Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and standards. Who needs them? Well?
Speaker 1: So it it turns out if you want stuff to
Speaker 1: work with other stuff, you you need them because without standards,
Speaker 1: compatibility would be the exception, not the rule, especially between
Speaker 1: products from different manufacturers. Because of standards, you can use
Speaker 1: a USB cable from one company to connect to a
Speaker 1: computer built by a totally different company, and then connect
Speaker 1: that to a device built by a third company and
Speaker 1: it can all work. But standards don't just magically pop
Speaker 1: into being. It's not like people just start building new
Speaker 1: technologies and then they all magically morph into a universal standard. Nope.
Speaker 1: We humans have to figure out what final form stuff
Speaker 1: should take, and then we have to cooperate to make
Speaker 1: sure everyone conforms to that decision. Sometimes a group of
Speaker 1: people from multiple disciplines will form a hopefully impartial committee
Speaker 1: whose job is to determine these things. Other times things
Speaker 1: are a little more messy, with a lot of give
Speaker 1: and take. I'm going to talk about a few of
Speaker 1: those other times. We can think of these as format wars.
Speaker 1: I've covered some format wars in the past. On May one,
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, I published the episode Blu Ray Versus
Speaker 1: h D DVD about how two different groups of manufacturers
Speaker 1: faced off in a fight to determine which format would
Speaker 1: succeed the DVD home media format, and spoiler alert for
Speaker 1: those who have been oblivious for more than a decade,
Speaker 1: it was Blu Ray that won. That story is pretty
Speaker 1: darn good and it involves stuff like companies quickly switching
Speaker 1: alliances and a rapid descent into obsolescence for the poor
Speaker 1: h D DVD. Way back on June six, two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven, we published an episode called The Current Wars,
Speaker 1: describing the battle between George Westinghouse and the alternating current
Speaker 1: that he favored versus Thomas Edison and his direct current.
Speaker 1: This is another format war that achieved legendary status, complete
Speaker 1: with public demonstrations of the dangers of alternating current and
Speaker 1: a fierce competition to be the provider of electricity for
Speaker 1: the Chicago World's Fair, and in that case, alternating current
Speaker 1: would win out as the standard being used for long
Speaker 1: distance transmission of electricity, so I'm not really going to
Speaker 1: go into those two stories in this episode, because I
Speaker 1: do have other episodes dedicated to those. We'll look at
Speaker 1: a few other instances of format wars, some of which
Speaker 1: I have touched on in the past. In fact, it
Speaker 1: would be good to start off with one of those,
Speaker 1: and it's a format war that was going on just
Speaker 1: as I was growing up as a kid in the seventies,
Speaker 1: the home video format war, which had several contenders. Now,
Speaker 1: the two big ones that most people have heard about
Speaker 1: are the two primary video cassette recorder formats, VHS and
Speaker 1: Beta Max, and we will get to those, but first
Speaker 1: I thought I would chat about a few other formats
Speaker 1: that made a go of it but ultimately fell short
Speaker 1: of becoming the standard format for home video. So it's
Speaker 1: good to remember that before the nineteen seventies, there really
Speaker 1: wasn't such a thing as home theater in the sense
Speaker 1: of being able to watch recorded media at home on
Speaker 1: any real scale. You could watch television broadcasts, but once
Speaker 1: the show was over, that was it. You would only
Speaker 1: see that show or that movie or whatever again if
Speaker 1: someone were to rerun it. Otherwise it was just gone.
Speaker 1: The film experience was still largely one where you would
Speaker 1: go to a cinema and you would sit there and
Speaker 1: you would watch a film. The emergence of technology that
Speaker 1: would allow people to view recorded media on demand at
Speaker 1: home was a truly revolutionary one and also one that
Speaker 1: caused more than a little hubbub in Hollywood as various
Speaker 1: studios grappled with the implications anyway. One of the technologies
Speaker 1: to emerge in this era gradually, anyway, was the laser disc. Now,
Speaker 1: this started out more than a decade earlier with a
Speaker 1: fellow named David Paul greg who came up with a
Speaker 1: means to record video and audio information onto a essentially
Speaker 1: a plastic disc. This case, the disc was transparent and
Speaker 1: in the original pattern which you can read if you
Speaker 1: want to, and the idea was really cool. You take
Speaker 1: a transparent disk and you encode video information onto it
Speaker 1: using a quote unquote metallic deposit, essentially creating opaque areas
Speaker 1: on the disc that light cannot pass through. So in
Speaker 1: a player, you would have a transducer like a light
Speaker 1: sensor on one side of the disk, and on the
Speaker 1: other side of the disc you would have a light
Speaker 1: shining up through the disc. So as the disc spins,
Speaker 1: the light and the transducer keep pace with a spiral
Speaker 1: of data that has been encoded on the disc itself.
Speaker 1: With these metallic deposits, the transducer ends up generating electricity
Speaker 1: depending on how much light is hitting it, so it
Speaker 1: varies as the metallic deposits pass in between the transducer
Speaker 1: and the light, and that gets converted into the electrical
Speaker 1: signals that go to be interpreted as a video signal.
Speaker 1: It's decoded that way. So Greg invented this technology in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties. He filed for a patent for
Speaker 1: it in nineteen sixty seven, received it in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Other inventors made related advancements in technology that would go
Speaker 1: toward the foundations for what would become laser disc. M
Speaker 1: c A would purchase the rights to the patent from
Speaker 1: Greg in the late nineteen sixties. Meanwhile, the Dutch company
Speaker 1: Phillips was hard at work on a similar technology, except
Speaker 1: this one used reflective discs rather than transparent ones. So
Speaker 1: a laser would shine a light onto a reflective surface
Speaker 1: of the disk, detecting sequences of little pits and lands.
Speaker 1: So a land is essentially a bit of the disc
Speaker 1: that hasn't been carved into a pit. The pits and
Speaker 1: lands would represent the information of the video recording. Now
Speaker 1: these days, we would call it just binary information zeros
Speaker 1: and ones. Now, normally this is where I would go
Speaker 1: into more detail about how all this works, but I've
Speaker 1: actually heard this type of technology fairly extensively in other episodes.
Speaker 1: It's the same basis for compact discs, which would come
Speaker 1: out a little bit later. Anyway, Phillips and m c
Speaker 1: A joined forces to bring the technology to market. They
Speaker 1: first gave a public display of the technology in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two, but it wouldn't be available for purchase until
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, when it debuted under the name m
Speaker 1: c A Disco Vision. It was a very different time,
Speaker 1: my friends. Interestingly, according to the sources I found, it
Speaker 1: originally launched in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, and the
Speaker 1: very first film available on the format happens to be
Speaker 1: my favorite film of all time. It's also the movie
Speaker 1: that was number one at the box office the day
Speaker 1: I was born, Jaws, And yet my family never owned
Speaker 1: a laser disc. So that's where my personal connection to
Speaker 1: this particular technology ends. The disks could hold old sixty
Speaker 1: minutes of content per side when it was in extended
Speaker 1: play mode. With extended play, the motor would rotate the
Speaker 1: disc at a slower speed. Standard play speed was faster
Speaker 1: and allowed for more features that you could use with
Speaker 1: the laser disc player, but you could only fit thirty
Speaker 1: minutes of content per side on the disc in standard
Speaker 1: play playback speed. And yes, this does mean that for
Speaker 1: a two hour film with extended play, you would have
Speaker 1: to flip the disc over halfway through the movie. Though
Speaker 1: later on towards the tail end of the laser disc era,
Speaker 1: some players could actually automatically switch sides, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to manually do it. Sometimes films would include a special
Speaker 1: standard play disc with the extended play feature film, and
Speaker 1: the extra disc would include stuff like bonus footage and
Speaker 1: interviews and the sort of features that we would later
Speaker 1: come to expect on DVD releases. A laser disc format
Speaker 1: could provide superior video and sound compared to the VHS
Speaker 1: and Beta Max formats, but it had a couple of
Speaker 1: major disadvantages. One is that it was far more expensive
Speaker 1: than cassette based technologies, and when I get to those
Speaker 1: and tell you how much they cost. That's going to
Speaker 1: raise some eyebrows. But another drawback is that you couldn't
Speaker 1: record to a laser disc, so you were restricted to
Speaker 1: watching prerecorded stuff from major studios. You would have to
Speaker 1: buy a movie or TV series or whatever on laser disc.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just you know, recorded off the television. That
Speaker 1: was a difference between that cassettes. Cassettes you could do that.
Speaker 1: And these drawbacks meant that fewer people would purchase laser
Speaker 1: disc players, which meant the technology couldn't really scale to
Speaker 1: a level where prices could drop significantly. The very last
Speaker 1: laser disc movie was in two thousand. This was the
Speaker 1: last film printed to laser disc. That's interesting to me
Speaker 1: because DVDs were already on the market by two thousand
Speaker 1: and The last film on laser disc was Bringing Out
Speaker 1: the Dead, which is a Nicolas Cage film that I
Speaker 1: have never actually watched. But LaserDisc never made a huge
Speaker 1: impact on home video. It was kind of a cult
Speaker 1: favorite among a small group of enthusiasts, but it never
Speaker 1: had an enormous impact. It also became a little bit
Speaker 1: of a novelty in arcades, however, because it was the
Speaker 1: basis for games like dragons Layer and Space Ace, but
Speaker 1: that's another story. Another technology that took a stab at
Speaker 1: becoming a standard home video tech and failed was the
Speaker 1: capacitance Electronic disc player or ce D, which was developed
Speaker 1: by our c A. Now, as I record this, I
Speaker 1: am actually looking right now at my old c e
Speaker 1: D player, which may or may not be functional. I honest,
Speaker 1: we don't know. I haven't plugged it in in years.
Speaker 1: Plus I don't have a television with the proper connectors,
Speaker 1: so even if it works, I wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: verify it anyway. But this is the technology that my
Speaker 1: family had obviously while I was growing up, though we
Speaker 1: only ever had a relatively small number of films for it,
Speaker 1: like Singing in the Rain, uh Raiders, Lost Arc, a
Speaker 1: couple of Woody Allen movies, that sort of thing. And
Speaker 1: the c e D is a disc based system, but
Speaker 1: unlike the laser disc, it's not an optical system. That
Speaker 1: means there's no laser shining on this disc. No. Instead,
Speaker 1: these discs which were housed inside these plastic envelopes that
Speaker 1: kind of made them look like a cross between a
Speaker 1: giant computer disc and a record album sleeve. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: actual discs inside the envelopes had very small grooves in them,
Speaker 1: just like a vinyl record album, but much smaller and
Speaker 1: like an old record player. The ce ED player used
Speaker 1: a special needle to move through these grooves. However, instead
Speaker 1: of the needle vibrating and then transmitting those vibrations to
Speaker 1: a transducer that converts the vibrations into an electric signal,
Speaker 1: the ceed player's needle and the disk in the player
Speaker 1: would complete an electronic circuit. The needle would not actually
Speaker 1: make contact with the bottom of the groove on the disc,
Speaker 1: but the groove would curve up toward the bottom of
Speaker 1: the needle, or it would curve away from the needle,
Speaker 1: and that would affect the capacitance between the stylus and
Speaker 1: the disc itself. The changing capacitance would then affect a
Speaker 1: resonant circuit, which in turn would send the generated fluctuating
Speaker 1: signal to a decoder to transmit as video and audio.
Speaker 1: And I know it sounds super technical, but in reality,
Speaker 1: it was using a quality of electricity as a sort
Speaker 1: of evolution of the old vinyl record technology. One advantage
Speaker 1: of the c e ED is that it wasn't as
Speaker 1: expensive to produce as VCRs and definitely less expensive than
Speaker 1: laser disc players. The video and audio quality were around
Speaker 1: the same level as that for cassettes, maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit better, but they definitely did not measure up to
Speaker 1: the superior quality of the laser disc format. But like
Speaker 1: laser discs, you could not record programming to c D.
Speaker 1: You could only buy existing media and play it at home. Also,
Speaker 1: like laser discs, you had to flip a movie halfway
Speaker 1: through because each side could only hold about an hour's
Speaker 1: worth of video. I seem to recall, although I have
Speaker 1: not verified this, that for Raiders of the Lost Arc,
Speaker 1: the point where we would have to flip the disc
Speaker 1: was right around the time where Salah would say to Indiana,
Speaker 1: they're digging in the wrong place. Our c A had
Speaker 1: this technology in development as far back the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: but various problems within the company and the project in particular,
Speaker 1: delayed it to market until the early nineteen eighties. By
Speaker 1: that time, the laser disc was already on the market
Speaker 1: and VHS and Beta Max were well established too, so
Speaker 1: C e D really never stood a chance. Our c
Speaker 1: A only would produce them for a couple of years
Speaker 1: before throwing in the towel, so in a way, I
Speaker 1: own a piece of tech history, or, as I like
Speaker 1: to call it, a very large paper weight. There were
Speaker 1: other media contenders besides C E D and laser disc,
Speaker 1: but the real battle raged between Beta Max, which was
Speaker 1: backed by Sony, and VHS, which was backed by j
Speaker 1: v C. Sony had hoped to create the standard format
Speaker 1: for home video. They tried to get buy in from
Speaker 1: all the other manufacturers in the early nineteen seventies, but
Speaker 1: j v C, which had been developing its own technology,
Speaker 1: held out and made the risky decision to back their
Speaker 1: competing format. The Beta Max hit the market first in
Speaker 1: nineteen VHS would debut about a year or so later,
Speaker 1: probably like early nine, I believe, And while both formats
Speaker 1: recorded media to tape that was inside of a cassette,
Speaker 1: they were also incompatible with one another. The Beta Max
Speaker 1: video cassettes were not as wide as the VHS, but
Speaker 1: they were longer or taller, depending on how you're looking
Speaker 1: at them, and at first, the Beta Max is faster
Speaker 1: playback speed resulted in a slightly superior resolution over the
Speaker 1: VHS format, so you might think Beta Max thus had
Speaker 1: the edge. It was better picture, right, but VHS had
Speaker 1: a couple of advantages of its own. One was that
Speaker 1: JVC chose to go with a less expensive set of
Speaker 1: components than Sony did, which kept the costs of production down,
Speaker 1: and that meant the company could sell VHS e c
Speaker 1: rs at a lower price point than Sony's Beta Max VCRs. Now,
Speaker 1: when I say lower price, we have to remember that
Speaker 1: the VCR technology was crazy expensive when it first came out. Now,
Speaker 1: this is typical for new technologies, particularly in the area
Speaker 1: of media technologies, where the early examples are priced at
Speaker 1: a point where most of us can't afford it, and
Speaker 1: over time, due to stuff like early adopters and the
Speaker 1: scaling up of production, the price comes down to a
Speaker 1: point where we lowly peons can also enjoy the technology.
Speaker 1: When the Beta Max first launched, the models ranged from
Speaker 1: just under two thousand dollars for the base model up
Speaker 1: to two thousand, two hundred nine five dollars for the
Speaker 1: top end model. And this was so if we adjust
Speaker 1: that for inflation, let's see that means that a top
Speaker 1: end model of a Beta Max machine would set you
Speaker 1: back more than eleven thousand dollars in today's money. Hatchi
Speaker 1: Machi that's a princely summoned no mistake. But but hey,
Speaker 1: I said that the vhs came in at a lower price, right,
Speaker 1: So what did those go for when they first came out? Well,
Speaker 1: the VHS style VCRs retailed for between one thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and fourteen hundred dollars, So that's between hundred bucks and
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars today. That is a hefty price to
Speaker 1: pay to watch my old night Court tapes. But beyond that,
Speaker 1: a huge differentiator came down to recording time. With the
Speaker 1: original Beta Max machines, users could only record one hour
Speaker 1: of content per tape. The original JVC VHS machines could
Speaker 1: record up to two hours of material onto a tape,
Speaker 1: and to be clear, this was more of a limitation
Speaker 1: on the machines than on the cassette tapes themselves. See,
Speaker 1: by running the tape more slowly through the machine, both
Speaker 1: for the recording and playback of media, you could cram
Speaker 1: more video content onto the cassettes. But you did this
Speaker 1: knowing that you were also compromising the video and audio
Speaker 1: quality at slower speeds, like super slow speeds, where you
Speaker 1: can cram like ten hours of material onto one video cassette,
Speaker 1: you could end up having a lot of cross interference
Speaker 1: and other issues that would affect the quality of the
Speaker 1: audio and the video. Sony and JVC initially were loath
Speaker 1: to budge on this. They didn't really want to give
Speaker 1: on quality. But as j VCS approach was gaining more
Speaker 1: favor because it could record twice as much content per tape,
Speaker 1: Sony would push out new players and video cassettes that
Speaker 1: could hold more content. So JVC then response the same way,
Speaker 1: or would allow other manufacturers like our c A to
Speaker 1: build VCRs capable of recording at slower tape speeds and
Speaker 1: thus more hours of content per tape. The VHS format
Speaker 1: got the edge and held it long enough that eventually
Speaker 1: Sony capitulated. This was a format war that was decided
Speaker 1: in the marketplace rather than by a standards committee, and
Speaker 1: it was a long and costly war, both for the
Speaker 1: manufacturers and for consumers. For people who backed Beta Max,
Speaker 1: they ended up supporting a format that eventually went obsolete,
Speaker 1: and switching over to a different format tends to be
Speaker 1: pretty irritating, both because it means that you've got to
Speaker 1: spend more money on stuff like a new player, but
Speaker 1: you also have to figure out what to do with
Speaker 1: your library of content. Do you keep a working Beta
Speaker 1: max machine around or do you go ahead and replace
Speaker 1: all the films and shows that you've either recorded or
Speaker 1: bought on Beta Max with new VHS copies. It is
Speaker 1: a mess, and it's one of the reasons standard committees
Speaker 1: form in the first place to avoid that kind of situation.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll turn the clock back a
Speaker 1: good way to talk about a totally different type of
Speaker 1: format war all aboard. Now, I'm sure a lot of
Speaker 1: you have already figured out what format I'll be talking
Speaker 1: about based on my lane transition into the ad break earlier.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about train railway gauges. That is
Speaker 1: the distance between the inner edge of the two rails
Speaker 1: on a train railway. The standard gauge for most of
Speaker 1: the world is known as one thousand, four hundred thirty
Speaker 1: five millimeters or four feet and eight and a half inches,
Speaker 1: because here in the good old USA, we just don't
Speaker 1: cotton to that their metric system, gosh darn't it. And
Speaker 1: to be clear, that's not every single railway around the world,
Speaker 1: but more than half of them do conform to this. Now,
Speaker 1: there is a charming story that the whole reason that
Speaker 1: train rails are this distance from each other ultimately depends
Speaker 1: upon the rear ends of a pair of horses. And
Speaker 1: as I said, the story is charming, but not necessarily
Speaker 1: totally accurate, at least in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 1: But let's go through the story anyway, so we know
Speaker 1: where we're coming from, all right. So, back in the
Speaker 1: days of the Roman Empire, you had Roman soldiers who
Speaker 1: would use chariots a lot in war or just to
Speaker 1: get around, and chariots would be pulled by a pair
Speaker 1: of horses, so by necessity, the chariot would need to
Speaker 1: accommodate two horses side by side in the front, which
Speaker 1: in turn meant that a chariot could only be so
Speaker 1: wide before it would become difficult to maneuver. The wheels
Speaker 1: need to be wide apart enough to provide stability, but
Speaker 1: not so wide apart that you couldn't do stuff like
Speaker 1: take a turn easily. And generally the distance between the
Speaker 1: two wheels of the chariot that would provide decent stability
Speaker 1: and maneuverability was about four feet eight inches or so. Now,
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire needed to produce a good number of chariots.
Speaker 1: They were important for military conquests and for maintaining a
Speaker 1: presence in the large Roman Empire. The chariots all followed
Speaker 1: a fairly close set of standards, and all that chariot
Speaker 1: traffic on roads started to create ruts in the road.
Speaker 1: The wheels were wearing down paths in the roadways, and
Speaker 1: these were like little ditches where the wheels of the
Speaker 1: old chariots were just hitting the road over and over.
Speaker 1: Over time, the ruts get fairly deep, and then the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire falls. This has nothing to do with ruts,
Speaker 1: although I guess you could argue that the empire was
Speaker 1: in a rut. But I suppose you could also argue
Speaker 1: that a few horses rear ends were involved in the
Speaker 1: process as well. Anyway, flash forward to areas that had
Speaker 1: formerly been part of the Roman Empire. As people began
Speaker 1: to build more vehicles like wagons and carts and stuff,
Speaker 1: they tended to gravitate back to that four foot eight
Speaker 1: inch distance between the wheels. Now, you could argue that
Speaker 1: this is because of those ruts, and that a cart
Speaker 1: with wheels that are closer together or further apart than
Speaker 1: that would have trouble navigating roads because the ruts are
Speaker 1: of a certain width, and if you're if you have
Speaker 1: one wheel in a rut and one wheel that's out
Speaker 1: of a rut, or you're constantly moving in and out
Speaker 1: of the ruts, it's not very easy going. Your animal
Speaker 1: has to work harder, it's not efficient. That's how the
Speaker 1: story goes, and that probably does play a part. But
Speaker 1: another part is just the practical considerations that the Romans
Speaker 1: had made were still in play centuries later, and that
Speaker 1: really that had more to do with the limitations of
Speaker 1: relying on vehicles that are powered by using critters to
Speaker 1: haul them. Anyway, the story goes on to say that
Speaker 1: when inventors in England first started building steam engine locomotives,
Speaker 1: the tools they were it upon to build out rails
Speaker 1: were based on the early horse horse drawn tram system
Speaker 1: where you would have rails and a cart, but a
Speaker 1: horse would pull the cart along the rails, and that
Speaker 1: those in turn were based on, you know, the the
Speaker 1: old ruts in the roads, you know, based off the
Speaker 1: carts that had to go through those roads, and that
Speaker 1: in turn was based off the original roaming chariots and
Speaker 1: hardy Hart horror. That means that train rails are the
Speaker 1: way they are because of the patutis of a pair
Speaker 1: of horses, which isn't true. Now, it is true that
Speaker 1: some early railway companies would use existing carriage bodies that
Speaker 1: had been intended for use on roads, and then they
Speaker 1: swapped out the wheels on these carriages and put them
Speaker 1: with wheels that could ride on top of rails like
Speaker 1: train cars. That was just playing practical. I mean, why
Speaker 1: would you spend all the money to reinvent the wheel
Speaker 1: or at least the wheeled carriage in you can just
Speaker 1: repurpose existing vehicles. But that's not the full story. George Stevenson,
Speaker 1: a nineteenth century engineer in England who came from truly
Speaker 1: humble origins, would be an early innovator with locomotives, not
Speaker 1: the inventor, but he made a lot of improvements with them,
Speaker 1: and he was creating powerful engines capable of transporting tons
Speaker 1: of coal long distances at a pretty slow pace. His
Speaker 1: early locomotive had a speed of around four miles per
Speaker 1: hour or about six and a half kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: Stevenson's machines ran on rails that were four ft eight
Speaker 1: inches apart at least in the early part of his career,
Speaker 1: but by eighteen twenty six, when he and his son
Speaker 1: Robert began working on the Liverpool in Manchester railway, he
Speaker 1: made the decision to go with a rail width of
Speaker 1: four ft eight and a half inches, and this wasn't
Speaker 1: the first time that anyone had done that, but he
Speaker 1: had adjusted this largely because it helped with turns. It
Speaker 1: it prevented more bunching up when you had to take
Speaker 1: a turn with a long train. And there wasn't just
Speaker 1: one set of train gauges from the get go. There
Speaker 1: were actually several competing train gauges in the UK and
Speaker 1: then later in other parts of the world. Some of
Speaker 1: them gravitated towards Stevenson's four ft eight inches, with the
Speaker 1: official standard eventually settling on that four ft eight and
Speaker 1: a half inches, but there were some railways that had
Speaker 1: narrower tracks and some that had wider tracks. In the
Speaker 1: state of New York there was an entire network of
Speaker 1: train tracks there were six ft wide, and the thinking
Speaker 1: at the time was that the trains on this network
Speaker 1: we're going to be carrying even heavier loads, and that
Speaker 1: a wider track would be best for that, while also
Speaker 1: providing greater stability. Even in the UK, there were tons
Speaker 1: of different train gauges. The Great Western Railway, which linked
Speaker 1: London with regions in the southwest of England and then
Speaker 1: off to Wales in the west, had a much wider
Speaker 1: gauge of rails. Their rails were seven ft one quarter
Speaker 1: inch apart or two thousand, one hundred forty millimeters. Back
Speaker 1: in the United States, just before the Civil War, the
Speaker 1: Confederacy or what would be the Confederacy, had a few
Speaker 1: different train gauges running through the South and that was
Speaker 1: one of the big contributing factors to the South being
Speaker 1: less capable than the North during wartime. Meanwhile, up north,
Speaker 1: the States had largely gravitated toward that four ft eight
Speaker 1: and a half inches as the standard, and that proved
Speaker 1: to be a huge advantage over the South when it
Speaker 1: came to supply chains and logistics. So what's the big
Speaker 1: deal anyway, Well, it's all about compatibility. Like I said
Speaker 1: at the top of the show, These different rail gauges
Speaker 1: led to what engineers called break of gauge, Meaning let's
Speaker 1: say you've got a route from point A to point C,
Speaker 1: and it passes through point B, and at point B
Speaker 1: you have a change in gauge of railway lines. So
Speaker 1: from point A to point B it's a narrower gage,
Speaker 1: and from point B to point SEE it's a wider gauge. Well,
Speaker 1: you can't take the same train all the way from
Speaker 1: point A to point C because the train can't run
Speaker 1: on a wider gauge. It has wheels that are in
Speaker 1: fixed positions on the bottom of the train. They're mounted
Speaker 1: on what we call wheel trucks here in the United States.
Speaker 1: In the UK they're called bogies. They're at a fixed
Speaker 1: wid you cannot magically go further apart from one another
Speaker 1: or closer together. There are special train cars that can
Speaker 1: account for slight differences in rail gauge, but those would
Speaker 1: come later, so you're stuck with a solid frame. So
Speaker 1: one type of rail car can ride on one type
Speaker 1: of railroad track, but you have to switch if you're
Speaker 1: gonna change gauges. So it doesn't take much imagination to
Speaker 1: see how this leads to a major problem. If you're
Speaker 1: transporting stuff, whether it's people or cargo, and you have
Speaker 1: to pass through one region that relies on one gauge
Speaker 1: width to another that has a different one, you've got
Speaker 1: to change trains. For people, this can be a nuisance,
Speaker 1: and it might mean having to travel by carriage from
Speaker 1: one train depot to a different one in the same town.
Speaker 1: For cargo, it's a much larger hassle because you've got
Speaker 1: to offload the cargo from train number one, probably loaded
Speaker 1: into some other form of transportation like wagons, then take
Speaker 1: that wagon or whatever to the other train, offload the
Speaker 1: wagon and loaded onto train number two. It is inefficient
Speaker 1: and wasteful, and it was clear that standardizing rail gauges
Speaker 1: would be a practical solution. Having one standard width would
Speaker 1: simplify matters and allow for the faster transportation of passengers
Speaker 1: and goods. The broad gage of the Great Western Railroad
Speaker 1: in the UK and the so called narrow gauge favored
Speaker 1: by Stevenson, we're gonna duke it out over there across
Speaker 1: the pond. Here in America, we had a whole different
Speaker 1: host of different railroad get gauges to contend with the
Speaker 1: two that I was talking about earlier. That was just
Speaker 1: an example. There were like almost a dozen different rail
Speaker 1: gauges in the US. It was a mess, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't easy. The various parties involved all had a vested
Speaker 1: interest that their gauge would become the standard. For one thing,
Speaker 1: I mean, they wouldn't have to spend more money building
Speaker 1: out or buying new materials. And in some places like Erie, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: there were other issues. You see, Erie marked the termination
Speaker 1: point for a couple of different railroads that had different gauges,
Speaker 1: which meant people traveling from say the East Coast to
Speaker 1: the Midwest, might have to stop an Erie along the way,
Speaker 1: and that meant that there were always reliable jobs related
Speaker 1: to transferring passengers from one railway to another, or to
Speaker 1: accommodate people as they did for the next outbound train,
Speaker 1: like restaurants and hotels. That break of gauge of Erie
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania was seen as a source of employment and revenue
Speaker 1: in many ways, so that was a major disincentive to
Speaker 1: move towards a standardized railway gauge. In fact, the people
Speaker 1: of Erie, Pennsylvania took this pretty far. From December eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty three to February eighteen fifty four, citizens and Erie
Speaker 1: politicians which I mean Erie Pennsylvania not spooky spooky politicians,
Speaker 1: they tried to stop a move to standardize the tracks
Speaker 1: with the narrower of the two gauges. A railway company
Speaker 1: had bought controlling interest in another railway company, and the
Speaker 1: decision was they were going to rip up the wide
Speaker 1: gauge tracks and replace them with narrow gauge so that
Speaker 1: you would have a single gauge going through Erie, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: And they didn't like that, so things escalated. The mayor
Speaker 1: ended up ordering police to remove railroad tracks that violated
Speaker 1: ordinances that said the new tracks would not be allowed
Speaker 1: to cross city streets. Uh then the mayor started to
Speaker 1: bring on one hundred quote unquote special constables or a
Speaker 1: brute squad in Princess Bride terms, to take it upon
Speaker 1: themselves to tear up railroad tracks, usually by the cover
Speaker 1: of darkness in the middle of the night, and things
Speaker 1: eventually would come to a head. The United States sent
Speaker 1: lawman out there to calm things down, and eventually they
Speaker 1: did calm down. The standardized track was laid down and
Speaker 1: mostly left unmolested, though there would be trouble that would
Speaker 1: spring up occasionally over the next couple of years, just
Speaker 1: not on the scale of what had been called the
Speaker 1: gauge War. But again, this whole conflict had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the actual battling standards. It had more to
Speaker 1: do with the consequences of settling on a single standard
Speaker 1: and removing that incompatible without trains stopping an eerie by necessity.
Speaker 1: Many local businesses saw a drop in revenue and some
Speaker 1: jobs were eliminated altogether. Kind of reminds me of stories
Speaker 1: about how when highways would come in and bypass a
Speaker 1: traditional route, entire towns would kind of dry up and
Speaker 1: die well. The shift to standards of rail gauges was
Speaker 1: gradual around the world. The UK passed a Gauge Act
Speaker 1: back in eight that set the standard at the four
Speaker 1: ft eight and a half inches. The US moved more
Speaker 1: toward a standard after the Civil War, when much of
Speaker 1: the rail lines needed repairs, so the reunified United States
Speaker 1: took the opportunity to swap out the wider gauges in
Speaker 1: parts of the South with one closer to the northern standard.
Speaker 1: A little more than half the world uses that one thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred thirty five millimeter as the standard gauge for
Speaker 1: railway lines. UH The other forty percent or so of
Speaker 1: railways make up a mix of different gauges, with not
Speaker 1: a single like dominant one with this format. War it
Speaker 1: was more practicality that guided most of the decisions rather
Speaker 1: than anything else. When we come back, we'll look at
Speaker 1: yet another war of formats. But first let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. One of the things that format wars often
Speaker 1: illustrate is how even something that is seemingly frivolous can
Speaker 1: be affected by a battle for standards. In the late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, as railways were slowly conforming for the most part,
Speaker 1: to the Stephenson standard, another format war began. Kind of
Speaker 1: this one was more of a format conflict that was
Speaker 1: resolved fairly quickly and then not that much longer afterward
Speaker 1: became more or less obsolete. And I am talking about
Speaker 1: player pianos, yep, pianos that have a mechanism that allows
Speaker 1: them to seemingly play themselves. And it's actually really fascinating.
Speaker 1: See player pianos suck. That's not a judgment call, it's
Speaker 1: actually what they are doing. The old player pianos worked
Speaker 1: on a principle of pneumatics. Now we usually think of
Speaker 1: pneumatic systems as using pressurized air to do work to
Speaker 1: push against something, for example, and player pianos do use pneumatics,
Speaker 1: only they do it by creating lower pressure inside the
Speaker 1: piano than the atmospheric pressure that's outside the piano. As
Speaker 1: opposed to pumping pressurized air through the system, it's the
Speaker 1: outside air rushing in that provides the pneumatic force. I'll
Speaker 1: explain how they work from a really high level. All right,
Speaker 1: So first let's think about the base of a player piano.
Speaker 1: The bottom of it, you would have a pair of pedals,
Speaker 1: and they weren't like sustained pedals the way you would
Speaker 1: find with classic pianos. They were actually foot pedals that
Speaker 1: would uh power some bellows. Later on you would have
Speaker 1: electric motors that would do this, but the early ones
Speaker 1: used foot power, and so you would generate the suction
Speaker 1: needed for everything else to work by pedaling these pedals.
Speaker 1: You would alternate left right, left, right pumping air out
Speaker 1: of this piano. And you've got a set of bellows
Speaker 1: for each pedal. So the left pedal has a bellows,
Speaker 1: the right pedal has a bellows. Now, as you do
Speaker 1: this motion where you're pumping left, right, left, right, there's
Speaker 1: actually a slight gap in suction as you're alternating. It's
Speaker 1: it's not a continuous uh suck. I guess. Is the
Speaker 1: way you could put it so to compensate for that player.
Speaker 1: Pianos typically have what was called a vacuum reservoir are
Speaker 1: essentially a sealed box. So as you pump the bellows
Speaker 1: suck air not just out of the piano, but out
Speaker 1: of the reservoir as well. And so as you would
Speaker 1: reach these little breaks where one foot is about to
Speaker 1: go down in any other foot's about to go up,
Speaker 1: that reservoir would allow for the continued air pressure that
Speaker 1: you needed. It would be because there was a vacuum
Speaker 1: pumped into the reservoir. It would create the sucking that
Speaker 1: you would normally have with the bellows. And so you
Speaker 1: keep this up, You keep on pedaling the entire time.
Speaker 1: And these bellows in the reservoir connect via hoses to
Speaker 1: two other major components, perhaps more, but two ones for sure.
Speaker 1: One was an air motor, and an air motor is
Speaker 1: what it sounds like. It uses air to provide the
Speaker 1: force needed to make the motor turn. In this case,
Speaker 1: it was device being powered by a vacuum. The vacuum
Speaker 1: suction causes the motor to rotate in that road. Stational
Speaker 1: motion was transferred to a role of piano paper, technically
Speaker 1: to a spindle that the role of piano player UH
Speaker 1: paper would sit on. It's hard to say piano player paper. Anyway,
Speaker 1: You put the the the roll of paper on the
Speaker 1: spindle and the rotating motor would provide the force necessary
Speaker 1: to rotate the paper. The second component that the bellows
Speaker 1: were pulling air from was what was called a track bar. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a bar. It's above the keyboard UH and
Speaker 1: it's typically made off of something like brass, and the
Speaker 1: role of piano player paper would stretch across this bar,
Speaker 1: making contact with it. So while you're pumping the bellows,
Speaker 1: the holes in this track bar there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: holes in it would be trying to suck in air,
Speaker 1: but the paper blocks the air from going through. However,
Speaker 1: the role of piano player paper also has some holes
Speaker 1: in it, and occasionally those holes aligned with the holes
Speaker 1: in the track bar and air can pass through. And
Speaker 1: it shouldn't surprise you to learn that those holes also
Speaker 1: correspond with specific notes on the piano. So you get
Speaker 1: the player piano started, you're pumping the bellows and the
Speaker 1: section goes to the air motor, which begins to turn.
Speaker 1: It pulls the player piano paper over this tracking bar.
Speaker 1: That has suction, and whenever a hole in the paper
Speaker 1: lines up with a hole in that track bar, air
Speaker 1: passes through into the piano. Otherwise the paper is blocking
Speaker 1: the air. So air rushes into the piano through the
Speaker 1: hole in the paper and the corresponding hole in the
Speaker 1: tracking bar, and each of those holes connects to a hose,
Speaker 1: and that hose goes to a pair of little pneumatic
Speaker 1: valves or bellows that correspond with a specific note, a
Speaker 1: specific piano key, or more are appropriately the hammer connected
Speaker 1: to the piano key, and the standard piano has a
Speaker 1: eight keys total, so a full player piano would have
Speaker 1: eight of these little valves or bellows at least, and
Speaker 1: possibly some extra ones for some cool other effects. So
Speaker 1: the air coming in powers that bellows or valve pairing
Speaker 1: and then turn connects to the striking hammer for the
Speaker 1: corresponding note and causes the hammer to strike the correct
Speaker 1: piano string with the appropriate amount of force. The force
Speaker 1: and old player pianos was just standard. You couldn't play
Speaker 1: loudly or softly with just a regular player piano without
Speaker 1: some alterations. So the player piano is constantly trying to
Speaker 1: suck air the holes in the paper where the air
Speaker 1: can pass through, and nearly all the early player pianos
Speaker 1: worked on this basic principle, but lots of companies were
Speaker 1: building them and no one had yet settled on a
Speaker 1: standard size for the player your piano roll. Some of
Speaker 1: them were wider than others, and some player pianos had
Speaker 1: a more limited range of notes, not covering the full
Speaker 1: eight eight keys. Some used paper that was much wider
Speaker 1: than others, and that poses a problem because if you
Speaker 1: went out and you made the extravagant purchase of a
Speaker 1: player piano. Let's say you own a bar and tin
Speaker 1: pan alley and you want this player piano in your bar,
Speaker 1: and then you want to go and buy the latest
Speaker 1: songs to play on this player piano. You want to
Speaker 1: make sure that whatever format you're buying is compatible with
Speaker 1: the piano you have, or else you've just wasted money.
Speaker 1: But with all the different sizes out there, that was complicated,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't be sure unless you were paying really
Speaker 1: close attention that you were buying the right stuff. So
Speaker 1: if the paper was too narrow, it wasn't going to
Speaker 1: cover all the holes in the pianos track bar, and
Speaker 1: you'd have a pretty hard time keeping suction up because
Speaker 1: a lot of air would be going through the uncovered holes. Uh.
Speaker 1: And technically they would be holding down a note, though
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be really noticeable after the beginning. And if
Speaker 1: the paper were too wide, it wouldn't fit on the
Speaker 1: spindle in the first place. And if the holes don't
Speaker 1: line up properly, the music would come out wrong, would
Speaker 1: be the wrong notes being played, kind of like what
Speaker 1: sounds like whenever I tried to play piano. So from
Speaker 1: eighteen nine six, when Edwin Vody invented the first really
Speaker 1: practical player piano using a pneumatic system, all the way
Speaker 1: up to nineteen o eight, various companies were making different
Speaker 1: style player pianos, and there were three major musical scales,
Speaker 1: one that had sixty five notes, one that had seventy
Speaker 1: two notes, and then one with all eighty eight notes
Speaker 1: of your typical piano. And there were a lot of
Speaker 1: different sizes of piano paper rolls all hitting the market,
Speaker 1: and that leads us to the great event known as
Speaker 1: the Buffalo Convention of December tenth eight. It was this
Speaker 1: convention that established the standard width for player piano rolls,
Speaker 1: which was two D eight six millimeters or eleven and
Speaker 1: one quarter inches. In addition, they settled on two musical scales,
Speaker 1: the note scale and then the full eight notes scale.
Speaker 1: Although both of those scales still used paper that was
Speaker 1: eleven and one quarter inches wide, manufacturers fell in line.
Speaker 1: They built out new player pianos designed to hold a
Speaker 1: piano role of that width, and that made it much
Speaker 1: easier to shop for player piano music because he didn't
Speaker 1: have to worry if it would fit the size of
Speaker 1: your player piano, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you want to hear an interesting
Speaker 1: example of player piano music, although this has been reinterpreted
Speaker 1: for a modern computerized piano so it's not played on
Speaker 1: an old player piano, I recommend you check out the
Speaker 1: album Gershwin Plays Gershwin the Piano Rolls. Gershwin himself was
Speaker 1: said to have recorded these piano roles over the course
Speaker 1: of like a decade. On some pieces, such as the
Speaker 1: famous Rhapsody in Blue, he over dubbed himself so that
Speaker 1: meant he would play through Rahapsody and Blue on piano
Speaker 1: that would then end up corresponding the playing too punching
Speaker 1: holes in a role of player piano paper. Then he
Speaker 1: would rewind the paper, put it back through, and play
Speaker 1: additional parts in sequence with his original playing, which allows
Speaker 1: a single player piano to play more notes at the
Speaker 1: same time than a human pianist would be able to
Speaker 1: manage on their own. It's like being able to play
Speaker 1: a four handed piece all by yourself. The pieces on
Speaker 1: that album are fantastic, and they offer the chance to
Speaker 1: hear how Gershwin would have played these famous bits of
Speaker 1: music himself, particularly early, if he happened to have four hands,
Speaker 1: and I highly recommend it now. I've covered a lot
Speaker 1: of the other format wars in various episodes like I
Speaker 1: mentioned before that talked about companies like Columbia and our
Speaker 1: Cia and how they battled it out over vinyl records.
Speaker 1: You know, should the standard be thirty three and one
Speaker 1: third rpm that was Columbia standard, or should it be
Speaker 1: forty five rpm with r C as smaller records. That
Speaker 1: format war fizzled out not because one side capitulated, but
Speaker 1: rather because record player manufacturers eventually built turntables that could
Speaker 1: operated either speed, which made both styles compatible with the
Speaker 1: same player machines, which kind of sidestep the thing. And
Speaker 1: then the music industry started to make a shift from
Speaker 1: singles two albums, and that kind of dictated which form
Speaker 1: would end up taking precedence. And of course I've talked
Speaker 1: about the early days of personal computers, when lots of
Speaker 1: companies battled it out with different hardware and operating systems.
Speaker 1: We sure you had Apple computers way back in the day,
Speaker 1: but you also had Commodore and Tandy and Atari and more.
Speaker 1: The format war would eventually shake out with two major
Speaker 1: players in the personal computer space, Apple with its Apple
Speaker 1: computers and later the Macintosh line, and then IBM, or
Speaker 1: rather IBM compatible machines with MS Dawson, then Microsoft Windows,
Speaker 1: and then eventually IBM itself would get out the PC market.
Speaker 1: But those would be the two dominating formats at that point,
Speaker 1: and there are lots of others. But I felt that
Speaker 1: these that I covered today were kind of fun ones.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I almost included
Speaker 1: another format war in this, but I realized that that
Speaker 1: would put me way over time. If you enjoyed this
Speaker 1: and you want to hear more about different format wars
Speaker 1: throughout the ages, let me know. Send me a message
Speaker 1: on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff, H s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. M tech
Speaker 1: Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.