Lemov 2015
The Storage of the Very, Very Small
nanotech
“Harvard- based bioengineers George Church and Sriram Kosuri used stand- alone DNA itself as their data- storage vehicle and found they could lodge seven hundred terabytes on a single gram. The binary pairs of DNA nucleotides function as “bits,” effectively 0 ’s and 1 ’s, so that they can treat “DNA as just another digital storage device.” 2 Merging medium and message in an unprecedented way, Church and Kosuri published their own book about DNA data banks on DNA, including images, text, formatting, and all. Imagine, they say, holding entire libraries in vats. To publish you can spray it on walls” (71)
“The all is packed away in the small” — earliest expression of desire to shrink archive to the size of a “snuff box” is 1859 (71)
“The fantasy of total information could be made manageable via technological tininess. Key to this fantasy, and what made it different from miniaturization per se, was that the small must be capable of becoming big again at will or whim.” (71-2)
Microphotography as “a shadow history of the photograph” (72)
John Benjamin Dancer, 1839 first microphotograph; later became business selling Lord’s Prayer, 10 commandments, celebrities etc. as microphotographs
1850s, field begins to grow
Took off in popularity once 1) collapsibility was joined to expandability and 2) they became reproducible (75)
“They were cute curios, but they augured something more than mere adorability. They opened up the possibility of long- term storage, and the microphoto now suggested itself to several onlookers as a template for future data capture and archiving” (75)
“A future in storage—libraries shrunk down to pocket size and blown up—came into public view only after Dancer added re- expandability to the microphoto.” (75)
Use of microscope, projecting flea, connection back to Hooke
Rene Dagron, attached souvenir slide to a reader
1870, Siege of Paris, balloons used to send messages out, pigeons to carry them back in — but microphotographs, since regular messages were too heavy
“Here entered microfilm in a new role: pigeons could carry high- density microphotographic messages rolled up in hollowed- out goose quills. A pigeon handler sewed each quill with silk thread into the carriers’ tails. Their wings, stamped with waterproof ink, specified their destination and other delivery information.” (79)
Dagron went out of Paris by balloon, evaded enemies, established a mass-reduction center
“note that Frederic Luther’s investigations of microphotography’s adventurous and illustrious history—he re- revealed Dancer’s and Dagron’s long- forgotten accomplishments in two well- placed articles in 1950 —themselves played a historical role in the mid- twentieth- century self- definition of the American documentation movement. The work of Dancer, Dagron, and their collaborators marks the inception of “microfilm in its modern sense and on the modern scale,” according to Luther. 24 Among latter- day aficionados of the “micro,” European roots and a longer- durée history were suitably grounding.” (81)
Check-O-Graph, 1926, rotary microfilm camera to copy and story canceled checks (81)
“By this time, the “micro” in microphotography no longer facilitated tiny delights or wartime heroism but staunchly accompanied burdensome tasks such as the storage of necessary but unwieldy amounts of paperwork among corporations, the military, government, and banks.” (82)
“Libraries, too, experienced challenges for which micrographics offered relief. The research library, emerging in the late nineteenth century, saw its librarians drawn to machine solutions and embracing the “efficiency movement” of the early twentieth century. By the 1930 s microfilming appeared as a technological sinecure to the problem of what a 1936 panel called the “two foes” of librarians: “brittleness and abrasion.” “ (82)
Problem of bulk and shelf space
“Microfilm became the chosen modern means of preservation and access by the 1930 s, touted especially by the documentation movement and even more especially by the American arm of that movement.” (82)
Europe -- Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, H. G. Wells; more pan-human and total archive, poetic questions
US -- more technical, practical; Vernon Tate, Eugene Power, Watson Davis -- "gadget-centered visionaries" (84)
Fiske reader, Fiskoscope 1930s many machines