UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election and RCA Mark I and Mark II Synthesizers: Difference between pages

Revision as of 21:20, 6 January 2015

RCA Mark I and Mark II Synthesizers

RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA Victor)

In the 1950s, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was one of the largest manufacturers of consumer entertainment devices and military electronics. For a brief time, RCA was also the site of cutting-edge research in musical instruments, thanks to engineer Harry F. Olson, RCA’s leading expert in the field of acoustics. In the 1940s Olson became interested in making electronic music, and he, along with fellow RCA engineer Herbert Belar, designed a massive electronic music synthesizer called the Mark I.

While electronic musical instruments, such as the Theremin, had been created before, the RCA Mark I was much more complex. It used a bank of 12 oscillator circuits, which used electron tubes to generate the 12 basic tones of a musical “scale.” These basic sounds could be shaped in virtually limitless ways by passing them through other electronic circuits, including high-pass filters, low-pass filters, envelope filters, frequency dividers, modulators and resonators. Never mind the details of how all these circuits work—the end result was that the Mark I could take those 12 basic notes and reshape them into any imaginable sound. At least in theory. In practice, it was easy to create weird, unearthly sounds, and to imitate certain kinds of existing musical instruments but almost impossible to imitate other sounds like human voices or the smooth transitions between notes on a violin or trombone. Still, the Mark I, demonstrated in 1955, was impressive. It was “played” by laboriously programming a sequence of notes to be played, along with information about how the sound of each note was to be shaped, by punching holes into a long roll of paper, similar to the kind used on a player piano. When all that was prepared, the roll was fed into the machine, the holes read, and music produced.

The success of the Mark I led to the creation of the Mark II, which had twice as many tone oscillators and gave the composer more flexibility. In 1957, RCA provided the Mark II to a new consortium between Princeton and Columbia Universities to create the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. This Center would remain a gathering point for musicians and composers interested in synthesizers for many years. One of the most famous works composed for the RCA Mark II was Charles Wuorinen’s “Time Enconium,” of 1968. The Mark II is still in existence, and is located at the Computer Music Center (successor to the Columbia-Princeton center) in New York.

Demonstration

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The Story of the RCA Synthesizer

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-== UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election ==
+== RCA Mark I and Mark II Synthesizers ==
-The story has been told and retold for decades: how CBS Television News used a [[UNIVAC]] computer to predict the 1952 U.S. Presidential election returns and — when the computer accurately predicted the Eisenhower landslide at around 8:30 in the election night broadcast — the prediction was doubted, and only hours later did CBS reveal that the prediction had been accurate. It has become a classic cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing human preconception to interfere with logic and evaluation of facts.
+[[Image:RCA Mark II.jpg|thumb|right|RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA Victor)]]
-There is more to the story. The exact timeline of when UNIVAC's initial prediction was made is not certain, but what is important is that UNIVAC's correct prediction of a landslide victory was ostensibly ignored until much later in the broadcast because of journalistic prudence and lack of confidence in the accuracy of the results.
+In the 1950s, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was one of the largest manufacturers of consumer entertainment devices and military electronics. For a brief time, RCA was also the site of cutting-edge research in musical instruments, thanks to engineer Harry F. Olson, RCA’s leading expert in the field of acoustics. In the 1940s Olson became interested in making electronic music, and he, along with fellow RCA engineer Herbert Belar, designed a massive [[Electronic Music Synthesizer|electronic music synthesizer]] called the Mark I.
-Dr. Ira Chinoy, whose doctoral thesis examines the use of computers in broadcast journalism, estimates that the celebrated initial prediction of the Eisenhower landslide was made closer to 9:15.  At 8:30, only slightly more than one million votes had been tallied; it took until at least 9:15 pm for three million votes to be transmitted from CBS to the Remington Rand factory in Philadelphia. CBS was receiving vote tallies from the wire services and teletyping them to Remington Rand’s factory in Philadelphia. Additional time was needed to input the data and to run the programs.
+<p>While electronic musical instruments, such as the Theremin, had been created before, the RCA Mark I was much more complex. It used a bank of 12 oscillator circuits, which used electron tubes to generate the 12 basic tones of a musical “scale.” These basic sounds could be shaped in virtually limitless ways by passing them through other electronic circuits, including high-pass filters, low-pass filters, envelope filters, frequency dividers, modulators and resonators. Never mind the details of how all these circuits work—the end result was that the Mark I could take those 12 basic notes and reshape them into any imaginable sound. At least in theory. In practice, it was easy to create weird, unearthly sounds, and to imitate certain kinds of existing musical instruments but almost impossible to imitate other sounds like human voices or the smooth transitions between notes on a violin or trombone. Still, the Mark I, demonstrated in 1955, was impressive. It was “played” by laboriously programming a sequence of notes to be played, along with information about how the sound of each note was to be shaped, by punching holes into a long roll of paper, similar to the kind used on a player piano. When all that was prepared, the roll was fed into the machine, the holes read, and music produced. </p>
-The 8:30 CBS segment merely gave the television audience a visual tour and introduction to UNIVAC; the second UNIVAC segment of the evening at 9:30 asked for a prediction, but the machine was not yet ready. By that point in the television coverage, the human commentators were already commenting on the surprising Eisenhower strength in the early returns.  On the basis of pre-election polls, the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed to be close (Eisenhower held a slight edge), so the use of a state-of-the-art computer to predict what was expected to be a very close election had generated a lot of popular interest.
+<p>The success of the Mark I led to the creation of the Mark II, which had twice as many tone oscillators and gave the composer more flexibility. In 1957, RCA provided the Mark II to a new consortium between Princeton and Columbia Universities to create the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. This Center would remain a gathering point for musicians and composers interested in synthesizers for many years. One of the most famous works composed for the RCA Mark II was Charles Wuorinen’s “Time Enconium,” of 1968. The Mark II is still in existence, and is located at the Computer Music Center (successor to the Columbia-Princeton center) in New York.<br> </p>
-At some point relatively early in the evening, UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landslide victory. However, the UNIVAC programmers decided that the prediction was too risky to release because it contradicted what the pollsters had been saying previous to the election about a tight race.
+== Demonstration ==
-At 10:30, which was the third on-air UNIVAC segment, the computer predicted twenty-eight states for Eisenhower and twenty for Stevenson. This was a softer prediction, and was in line with what the CBS commentators had already been telling their television audience. It was the initial correct prediction of an overwhelming Eisenhower win that the UNIVAC programmers decided not to release because it contradicted the poll numbers.
+<p><flash>file=RCA2.swf|width=682|height=410|quality=best</flash> </p>
-The 11:30 UNIVAC on-air prediction caused more drama. It reversed its earlier prediction, calling 24 states each for Eisenhower and Stevenson, and a slim 270 to 261 Electoral College vote margin for Eisenhower.  But by 11:45, the prediction had been corrected and UNIVAC predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory.
+== The Story of the RCA Synthesizer ==
-UNIVAC made its predictions based on the difference between vote tallies and the expected vote in cities and counties, based on a statistical model extrapolated from past elections.  By applying this deviation in places that had already voted to those which had not yet voted, an estimate of the present election could be obtained based on past tallies in those places. One of the ironies of the election of 1952 was that the returns from Massachusetts, one of the crucial early-reporting states, were incorrectly reported to UNIVAC.  That UNIVAC was nonetheless able to make accurate predictions.
+{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=rgN_VzEIZ1I</youtube>
-The UNIVAC used by CBS was the fifth UNIVAC machine made. In the autumn of 1952, UNIVAC-5 was still in the Philadelphia factory of Remington Rand waiting for its future installation at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Because UNIVAC itself was too large to be moved conveniently, a dummy control console was set up in the CBS studio in [[Grand Central Terminal]], New York City for visual effect, its lights blinking evocatively thanks to delay switches ordinarily used for making Christmas tree lights flash on and off.
+[[Category:Engineering and society]]
+[[Category:Leisure]]
-There was some irony that a machine which debuted in the public spotlight of national TV would go on to do classified weapons work.  UNIVAC contained mercury delay lines, which allowed it to store 1,000 words (45 bits each) as electric pulses in tubes of mercury. Up to one million characters could be stored and accessed on magnetic tape. It was these tapes, replacing punched cards, which made the UNIVAC revolutionary, and which gave it a tremendous speed advantage because it could access its own data instead of needing to wait for cards to be loaded.  It could perform four hundred and sixty-five multiplications per second and had a clock speed of 2.25MHz.
+[[Category:Music]]
-== Video ==
-A brief video of the CBS prediction can be seen here.
-{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=v7K8MW8wQWs</youtube>
-== Further Reading ==
-[http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/10504/1/Chinoy_umd_0117E_11395.pdf Ira Chinoy's doctoral thesis]
-[[Category:Computing and electronics]]
-[[Category:Computer_science]]