Recording sight and sound
Some inventions change society; others don’t. Why?
We were recently pondering two nineteenth-century inventions and their effects on society. The first is photography, the silver halide chemical process that held the field until the digital age. (You can include the slightly earlier Daguerreotype, if you wish; the conclusions remain the same.) With this invention it became possible to record sights in an exact, automatic way, a way that did not depend on the drawing skill of an artist or draftsman. In his book The Pencil of Nature a pioneer of silver halide, William Henry Fox Talbot, included a photograph of a haystack. It is not a particularly amazing or moving image, until you realize that each particular straw is shown exactly where it was. Any competent painter could have produced an image giving just about the same appearance and emotional impact, but none could have put every straw in place.
A few people noticed the revolutionary aspect of photography, but society was not revolutionized by it. There are the normal reasons that apply to every new process: at first it was clumsy, expensive and limited in its subjects. A photographer had almost to be a research chemist in the early days. And it did improve vastly over decades. But people continued to paint, and illustrations in books were often hand-drawn even in the mid-twentieth century. Even when George Eastman managed to make photographers of millions of people by producing a cheap camera that was easy to use, the social impact of the invention was minor. In that way, the camera was like the typewriter: a revolutionary invention without a revolution.
In the latter half of the century a way was found to record sound, as the camera recorded light. It also shared the drawbacks of a new technology: crude, expensive, difficult to handle at first. But in a relatively short time record players were common, and records proliferated. This time there was a significant social impact. An evening’s entertainment at home was no longer confined to one of the family playing the piano, or several of them singing, or someone telling stories or reciting poems. One could listen to world-class musicians by spinning a disc; amateur efforts were no longer necessary. (In addition to changing family life, entire sub-genres of music were invented to conform to the time limitations of the first records. No doubt much else in music was transformed, but that takes us out of our areas of expertise.)
Why did recording sound make such an impact, and recording sight fail to do so? We think that it was the fact that there were already in place ways to produce images, ways that had been found perfectly satisfactory. People were used to looking at pictures. The new way of producing them would have its effects, but subtly and over time. In this way it was like the typewriter: people could already produce writing; a new way of doing it would not be revolutionary. In contrast, there was no existing way of recording sound. There were musical scores, but you needed musicians to turn them into music.
From these examples, we draw this conclusion: to change society, it’s not always enough to take something we already do, and do it better or faster or easier. You may have to find something that doesn’t yet happen, and find a way to do it.
