Henry Luce’s (far-right, jingoist, unreliable) The March of Time radio show provided extensive coverage of Italy’s incursion into Ethiopia.
In a serendipitous voltpunk twist, the August 28, 1935 show tells the (fictional) account of a conversation between Mussolini and Marconi, regarding the wartime and peacetime uses of a ray gun Marconi has developed.
I had yesterday’s Times open at the breakfast table this morning, and saw this amazing story.
Evidently Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil hold the patent for frequency-hopping radio guidance. That’s basically the same technology that lets digital cellular avoid the type of easy eavesdropping that Scanner used to sample.
From Lamarr’s Wikipedia entry:
This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
Got that? A piano roll, skipping among 88 frequencies! That’s the most awesome hack I’ve heard in ages! If your only tool is a piano, everything looks like a key, I guess. I often worry that computers impoverish our hackish imaginations.
The ‘punk’ part of ‘voltpunk’ is extremely problematic in this case, of course— since what Lamarr and Antheil were anti- in this case wasn’t -authority but -fascism. Punk or not, I’m always happy for hacks in the service of anti-fascism (particularly since our local brand of fascism has friends at the top).
My outlining project for June is a voltpunk story:
In 1936, Ethiopian radio pirates use improvised technology to broadcast the true story of Mussolini’s incursion to the world.
