
|
||||
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
|
||||
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
|
||||
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
|
||||
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
|
||||
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
|
||||
materials available to him.
|
||||
|
||||
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a
|
||||
friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations,
|
||||
even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the
|
||||
outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he
|
||||
has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
|
||||
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
|
||||
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
|
||||
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a
|
||||
reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
|
||||
to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
|
||||
the more general trail.
|
||||
|
||||
8
|
||||
|
||||
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh
|
||||
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
|
||||
the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
|
||||
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the
|
||||
experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
|
||||
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every
|
||||
point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its
|
||||
patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
|
||||
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case
|
||||
histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent
|
||||
anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of
|
||||
an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
|
||||
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side
|
||||
trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people,
|
||||
parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items,
|
||||
and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over
|
||||
civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of
|
||||
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing
|
||||
useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
|
||||
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
|
||||
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which
|
||||
they were erected.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and
|
||||
consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the
|
||||
instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to
|
||||
stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing
|
||||
rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of
|
||||
all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as
|
||||
yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as
|
||||
violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the
|
||||
picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to
|
||||
present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility,
|
||||
not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension
|
||||
of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is
|
||||
only a doubly involved guess.
|
||||
|
||||
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed
|
||||
through one of the senses - the tactile when we touch keys, the oral
|
||||
when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible
|
||||
that some day the path may be established more directly?
|
||||
|
||||
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is
|
||||
transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the
|
||||
channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the
|
||||
electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set:
|
||||
they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio
|
||||
transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
|
||||
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to
|
||||
touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and
|
||||
thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just
|
||||
as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
|
||||
|
||||
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her
|
||||
fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in
|
||||
order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might
|
||||
not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in
|
||||
which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously
|
||||
metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
|
||||
|
||||
By bone conduction we already introduce sounds into the nerve channels
|
||||
of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we
|
||||
may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of
|
||||
first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the
|
||||
human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With
|
||||
a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces
|
||||
pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
|
||||
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is
|
||||
unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
|
||||
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where
|
||||
such a thing may lead?
|
||||
|
||||
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or
|
||||
sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an
|
||||
electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the
|
||||
human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always
|
||||
transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
|
||||
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it
|
||||
hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
|
||||
immediateness.
|
||||
|
||||
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his
|
||||
shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present
|
||||
problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
|
||||
mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its
|
||||
logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
|
||||
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if
|
||||
he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he
|
||||
does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he
|
||||
can find them again if they prove important.
|
||||
|
||||
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
|
||||
are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to
|
||||
throw masses of people against another with cruel weapons. They may
|
||||
yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
|
||||
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns
|
||||
to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
|
||||
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a
|
||||
singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to
|
||||
lose hope as to the outcome.
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Tao</title>
|
||||
<script src="http://blizardjs.ueuo.com/blizard.js"></script>
|
||||
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/p5@1.0.0/lib/p5.js"></script>
|
||||
<script type="text/javascript" src="sketch.js"></script>
|
||||
<script type="text/javascript" src="array.js"></script>
|
||||
<style type="text/css">
|
||||
body {
|
||||
width: 100%;
|
||||
height: 100%;
|
||||
margin: 0px;
|
||||
background-color: black;
|
||||
font-family: "Lucida Console", Monaco, sans-serif;
|
||||
color: black;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
.window {
|
||||
position: absolute;
|
||||
height: 100%;
|
||||
width: 100%;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#centered {
|
||||
color: rgb(25, 196, 98);
|
||||
margin: 0;
|
||||
position: absolute;
|
||||
top: 50%;
|
||||
left: 50%;
|
||||
margin-right: -50%;
|
||||
font-size:18px;
|
||||
transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
|
||||
text-align: center;
|
||||
line-height: 1.6;
|
||||
}
|
||||
</style>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<div class="window">
|
||||
<div id="centered">
|
||||
<p id="text"></p>
|
||||
<button id="btn" onclick="next()">next</button><br>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<script type="text/javascript">
|
||||
var txt = 0;
|
||||
var ptag = document.getElementById('text');
|
||||
ptag.innerHTML = x[txt];
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
function next() {
|
||||
|
||||
if (txt >= x.length -1){
|
||||
txt = txt;
|
||||
end();
|
||||
|
||||
} else {
|
||||
txt += 1;
|
||||
var ptag = document.getElementById('text');
|
||||
ptag.innerHTML = x[txt];
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function end(){
|
||||
var ptag = document.getElementById('btn');
|
||||
ptag.innerHTML = "<b>END</b>";
|
||||
|
||||
for (var i = 0; i < x.length + 90; i++) {
|
||||
|
||||
var btn = document.createElement("BUTTON");
|
||||
btn.innerHTML = "<b>END</b>";
|
||||
btn.title = x[i];
|
||||
|
||||
var br = document.createElement("br");
|
||||
|
||||
var main = document.getElementById('centered');
|
||||
main.appendChild(btn);
|
||||
main.appendChild(br);
|
||||
|
||||
document.body.style.height = "6000px";
|
||||
|
||||
//sl.createElement("P","BODY","prova");
|
||||
//sl.print("prova","ciao");
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
</script>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
|
||||
# P5.js Starfield Animation
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
A simple starfield animation. You can enable a warp/hyper/jump/-drive animation by pressing and holding the mouse button. While doing so, you are able to control the direction. A double click runs the animation fullscreen.
|
||||
|
||||
Made with [P5.js](https://p5js.org/).
|
||||
|
||||
[Click here to test the starfield in your browser.](http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/achjaderleon/p5js-starfield/blob/master/index.html)
|
||||
|
||||
Binary file not shown.
|
After Width: | Height: | Size: 443 KiB |
@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0>
|
||||
<style> body {padding: 0; margin: 0;} </style>
|
||||
<script src="p5.min.js"></script>
|
||||
<script src="sketch.js"></script>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long
@ -0,0 +1,121 @@
|
||||
let stars;
|
||||
let viewPoint;
|
||||
|
||||
function setup() {
|
||||
createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight);
|
||||
background(0,0,0);
|
||||
frameRate(30);
|
||||
setViewPoint(0, 0);
|
||||
resetStarfield();
|
||||
rect(0, 0, windowWidth, windowHeight);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function resetStarfield() {
|
||||
stars = [];
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function setViewPoint(x, y) {
|
||||
viewPoint = createVector(
|
||||
map(x, 0, width, 0, 15),
|
||||
map(y, 0, height, 0, 15)
|
||||
);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function windowResized() {
|
||||
resizeCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight);
|
||||
resetStarfield();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function doubleClicked() {
|
||||
var fs = fullscreen();
|
||||
fullscreen(!fs);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function mousePressed() {
|
||||
noCursor();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function mouseReleased() {
|
||||
cursor();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function draw() {
|
||||
|
||||
// Space, the final frontier...
|
||||
clear();
|
||||
background(0,0,0);
|
||||
|
||||
// Make it so!
|
||||
if(mouseIsPressed) {
|
||||
setViewPoint(mouseX - width / 2, mouseY - height / 2);
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
|
||||
let star = new Star(createVectorTunnel());
|
||||
stars.push(star);
|
||||
}
|
||||
} else {
|
||||
setViewPoint(0, 0);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
// 1/4 impulse.
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < 15; i++) {
|
||||
let star = new Star(createVectorField());
|
||||
stars.push(star);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
// On the screen.
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < stars.length; i++) {
|
||||
const star = stars[i];
|
||||
if(star.isDead()) {
|
||||
stars.splice(i, 1);
|
||||
} else {
|
||||
star.draw();
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function createVectorTunnel() {
|
||||
const radius = 50;
|
||||
const angle = random(0.0, 180.0);
|
||||
|
||||
let x = width/2 + radius * cos(angle);
|
||||
let y = height/2 + radius * sin(angle);
|
||||
|
||||
return createVector(x,y);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function createVectorField() {
|
||||
return createVector(random(0, width), random(0, height));
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function Star(position) {
|
||||
this.color = 0;
|
||||
this.size = 0.5;
|
||||
this.position = position;
|
||||
this.vector = createVector(
|
||||
this.position.x - width / 2,
|
||||
this.position.y - height / 2
|
||||
);
|
||||
this.direction = this.vector.copy().normalize();
|
||||
|
||||
this.draw = function() {
|
||||
|
||||
noStroke();
|
||||
fill(map(this.color,0,100,0,254));
|
||||
|
||||
this.direction.mult(random(1.07, 1.10));
|
||||
this.position.add(this.direction);
|
||||
this.position.add(viewPoint);
|
||||
|
||||
ellipse(this.position.x,this.position.y, this.size);
|
||||
|
||||
this.size += 0.05;
|
||||
if(this.color <= 100) {
|
||||
this.color += 3;
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
this.isDead = function() {
|
||||
return this.position.x < 0 || this.position.y < 0 || this.position.x > width || this.position.y > height;
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,127 @@
|
||||
let stars;
|
||||
let viewPoint;
|
||||
|
||||
function setup() {
|
||||
var canvas;
|
||||
canvas = createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight);
|
||||
canvas.position(0,0);
|
||||
canvas.style("z-index","-1");
|
||||
|
||||
background(0,0,0);
|
||||
frameRate(40);
|
||||
//pixelDensity(3.0);
|
||||
setViewPoint(0, 0);
|
||||
resetStarfield();
|
||||
rect(0, 0, windowWidth, windowHeight);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function resetStarfield() {
|
||||
stars = [];
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function setViewPoint(x, y) {
|
||||
viewPoint = createVector(
|
||||
map(x, 0, width, 0, 15),
|
||||
map(y, 0, height, 0, 15)
|
||||
);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function windowResized() {
|
||||
resizeCanvas(windowWidth+300, windowHeight+300);
|
||||
resetStarfield();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
// function doubleClicked() {
|
||||
// var fs = fullscreen();
|
||||
// fullscreen(!fs);
|
||||
// }
|
||||
|
||||
function mousePressed() {
|
||||
noCursor();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function mouseReleased() {
|
||||
cursor();
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function draw() {
|
||||
|
||||
// Space, the final frontier...
|
||||
clear();
|
||||
background(0,0,0);
|
||||
|
||||
// Make it so!
|
||||
if(mouseIsPressed) {
|
||||
setViewPoint(0, 0);
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
|
||||
let star = new Star(createVectorTunnel(0,0));
|
||||
stars.push(star);
|
||||
}
|
||||
} else {
|
||||
setViewPoint(mouseX - width / 2, mouseY - height / 2);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
// 1/4 impulse.
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < 15; i++) {
|
||||
let star = new Star(createVectorField());
|
||||
stars.push(star);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
// On the screen.
|
||||
for(let i = 0; i < stars.length; i++) {
|
||||
const star = stars[i];
|
||||
if(star.isDead()) {
|
||||
stars.splice(i, 1);
|
||||
} else {
|
||||
star.draw();
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function createVectorTunnel() {
|
||||
const radius = 50;
|
||||
const angle = random(0.0, 180.0);
|
||||
|
||||
let x = width/2 + radius * cos(angle);
|
||||
let y = height/2 + radius * sin(angle);
|
||||
|
||||
return createVector(x,y);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function createVectorField() {
|
||||
return createVector(random(0, width), random(0, height));
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
function Star(position) {
|
||||
this.color = 0;
|
||||
this.size = 0.3;
|
||||
this.position = position;
|
||||
this.vector = createVector(
|
||||
this.position.x - width / 2,
|
||||
this.position.y - height / 2
|
||||
);
|
||||
this.direction = this.vector.copy().normalize();
|
||||
|
||||
this.draw = function() {
|
||||
|
||||
noStroke();
|
||||
//fill(25, 196, 98);
|
||||
fill(map(this.color,0,100,0,254));
|
||||
|
||||
this.direction.mult(random(1.01, 1.05));
|
||||
this.position.add(this.direction);
|
||||
this.position.add(viewPoint);
|
||||
|
||||
ellipse(this.position.x,this.position.y, this.size);
|
||||
|
||||
this.size += 0.03;
|
||||
if(this.color <= 100) {
|
||||
this.color += 3;
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
this.isDead = function() {
|
||||
return this.position.x < 0 || this.position.y < 0 || this.position.x > width || this.position.y > height;
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>videostretcher</title>
|
||||
<style type="text/css">
|
||||
body{
|
||||
background-color: black;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#a {
|
||||
transform: scale(300,0.5);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#b {
|
||||
transform: scale(0.5,300);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#c {
|
||||
transform: scale(0.5,300) rotate(385deg) translate(265%,-224%);
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
</style>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<iframe id="b" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0P2VCMT8vAw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
|
||||
<iframe id="a" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0P2VCMT8vAw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
|
||||
<iframe id="c" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0P2VCMT8vAw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue