Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By
192
Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By
192eBook
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Overview
So many things have disappeared from our day-to-day world, or are on the verge of vanishing. Some we may already think of as ancient relics, like typewriters (and their accompanying bottles of correction fluid). Others seem like they were here just yesterday, like boom boxes and CDs.
We may feel fond nostalgia for certain items of yore: encyclopedias, newspapers, lighthouses. Other items, like MSG, not so much. But as the pace of change keeps accelerating, it’s worth taking a moment to mark the passing of the objects of our lives, from passbooks and pay phones to secretaries and skate keys. And to reflect on certain endangered phenomena that may be worth trying to hold on to—like privacy, or cash.
This thoughtful alphabetized compendium invites us to take a look at the many things, ideas, and behaviors that have gone the way of the subway token—and to reflect on what is ephemeral, and what is truly timeless.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613120309 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ADULT BOOK STORES
A place outside of the home to privately indulge prurient interests that had nothing to do with reading.
AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIALS
Didactic television dramas aimed at youths, broadcast in the afternoons by ABC from the 1970s through the 90s; preached the dangers of teen pregnancy, drugs, hitchhiking, (see page 86) and bowl cuts. The term came to refer to any kind of televised morality play aimed at teens.
AGING
A biological process that occurred before the advent of plastic surgery. Signs of aging (or, speaking euphemistically, "maturing") often included graying hair, increased wrinkles, varicose veins, a lessening of shame, a desire to move to Arizona, and sometimes the proclivity to relieve oneself in public. Non-physical signs of aging may still be observed, such as (but not limited to) the desire to buy hot pants, drive a Ferrari, or play slot machines.
AIRPORT GOODBYES
The practice of accompanying someone (often a dewy-eyed lover) all the way to the gate at the airport, now thought to be as potentially dangerous as a handbag containing Scope; currently only possible with the purchase of an additional ticket.
AM RADIO
Radio channels that operated in the relatively low 500–to 1,600-kilohertz range; home of the Packers and Rush Limbaugh, I-95, and Jesus.
* * *
AM stations, if you can tune them in at all, are so often realms of pontificating jockeys, bummer health news, and scintillating traffic analysis that it's easy for many of us to just completely ignore that entire spectrum of the dial. Not long ago, however, AM — short for amplitude modulation — was the only option for radio users.
For the bulk of its ninety-plus-year lifetime, the AM dial played mostly music and had a kind of magic ability to span great distances. While its ground-wave signal only reached locally during the day, at night it would bounce off the atmosphere and the water, enabling it to travel thousands of miles. This meant that the strongest signals gave people glimpses of lives in parts of the country they might never see. Grand Ole Opry, which, as of this writing, is still broadcasting on 650 AM WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, started blasting country music into homes in Maine and California in 1925 — and was likely Woody Guthrie's first introduction to the genre when he was growing up in Oklahoma; New York's 77 AM WABC brought a taste of big city life to people living in shacks in Wyoming. Yes, there was often crackling during the day caused by the waves' wrestling matches with storms and sunspots, but this only added to the organic, ephemeral nature of the listening experience: The sound, delicate and prone to disturbance, was fighting its way across land and sea all so you could hear Casey Kasem's dulcet tones. If you had to play with your radio's knob or the antenna in order to get the least static-y sound, it only made the end listening experience feel all the more earned.
Frequency modulation radio, a.k.a. FM, was in development since before World War II, but it didn't amass a loyal following until the late 1970s; it was in the 60s, however, that it became a way for counterculture music lovers to get on the radio when the FCC had already handed out most of the frequencies in the AM band. FM, which operated at much higher frequencies that were less prone to natural interference, had about ten times AM's range. This extra space meant that the sound waves could carry more information. With all that additional room to play with, FM broadcasters put out their signals in stereo, so that people with FM receivers could get a sound much fuller than the tinny one that AM listeners were accustomed to — that thin, old-telephone sound today sometimes used as an effect in modern pop songs.
College radio DJs and the non-mainstream music aficionados broadcasting on the FM airwaves shirked the tight formulas that had become de rigueur on the AM band — the Top 40 countdowns and the same songs in rotation every hour, each one bookended by ten-minute commercials. Instead, they used the stations to play experimental music and embraced offbeat talk programs. The content could afford to be esoteric, if only because the people who owned FM receivers were few and far between. If you were listening to FM in the 60s, you were considered to be kind of weird. But you were probably proud of that fact.
In 1962, according to the FCC, there were only 983 commercially operated FM stations; by 1975, there were close to four thousand. The shift happened when FM operators began embracing some of AM's formatted ways, and people started to catch on that music sounded way better in stereo. There was also the fact that manufacturers began selling affordable radios that could pick up both bands. Once listeners had a choice between hearing something full and rich or something flat and tinny, they sought out music on the FM channels, leaving AM stations to pick up sports and talk shows — programs where sound quality wasn't so important. In 1979, the New York disco station WKTU FM made news for bumping the AM channel WABC from its long-held #1 slot.
By the time that the FCC approved some of the AM stations to also broadcast in stereo in 1982, listeners had already made the switch and had little reason to go back to their old ways. AM's future was further complicated by the fact that you had to have the right equipment in order to hear the richer AM stereo tones. This required going out and buying a new, often expensive receiver that had to correspond with whichever of the handful of transmitter systems your favorite station used. There was no AM transmitter/receiver standardization until 1993 in the US, by which point there was little point to hearing AM in stereo unless the thing that bothered you most about Don Imus was his timbre.
Today, many MP3 devices with radio components don't offer AM stations at all, largely because the AM signal requires a transmitter that's bulkier than FM's, and the signal tends to receive interference from nearby MP3 circuitry.
That doesn't mean that old AM transistors don't have any use in modern times. When Bill Schweber of Electronic Engineering Times took one of his old ones for a trip around his home in 2008, he found it was unexpectedly useful — despite the fact that he couldn't actually tune in to any stations.
"What really struck me were the specific sounds I heard," he writes. "There was the whine from the electric motor of a nearby service cart; you could judge its RPM by the pitch. There were loud snaps from switches in nearby heavy machinery. PC power supplies and display oscillators added their own noise to the mix. I could have decided to toss the radio ... but in today's world, it's all about spin and repositioning your assets and attributes. I took out my Brother electronic labeler, made up an 18-point-size label that clearly announced '500-to 1,600kHz RF Sniffer,' and felt I had done the radio justice."
ANALOG CLOCKS
Devices based on sundials; used to display time with two mechanical arms, one shorter than the other, pointing to the hour and minute, respectively (some had a third hand which tracked the passing seconds); minutes were calculated by multiplying the number closest to the big hand by five. Sometimes required winding. Sometimes read using terms like "quarter" or "half." Sometimes necessitated doing math by assigning values to letters such as X, V, and I. Conveniently, the hands moved in the direction known as "clockwise."
ANONYMITY
Living an existence that warranted only two status updates; three, if you got married. (Also see Privacy)
ANSWERING MACHINES
Devices with an insatiable appetite for the names, numbers, and times of phone calls.
* * *
Today, recluses get a bad rap. Once, however, there was perfectly good reason never to leave the house: What if someone called?
Sure, when you were home, there was only a light drizzle of telemarketers and wrong numbers. You occasionally checked the dial tone, just to make sure it was still there. But who knew what crazy things would happen if you ventured into the outer realm of people taking part in this thing they called life? The fridge's light might go on even with the door closed; your dog could read Karl Marx. And the phone? It would certainly go berserk. The telephone company would probably cut off your service all together, incredulous that one human being could be so popular. No amount of sunlight could be worth that risk.
In the 1970s, thanks to the invention of call forwarding, when answering services became available to the masses, it was no longer necessary to run to the other side of the house in order not to miss a call (after just having sprinted downstairs to add the fabric softener). If you did miss that call, an operator would pick it up and then relay the message when you phoned in later to check on your popularity level. No, it wasn't cheap to hire a company to answer your incoming calls, but important people had to make such sacrifices.
It was, at last, a way to avoid those long, thin evenings in front of the telly (one doesn't need to go outside in order to be worldly, does one?) without panicking over the possibility of missing a call from a certain suitor. Or Ed McMahon. On occasion, this person might be one and the same.
There was, however, a certain awkwardness to having a third person involved in all of your communiqués. "You'd get to know the people at the service after a while," says Nancy, a sixty-year-old lifelong New Yorker. "I remember getting into these blowout fights with my boyfriend. He'd hang up on me and then I'd call back and the answering service would pick up and I'd find myself yelling at the people at the service, 'Let it ring through! Make him pick up!'" Usually, they'd comply with this kind of request. Almost all the operators were women.
Answering machines had been used by businesses for several decades, but they were not widely available to consumers until the 1980s. They gained popularity as people realized that it was a one-time purchase that amounted to a fraction of the cost of a year of their old service's bills. Phone usage surged in the 80s as people caught on to the idea that you could make the requisite calls to exes and in-laws at odd hours without actually having to speak to anyone, provided they remembered to turn on their machines. By 1988, more than a quarter of all US households had answering machines. "I remember asking one of the women at the answering service if she thought I'd be better off with a machine. She said, 'How am I supposed to respond to that question?'" recalls Nancy.
It was undeniable, however, that answering machines offered an array of features that no service could replicate. In addition to picking up your missed calls, the devices could screen callers. They could also be used to say hello to your parakeet while you were at work. And if you realized you left the oven on, you might call to see if the machine picked up — a good indication that your home had yet to go up in flames.
Some machines required that the outgoing message be at least thirty seconds long in order to give the recording device time to kick in. In order to avoid hang-ups, machine owners went to great lengths to entertain their callers, often using the outgoing message to display their limerick-writing abilities or their Italian vocabulary or to broadcast their favorite Santana tracks. Many used those lengthy seconds to spell out every step of the message-capturing-and-retrieval process. "Hello. Barbara isn't home right now. You have reached her answering machine ..." they'd intone, assuaging the caller's fear of reaching Barbara's blender.
The early machine used an audio cassette for the outgoing message and another for the incoming ones. What would sitcom writers have done if it weren't for those little tapes and all the inevitably embarrassing messages they recorded? Fortunately, there were plenty of ways that a message could get lost before you'd have to crawl through the window to retrieve a tape: Sometimes the tapes broke; often they cut off during a message. It wasn't long, however, before these devices begat digital progeny that put no limit on how long an incoming message could be. A mixed blessing, to be sure.
In the 2000s, we use voicemail — if we bother to leave a message at all: Talking requires a level of exertion second only to listening. At least voicemail is dependable enough that you don't have to run in order to avoid losing a call. Actually, the fact that you usually have your phone on your person means that it's hard to miss a call to begin with. Still, that doesn't mean you always want to answer the darn thing — or, for that, matter, be bothered to take the time to listen to your accumulated messages. So, please don't leave your name, number, and the time that you called. Just send a text. Baci, ciao.
APPENDICITIS SCARS
Scars anywhere from one to six inches in length, located on the right side of the belly and visible when doing the YMCA dance while wearing low-waisted jeans; decrease in ubiquity thanks to laparoscopic surgeries that don't leave the same telltale line, medications that can help avoid surgeries, and improved diagnostics that lead to fewer unnecessary slicings.
ARCADES
Storefronts that predate the migration of video games to basements and computer monitors, filled with consoles designed to help children understand concepts such as military defense (Atari Missile Command) and feminism (Ms. Pac-Man); effective in helping to cultivate a nascent taste for casinos.
ASBESTOS
Natural mineral that, to the disappointment of many a personal-injury lawyer, was banned by some countries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; formerly used widely in ceiling insulation, drywall, flooring, and most other permanent edifices occupied by indoor-based humans. Known for its convenience, effectiveness, and low cost; pesky side effects of exposure included lung disease and death.
BALD SPOTS
The result of involuntary loss of head hair, visible when a man who was so afflicted chose neither to wear a toupee nor shave off the rest of his scant cranial offerings. "Sometimes referred to as andro-genetic alopecia. This may be identified by the four basic patterns of hair loss: the 'Widow's Peak,' where the hair recedes up the temples, leaving a narrow strip of hair down the center of the head; the 'Naked Crown,' where the hair recedes more quickly in the centre and more slowly at the sides; the 'Domed Forehead,' where the whole of the hairline recedes; and the 'Monk's Patch,' where a bald patch grows at the top and back of the head. If a Widow's Peak and a Monk's Patch occur on the same head, the eventual result is a small 'Fantasy Island' of hair just above the forehead, surrounded by an expanse of bare scalp."— Bald! From Hairless Heroes to Comic Combovers. (Also see Comb-overs)
BELLHOPS
Hat-wearing hotel employees paid to carry bags and be discrete. Propriety dictated that: "Unless you have a light bag or the hotel is especially busy, don't deprive him of his tip by taking your bags yourself."— Emily Post's Etiquette
BLACKBOARDS
Large black, green, or dark gray wall-mounted boards made of either slate or enamel-coated steel; used primarily in schools, for either edification or torture.
* * *
It's hard not to have complicated feelings about the big rectangles that loomed large in the front of classrooms for so long. Blackboards certainly had their share of pros — they gave us permission to write on the wall, acted like larger-than-life Etch A Sketches, and insured that teachers would have to spend some part of every class with their backs turned to the students. When your name got called to the board and you found yourself standing framed by that black expanse, you couldn't help but feel kind of important — unless you were being forced to write one sentence over and over again, à la Bart in the opening credits of The Simpsons. That was when you suddenly remembered the hand cramps that came on as soon as you gripped a piece of chalk, the sneeze-inducing dust, the inimitable screeches that the board would sometimes inadvertently produce while being written upon, and the fact that facing it meant that a room full of people was staring at your behind.
For more than a century, the blackboard was really the only way to easily disseminate written information to a group of people all at once. In the early nineteenth century, American schools began experimenting with using slate slabs in classrooms — the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York is thought to be one of the first schools to have used them. It was a blessing for teachers who no longer had to copy out problems by hand for each student. Few other tools have been used so effectively by everyone from kindergarteners to physicists to football players. In the mid-twentieth century, green became the new black, as steel boards coated with moss-colored porcelain enamel began to replace the traditional slate boards. No matter the color, they had the odd quality of being kind of pleasant to wash; there was a Zen aspect to wiping a soft chamois or a wet sponge over the dusty remnants of math problems, and the cleaning of the erasers usually meant banging them to make irresistible indoor clouds. And we wonder why so many of us ended up with asthma ...
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Obsolete"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Anna Jane Grossman.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Adult Book Stores,
After-School Specials,
Aging,
Airport Good-byes,
AM Radio,
Anonymity (See also Privacy),
Analog Clocks,
Answering Machines,
Appendicitis Scars,
Arcades,
Asbestos,
Bald spots,
Bellhops,
Blackboards,
Blind Dates,
Body Hair,
Books,
Boom Boxes,
Buffering,
Camcorders,
Capitalization,
Car Cigarette Lighters,
Cash,
CDs,
Cesareans for Emergencies Only,
Checks,
Comb-overs,
Commercials,
Correction Fluid,
Cursive Writing,
Cyclamate,
Darning Socks,
DDT,
Dial-up Modems,
Dictionaries,
Directory Assistance,
Ditto Paper,
Doing Nothing at Work,
Dying of Old Age,
Easy-to-Open Packaging,
Eating for Pleasure,
Encyclopedias,
Evening News,
Executive Chairs,
Farm Studs,
Fax Machines,
Film,
Focus Groups,
Full Words,
Gas Station Attendants,
Getting Lost,
Girdles,
Handkerchiefs,
HD-DVDs,
High-Diving Boards,
Hitchhikers,
Home Economics,
Hotel Keys,
Housewives,
Hyphenated Last Names,
Keeping Plans (and Making Dates),
Landfills,
Landlines,
Late Fees,
Laugh Tracks,
Layaway,
Lickable Stamps,
Lighters at Concerts,
Lighthouses,
Long-Distance Charges,
Mail,
Manual Car Windows,
Meetings,
Men Treating,
Mercury Thermometers,
Microfilm/Microfiche,
Milkmen,
Minidiscs,
Miss (and Mrs.),
Mixtapes,
MSG,
Newspapers,
Niche Publications,
Nuns,
Paper Plane Tickets,
Passbooks,
Pay Phones,
Pennies,
Percolators,
Personals,
Phone Sex,
Photo Albums,
Photobooths,
Plaster Casts,
Plastic Bags,
Pocket Protectors,
Polaroids,
Pornographic Magazines,
Privacy,
Push-Buttons,
Rolodexes,
Sadness,
Script (See also Cursive Writing),
Secretaries,
Short Basketball Shorts,
Shorthand,
Singles Bars,
Skate Keys,
Slide Projectors,
Smoking,
Social E-mailing,
Stovetop Popcorn Makers,
Super 8s,
Telex Machines,
Thesauruses,
Tokens,
Tonsillectomies,
Traditional Names,
Traveler's Checks,
Tube Sets,
Typewriters,
Underscores/Underlines,
Unflattering Maternity Clothes,
Vacuum Tubes,
Videos,
Video Stores,
Visible Orthodonture,
White Pages,
Wrinkles,
Wristwatches,
Writing Letters,
Acknowledgements,
Selected Bibliography,
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