Books – Gregg Fedchak

The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Who Invented Television

Written by Gregg Fedchak on February 10, 2025. Posted in Books.

Did a 15 year old boy on a family farm invent TV, or did a nasty old big corporation?

Okay, so Philo Farnsworth was older than 15 when he came up with the first functioning electrical television broadcasting system, but he started when 15.

Earlier, actually. He shared it with his high school science teacher at 15. According to the patents, he’s the one who did it.

philo farnsworth 1924 — ***Philo T. Farnsworth***

RCA, led by David Sarnoff, wanted the world to believe that RCA invented the first successful system, and displayed it at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Sarnoff, actually, wanted the world to believe that David Sarnoff was the magician behind the new technology, but that’s for another text, a psychology one.

davidsarnoff 1922 — ***David Sarnoff of RCA/NBC***

THE LAST LONE INVENTOR: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television by Evan I. Schwartz (HarperCollins 2002) reads like a Hardy Boys novel, full of intrigue with villains, heroes, and plenty of questions. And that’s okay for this subject, which is littered with figures large and small who have bits and pieces of claims to have invented TV or parts thereof.

version 1.0.0 — ***THE LAST LONE INVENTOR by Evan I. Schwartz***

Here’s the mess: there were competing broadcasting systems, one mechanical (with a spinning disk inside each TV!), another electrical (which won, thank God). Germany, Russia and the later Soviet Union, and England all had lone and corporate inventors working on early TV. Italy had Marconi, the elegant (and sexy, and rich) wireless telegraph inventor fiddling with TV.

Everybody dragged their heels in the development process. Farnsworth dragged because of lack of money and facilities and because of personal problems. RCA/NBC dragged because it had a cash cow in radio during the otherwise desperate Great Depresssion decade. They also dragged because they were trying to run out the clock on Farnsworth’s successful patents, while wearing him down on legal costs and court challenges.

And, of course, Hitler wanted attention and caused the world to shut down luxury and leisure industries so that it could annihilate Germany.

Finally, Farnsworth had a perverse way of shooting himself in the forehead from time to time.

He took up smoking to cure himself of alcoholism. He wasted a golden opportunity to testify before a Congressional committee about RCA’s goon tactics. He refused numerous business deals for his tech that would have made him wealthy for life, deals that you or I would have made in a flash.

But no, Farnsworth wanted to be Farnsworth. He won in the end. Against the greatest of companies and the greatest of odds.

Sort of . . .

Did An Enema Technique Create Critical Theory?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 18, 2025. Posted in Books.

Our internal and external environments affect how we think. They can be inspirational. They can create epiphanies. If we’re lucky, they can create our life paths.

sommer, giorgio (1834 1914) n. 1167 napoli panorama (2) — ***Vesuvius ejaculating***

In “NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale/Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2024), author Martin Mittelmeier, with wonderful help from translator Shelley Frisch, proposes that the environs of Naples, Italy inspired the beginnings of Critical Theory.

What is Critical Theory?

Known more commonly in the United States as The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory is a school of philosophy? sociology? Marxism? that actually had a building in Frankfurt, Germany, which proves it was a school. It even looks like a school building:

German philosophers liked to unwind and drink in Italy, and eventually some of them found their way as far south as Naples, near the always-entertaining Mt. Vesuvius. The practical locals, the pre-industrial setting, the ruins, the porous volcanic rocks, skulls and burial caves, and colorful architects like Gilbert Clavel, who bragged about his enema as, “a Vesuvian eruption ensued, which then turned my behind into a riflescope,” all added to the atmosphere.

Clavell, according to Mittelmeier, inspired Adorno’s concept of “blasting”. “Porosity” came from the lava rocks ejected, some would say ejaculated, upon the mountainsides. “Constellations” came from . . . I’m not sure where.

walter benjamin vers 1928 — ***Walter Benjamin, gazing uneasily upon the future***

Critical Theory is an offshoot, or a sideshoot, or a bastard child of Marxism. As soon as Marxists realized that the working classes were not going to rise up and butcher industrialists, Marxism mutated into a gentle nudging of institutions leftward, a process we see and live in today. It lost, but it won. Sort of, since the working classes are now voting for populists.

Critical theorizing is fundamentally a critique of capitalism and all its failings. It aims for a utopia on earth, but even Adorno thought, “Can’t be done.”

It would like, ideally, for each of us to gain the self-consciousness to assess our lives and then to live more consciously, and better. We might approach that utopia by sharing wealth, working less, needing less, wanting much less, striving less.

It is a critique of the Enlightenment, the historical era that gave us rationalism.

And it’s also hypocritical, in that anyone who can parse it today is running away from a bourgeois life with generally well-to-do bourgeois parents. If your parents can get you into Yale, you could study Critical Theory. If they taught it. Which no university really does, as a whole.

NAPLES 1925 is a beautifully written and even better translated (from the German) book. Mittelmeier has a clever and rather plausible notion of the roots of the philosophy being bred in Italy.

The fact that we live the consequences of a philosophy that nobody can explain or read is horrifying.

Think about that the next time you sit down to your Captain Crunch in sunny Happyville.

scoria macro digon3 — ***porous ejecta so beloved by philosophers***

When Classical Music Was Everywhere

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 13, 2025. Posted in Books.

I know it seems hard to believe, but there was a time when classical music was as available and as free as country or pop.

That time was in the early days of radio. In the 1920’s until 1950, broadcast networks such as CBS or NBC provided classical music, as did local stations. And there were a bunch of reasons why they did.

When radio was a novelty, there was a civilized war, but a war nonetheless, over what the nature of radio would be.

Would it be commercial, with advertisements? Would it be ad-free and government-run, like the BBC in Great Britain and sort of like the CBC in Canada?

Business and government and activists and all sorts of interests fought it out, and eventually a hybrid model prevailed. Radio in the United States would be mostly commercial.

But there was a catch: the government let it be known that the networks and local stations would need to be responsible for the education and welfare of their listening audiences.

This meant classical music, because it was the most easily pinned-down facet of civic responsibility. Covering political events, news, and producing educational programs such as lectures followed.

There was a missionary element in this. Fans of classical music truly believed that providing a steady diet of it to the guy milking a cow in his barn at 4 am would make the guy, and by extension America, a better and more civilized place.

The classical music industry – and there was and is one – also hoped to capitalize, money-wise, as radio made the music more commercial. That even happened, at least until the Beatles showed up and sunk the ship.

Finally, and most importantly, the roughly 1.5% of the American population that obsesses over classical music feared their type of listening would disappear under the brunt of commercial ding-dong yahoo music forms. They just hoped classical would survive.

Well, it has. Barely. And not on the networks or on your local station. Even your local National Public Radio station has replaced classical music with news, politics, chat, folk stuff, world music, and so on.

Under pressure from government, the major broadcasters gave us 30 or so years of highbrow music. Until like the internet, everything was taken over by noise to rehabilitate a population too weary of work to think or sit patiently in their “free” time.

I have a love/hate relationship with classical music. I like some periods of it, dislike others, prefer some conductors or orchestras, and demand great sound quality because shrill strings drive me insane.

I got a full dose of music education on the top floor of my grammar school, the Page School in Athens, PA, in the early 1960’s. My generation may have been the last to be blessed with this.

I remember Copland, I remember Grofe, I remember the Grand Canyon Suite and the thunderstorm in it and the clip-clop of the donkey heading down into the pit. I remember Bernstein and I remember the guy who preceded him in New York – his name begins with “k”, was it Andre Kostelanitz?? – and so on. Pretty spotty.

pageschool copy — ***The Page School, Athens, PA. Music class top right classroom. I think.***

But I clearly remember that classical music was for the smart kids. It was for the elite. It was drilled into me.

Smart? Classical. Spud? Bobby Vinton. The Beach Boys.

Elitist? Sure. Hard to change oil to, hard to whistle to, hard to stay awake during? Sure. But some of it is mighty fine eatin’.

If you want to know all about how radio used to sound, and believe me, it didn’t sound the way it has during our lifetimes, grab the book RADIO’S CIVIC AMBITION by David Goodman, Oxford University Press: