I’M DESIGNED FOR LIFE [426]

I spent quite a long time deciding whether to buy a Braun wall clock, and perhaps that was entirely appropriate. Despite its present focus on grooming and hair removal, the Braun brand is synonymous with the tactile, functional design aesthetic fostered under Dieter Rams, who joined the company in 1955 and was its head of design from 1961 until 1997. 

The iconic designs of Braun radios, clocks, hi-fi systems and cigarette lighters may initially feel like a technological equivalent of Ikea furniture – in the 1960s, Rams also designed the Vitsœ modular furniture and shelving system that remains on sale to this day – but they came at the point where these items ceased looking like furniture, becoming desirable entirely on their own merits. Braun has made its name in design as much as Philips in the Netherlands made theirs in innovation.

That is how I feel with my Braun BNC006MSF clock, an evolution of the ABW30 clock designed by Rams forty years earlier. Its face is clear and legible without being plain: the ring of numbers and markings is raising from the centre of the clock face, the resulting ridge being met by the hour hand while also casting a slight shadow to emphasise the different lengths and thicknesses of the hour and minute hands. With this model being radio-controlled, the addition of a two-digit digital display can show the date or act as a “second hand”, having previously decided that having the right time involves removing yourself from setting it [https://www.leighspence.net/2019/03/cause-you-ride-on-time-ride-on-time-153.html]. I have essentially bought into a design classic, taking pride of place behind my television.

But as much as the “brAun” logo is displayed, itself a design dating back to 1935, the clock itself is built under licence by the Hong Kong-based clock manufacturers Zeon. Braun audio systems and speakers returned in 2019 via the British radio company Pure, while Braun food processors are from De’Longhi of Italy. Having been bought by the Gillette razor company in 1984, itself becoming a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble in 2005, Braun today makes only haircare products themselves, the rest of the company acting as an agent for its own intellectual property and design history. Ironically, the consumer arm of Philips is now in much the same position, and it is them I usually think of first if “hair removal” comes to mind.

Does any of this matter? Evidently not, as far as my clock is concerned. It is exactly what I wanted, it is officially a Braun clock, and is identifiably a Dieter Rams design. I may not be able to afford one of their original Atelier hi-fi systems, but if new systems from elsewhere have a similarly clean design, it is clear where they took their lead. 

Braun Atelier hi-fi system, from Braun product catalogue

IT’S AUTOMATIC, IT’S SYSTEMATIC, IT’S HYDROMATIC [140]

So many ways have been used to get music, TV and films into the home over the years, but there is a reason I am going to talk about Sony’s U-Matic here, apart from it being the world’s first video cassette: it is the nexus point of all that has been, and all that remains, in the last fifty years of audio-visual formats, and that isn’t hyperbole either.

U-Matic, named after how the tape was threaded around a large chrome cylinder that contained the record and playback heads, was first shown off as a prototype in October 1969, and went on sale to the public in 1971, beating Philips’ VCR (Video Cassette Recording, also known as N1500) and Avco’s Cartrivision by a year. Home video recorders were already on sale for nearly ten years by then, but these were open-reel devices, not unlike reel-to-reel audio recorders – U-Matic simply encased the tape in an anti-static cassette, making it easier to handle. Like the EIAJ standard agreed among open-reel machine manufacturers, Sony also persuaded other companies, like Panasonic and JVC, to agree to make their own U-Matic machines.

However, for all the ease the format gave the general user, they were still ruinously expensive to buy, approaching the price of a small family car. However, businesses, schools and colleges could afford them, which caused Sony to move their efforts towards them – the “VO” prefix on the machines’ model numbers already stood for “Video Office.” The failure to get U-Matic into homes led Sony to develop the smaller Betamax format, and much has already been written about the format war between it and VHS, ironically developed by JVC, with help from their owner at the time, Panasonic.

Holding a U-Matic tape in your hands defines “industrial.” While a smaller E-180 (3-hour) VHS tape weighs 195g, a 60-minute U-Matic tape weighs 505g, and that is mostly the tape: while VHS runs at a maximum of 1.3 inches per second (PAL region, Short Play), using tape half an inch wide, U-Matic’s three-quarter-inch tape runs at 3.75 inches per second – 60 minutes is all you can get into the case, unless you make the tape itself thinner. However, more tape per second means higher quality, and rather than people at home using them to record TV programmes, the programme makers themselves were using them instead.

Until U-Matic, if you wanted to go out and record a news report, you needed to take a 16 mm film camera with you, which would have to be developed before you could edit it and show it to anyone. This had begun to change slowly – Sony had developed a “Portapak” system that used open-reel tape, but once the U-Matic S Type (for “small”) cassette was developed, Electronic News Gathering (ENG) took off in the United States from the mid-1970s. It did not matter if the picture was less detailed than film, it did not matter if U-Matic had a problem with making the colour red too saturated, and it did not matter if the S Type cassette only held 20 minutes at most – making the news became easier and faster, and did not need as many people to make it work. It took another ten years for ENG to become commonplace in the UK, as unions argued it put too many jobs at risk – the BBC took a film developing unit to the Falklands War – but technology was moving on.

As UK TV news began using ENG, other formats were becoming available, and even Sony had a replacement for U-Matic: while the cheaper and more convenient VHS beat out the technically superior Betamax, Sony simply reworked their second cassette for the professional sector as well, creating Betacam (later Betacam SP, later DigiBeta). While these became the industry standard, Sony still supported U-Matic, because companies still used it: there is evidence that films like “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” (2005), and the Studio Ghibli film “Ponyo” (2008) had clips issues to TV stations in the US using U-Matic tapes. I couldn’t find the date for when Sony stopped supporting U-Matic but, considering they only stopped making Betamax cassettes in March 2016, it can’t have been that long ago.

While U-Matic was central to the development of video, it was to audio as well: before the Compact Disc, video tape was the only way of recording music digitally, and U-Matic was often used for mastering music this way in the 1970s and 80s, once connected to early PCM adaptors. Because the digital signal would be encoded using the number of lines in a TV signal, a combination of the number of lines that make up the picture, and the number of audio samples made up one line, meant that a total of 44,100 samples could be recorded per second, otherwise known as 44.1 kHz – CDs use the same rate for this reason, and practically everything else has since.

IF YOU DON’T ANSWER, I’LL JUST RING IT OFF THE WALL [136]

There appears not to have been a time before the mobile phone or, if there was, it exists in an alternative reality, one where Biff Tannen did not turn the Hill Valley courthouse into a casino. More seriously, the mobile phone has changed how we live, changed our habits, and changed our infrastructure. Like with the World Wide Web, I will be one of the last, at age thirty-five, to remember a time without them.

I had to remind myself of how I used to keep in touch – I actually remember once having to wait until somebody finished using a payphone before I could make my own call, using my pre-paid BT Phonecard. That all changed in 2000 when, ahead of my seventeenth birthday, I bought my first mobile phone, just as they started becoming affordable to everyone. By that year, just over half of UK adults had one.

I’m not sure why I bought the phone I did, but I guess I recognised the name “Philips” more than “Nokia,” who made the phones everyone else had at the time. The Philips Savvy was introduced in 1999, and was a chunky black and blue brick of a basic phone. Its big buttons make it clear it has only one use – cameras were not commonplace on phones for another five years.

If I wasn’t using it to call or send an SMS message – the manual confirms SMS stands for “Short Message Service” - the other reason I had the Savvy in my hand was to unscrew and screw in its external aerial, as a way of keeping your hands busy. Unlike the black slate smartphones for today, if I broke the aerial, I could just buy a new one, and I could replace the battery with a new one, or one I charged earlier, or one with a bigger capacity, which needed its own bigger back cover. Standby time was measured in days, but you could only do so much with the Savvy.

With no information available on internal storage capacity, saving contacts, SMS messages and call history appears to be down to the SIM card only. Details of the last twenty calls you made, and the last ten you received, is the most you can have. No internet service is possible, but you do get a calculator and stopwatch. The LCD screen had space for two lines of text and an icon – the home screen displayed the time using a clock face. There is a primitive pre-emoji list of twenty-five characters you can send with SMS messages, but only an emoticon is sent if the recipient doesn’t have the same phone as you. Short pre-prepared SMS messages are provided, like “please call me back, or “I will be late” – the first such message had only been sent in 1992, over the Vodafone network, and people were not expected to take time writing long messages. The only other “app” was a “biorhythm calendar,” using your birthday and a given date to show your results for Chance, Love, Energy and Success. Amuse your friends, if you can.

In the year 2000 alone, payphone use declined by 12% in the UK – BT responded by increasing the minimum call charge for the first time since 1984, from 10p to 20p, and began charging for directory enquiry calls. BT Phonecards were withdrawn in 2002, except within the prison service. From the peak of 92,000 phone boxes in 1992, there are now only 40,000 on UK streets, with BT expecting to halve that total by 2022.

For all its limitations, I used my Philips Savvy for four years, longer than any other phone I had since. I finally joined the Nokia brigade in 2004 with a 3510i, an updated version of one of the first phones to have a colour screen, and 2007 established the two-year contract pattern to which practically everyone follows. Today, speaking as the owner of a phone that insists on using glass, it would be nice to use a phone I can drop, or throw, with abandon.

AND PLAIN TO SEE THE FACTS ARE CHANGING [131]

Memories are short. Instant access to information via the World Wide Web has only been available to the general public since August 1991, with mobile and broadband internet only becoming commonplace in the last fifteen years. However, if you had the right television, instant recall of news, sport and financial updates, TV and radio listings and even recipes, was possible as early as 1974, before the first home computers appeared. Look down at your remote control, and the remnants of Teletext will stare back, marking where the information superhighway begins.

The world’s first teletext service was the BBC’s CEEFAX (“See Facts”), launched in 1974, following two years of testing technology developed by Philips, which had already launched the first consumer video recorders by then, and were readying what would become the LaserDisc and Compact Disc. The BBC had already been experimenting with “BEEBFAX” in the late 1960s, using TV transmitters to broadcast a page of information overnight, not unlike a newspaper page, to be printed on a fax machine-like printer at home. This project was shelved because the printer was too noisy, but with Philips proposing to use the screen, work started again.

The way teletext worked is down to how old televisions worked, in ways that are still well known to many. Put extremely simply, the reason not all 625 lines are broadcast to make up a TV picture is because the top and bottom of each field of lines is left blank to denote where the picture starts and ends, literally creating the “vertical blanking interval,” also known as the black bar that rolled down the screen on analogue TVs when the channel was not properly tuned in – horizontal blanking intervals also take up some of the width, and digital television makes sure you see none of this at all.

Teletext used the spare lines from the vertical blanking interval to broadcast a cycle of digital code that creates each frame of text. When you enter a three-digit code for the page you want, like 430 for travel news, you would then see the number scroll through the cycle as it is broadcast, until it reaches your page – popular pages were broadcast more than once. Each “magazine” of pages was broadcast on its own line, usually grouped by subject, to a maximum of eight lines. When subtitles for TV programmes were added from 1981, the page for this was usually placed at the end: it was originally 170, and eventually ended up at 888. Each page also had a number of frames, for longer news items and other stories, for which you may need the “hold” button on your remote control.

Later, hyperlinks to other sections of teletext were possible by red, green, yellow and blue “FastText” buttons. A “Reveal” button was also available for parts of pages, like revealing a punchline for a joke. Blocky pictures were also possible using the palette of eight colours, which included the black background, and breaking news could be left to scroll along the bottom of your screen while you continued to watch TV.

Ceefax would grow slowly at the BBC in the 1970s. Initially a staff of nine would write the original thirty-page magazine, broadcast on a single line, which were punched onto paper computer tape, and sent to a different floor of BBC Television Centre to broadcast them – updates only happened on weekdays, as everyone went home for the weekend. From 1981, the BBC Micro computer was used to create pages, and could be received at home with an adaptor – basic computer programs were also broadcast using teletext. Viewers in the UK will also be used to “Pages from Ceefax” filling in gaps on BBC television during the day when there were no TV programmes to show.

Of course, this is all gone now – digital teletext was introduced in 1999, using information from Ceefax, but by the time the end of analogue TV killed off Ceefax in 2012, it was using text from the BBC’s website, and some of the sections could only be found online, because it was just easier. A similar text service that used your phone line, Prestel, allowing you to buy items and view your bank account at home from 1976, had already ended by 1992, mainly because it was cheaper to make a regular phone call for what you needed. 

Even looking at the “BBC Red Button” service today through my TV, it is cut down even from when it began, almost to the point where there is no longer a need for it. However, teletext was built because a need for it was found, a need that continued to find ways to fulfil itself.

NO MATTER WHO’S THE LEADER WHEN THE SUN SETS DOWN [105]

The idea of owning a personal copy of a film or TV programme is only around forty years old. Unless you had spent thousands on your own cinema set-up, or on a new-fangled home video tape recorder, 1978 was the year home video began in earnest, and anyone buying into it had to decide which direction they would take.

Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder in 1975, with VHS, JVC’s competitor format, launching the following year. They were marketed with a specific use in mind – the ability to time-shift your television viewing. A two-hour video tape costed as much as £20, but were expected to be reused often - pre-recorded tapes cost at least three times as much, taking as long to make as they took to play back. With the recorders themselves costing up to a thousand pounds, selling films to the general public would have to be done another way.

The answer was, as will be with DVD and blu-ray, to copy the main method of getting music into homes: pressing video onto a disc. The first disc format, usually known as LaserDisc, went on sale in 1978. It was originally known under the hilarious name “MCA DiscoVision” – the name had been chosen back in 1969, before disco music appeared, but if you are forming a company to hold video-on-disc patents held by MCA, then owners of Universal Pictures, and the electronics group Philips, it was the right name to choose. LaserDiscs look like 12-inch CDs, recording their data in a similar track of spaced pits - the discs are big enough to see the track with the naked eye - but the pits are used to interpret the waves of a composite analogue signal, rather than binary code. A LaserDisc player was two-thirds of the cost of a VCR, requiring fewer moving parts, and pre-recorded films, the first of which was Universal’s “Jaws,” cost as much as a blank tape did.

The second format was CED, or “Capacitance Electronic Disc,” launched by RCA in 1981 under the "SelectaVision" brand they also used for their VCRs. However, the release date was originally meant to be 1977, with the project having started back in 1964. However, the long gestation period was because RCA was perfecting their own patents: instead of using a laser on a reflective plastic disc, the CED would be made of the same vinyl that made audio records (with carbon added for conductivity), could be made on the same presses, and would even be read with a diamond stylus that physically touched the record. The video signal is then generated from the resonance measured from the changes in electrical capacitance between the disc and the stylus. Because the merest piece of dust on the disc would disrupt this process, attracting moisture from the air, the records would be shielded from view within a cartridge, from which the player would retrieve the record without the owner touching it. The first CED on release was not “Jaws,” but the more laid back film “Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.”

This is where the problems started – stacked against LaserDisc, which could be mistreated like a CD and still play, CEDs would be too temperamental, only produced a VHS-level picture against the higher quality of LaserDisc and, of course, was released too late. RCA announced they would stop making CED players in 1984, which paradoxically caused demand for the discs to increase, until they finally ended in 1986, when RCA was broken up for sale, after losing $600 million on the whole endeavour – the UK would only see the whole system on sale for six whole months. LaserDisc would carry on much longer, having proved very popular in Japan, with discs on sale until 2001, and players still being made as late as 2009 – its analogue picture quality was still on a par with early DVDs, and its ability to provide chapter searches and audio commentaries made it the premium alternative to VHS, through film series like the prestige Criterion Collection. Pioneer Electronics, which had bought out MCA and Philips’s stake, changed the name, and pushed the format to the very end - when they bought into it, in 1980, it was Pioneer that started pushing the more futuristic "LaserVision" as the name for the format, and "LaserDisc" for, well, the discs. In 1987, Philips tried naming the format "CD Video" in Europe, using gold-coloured discs, but LaserDisc had already failed to catch on there, so it lasted only a few more years. 

VHS became the dominant home video format for twenty years, but this was only achieved through economies of scale. While the cost of a pre-recorded tape was initially too much for most, it created the market for rentals instead, increasing what demand there was, and reducing the cost of making each tape. More companies began making both recorders and tapes to meet demand, and the overall cost continued to fall. The only downside of the ubiquity of VHS was that, when it came to replace them with DVDs, the plastic used to make the tapes was not recyclable – presumably, my collection remains in a landfill to this day.

Right now, “home video” no longer involves ownership for many people – online video streaming has replaced both the rental market and the need to record TV shows to watch at a later date. I have bought films on Blu-Ray because they were no longer available on Netflix, and recording TV shows to keep now involves a dongle attached to a desktop computer. When a problem is solved, it shouldn’t slowly reappear like this.

IT’S THE THEATRE OF FINANCIERS [99]

If I ever win the lottery, I would invest in premium bonds. I know the National Lottery is now the main way to win a cash sum, but having now looked further, I can maintain my fantasy.

Bonds are used by governments and businesses to borrow money from investors for a fixed period of time. Interest on the amount borrowed is paid to the investor at regular intervals, and the investor gets their initial sum back at the end of the term. Premium bonds are different in that the interest is instead issued as a monthly prize draw, and the bonds are held indefinitely by the UK Government, through National Savings & Investments, until you request your investment back.

This is all fine, so long as the business or government can pay back its debt to you. The Gibson Guitar Corporation, makers of the Les Paul since 1952, are currently facing bankruptcy, and not just because guitar-based rock music is currently not as popular as electronic-based rap or hip hop: it is running the risk of being unable to repay on bonds it issued to expand its business, which now includes audio brands like TEAC, TASCAM, Pioneer, Onkyo, and even the audio-video-multimedia arm of Philips, leaving the Dutch company to focus on its “health and wellbeing” products.

In other words, for a rock music singer and musician like David Bowie to issue his own bonds, in 1997, required an unsurpassable level of confidence, although this had been proven – in 1985, he became the first artist to release his back catalogue on CD, only two years after CD players became commercially available, and in 1996, “Telling Lies,” from Bowie’s  album “Earthling,” became the world’s first downloadable single, selling 300,000 copies.

The back catalogue was the reason for issuing the bonds, as Bowie sought to end his obligations to his former manager, Tony DeFries, who he had split from in 1975. DeFries owned 50 per cent of Bowie’s recordings from up to 1975, and a claim to half of Bowie’s share of the royalties for them, and a sliding scale of those recorded after it to 1982, which includes the “Low,” “Heroes,” “Lodger” and “Scary Monsters” albums. With these payments to DeFries due to continue in perpetuity, and with DeFries using the contract to release compilations of material without Bowie’s approval, such as recordings of old sessions for the BBC, Bowie would need to take full ownership of his catalogue to stop this exploitation of his work.

The investment David Pullman was the inventor of the “Bowie Bond,” and has since become head of his own company that has done similar deals for other artists. Under his idea, the next ten years royalties for David Bowie’s back catalogue would be secured, at an interest rate of 7.9 per cent – Premium Bonds only offer 1.4%. With all the bonds bought by the Prudential Insurance Company of America for $55 million, keeping them for the full period, despite their ability to sell them on, it was up to Bowie to preserve the value of the songs that were now his – more touring, and more playing of the hits. Bowie even branched out into further enterprises, with his own internet service provider, BowieNet, in 1998, and 2000 saw an online bank, BowieBanc, which only reached around 1,500 customers. More conventionally, 1999’s “Hours” album became the first album to be available for download ahead of its physical release (by two weeks).

Of course, Bowie was accused by his peers of selling out, of turning himself and his work into a commodity or utility, and the changing nature of the music industry, especially the threat posed by MP3 streaming sites like Napster, caught it out. The Bowie Bonds, as a result, were relegated to near-junk status by the credit ratings agency Moody’s, despite Prudential not selling them – Moody’s didn’t think Bowie would be able to pay Prudential back on time. Having said that, Bowie continued to look at the long game, as shown in an interview with “The New York Times” in 2002:

“The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing… Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.”

Having looked into this, I am unsurprised David Bowie went into semi-retirement for a few years, before springing “The Next Day” upon everyone in 2013. With his future secure, his future worth proven, and with familiarity probably breeding a little contempt, it was time to let the prophecies, and the marketplace, play themselves out. It is not romantic to talk about money and art together, but when one is needed to preserve the other, it becomes unavoidable.