Historian of Science Says Calit2 Can Learn Lessons from Past Technology Transitions
April 21, 2005 / By Doug Ramsey
4.21.05 -- Emily Thompson is the first scholar affiliated with Calit2 to have inspired an opera. Yes, an opera. Tone Test had its world premiere last summer at New York's Lincoln Center Festival, with Thompson in attendance. Composer Nicholas Brooke integrated new compositions with original recordings of Thomas Edison's tone tests used to promote phonograph sales in the early 20th century. Singers were dispatched to theaters around the country to demonstrate the fidelity of phonograph recordings to the real thing. Brooke learned of the tests after reading an article by Thompson about the history of the phonograph. "He said my article inspired him to write the opera," recalls Thompson, adding wryly: "I guess that makes me a muse."
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Thompson joined the UCSD faculty in February as an associate professor of history and academic participant in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). She is finishing a book on early Hollywood's shift from silent movies to talking pictures, and hopes to embark on a biography of Thomas Edison.
"With so many changes and transformations in all the media that have sprung from Edison's inventions and research, I think that looking at his life and understanding the origin of today's media-saturated world would be a worthwhile exercise," says Thompson, noting that there may be lessons for Calit2 itself. "Edison probably contributed more to the culture of invention than anyone in modern times, and his research lab in West Orange, New Jersey, was the first corporate R&D facility in America. So to look at the origins of that lab could give us clues to the best way to pioneer innovation today."
Since arriving at UCSD, Thompson has met with both Calit2 director Larry Smarr and division director Ramesh Rao. "Professor Thompson is one of the foremost experts on the history of sound technology," says Rao, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering. "We look forward to collaborating with her in the context of our New Media Arts initiatives, and we expect that she will bring her knowledge of earlier technological disruptions to bear on Calit2's research and policy agenda."
"We have talked about various initiatives where I might be able to contribute, such as digital cinema," says Thompson. "There are great parallels between the shift from analog to digital cinema projection and delivery, and the earlier transformation from silent movies to talkies. Who is going to pay to make theaters digital, for instance? It's not clear that movie theaters can make money off of the new technology, so they want the distributors to pay. So there are lots of interesting unresolved issues that Calit2 is involved in as we try to push this technology into the marketplace."
Thompson also intends to organize a conference in the next year or so in the new Calit2 building at UCSD that would focus on sound and sound technologies. "In the past five years or so this has become an exciting field of scholarly research, not just for historians, but also for anthropologists, musicologists, people in literature and so on," she says. "They are suddenly thinking about the 'sound world' past and present. I think Calit2 can bring together all the different people who are working in sound media and get a dialogue going among the technicians and engineers and the users of the technology, together with scholars who have critical insights about sound."
The conference would be a logical progression of Thompson's own specialty: the sound of the built environment, and how it can reflect and influence behavior. In 1999, she co-edited The Architecture of Science, and three years later wrote The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 , both published by The MIT Press.
The historian joined UCSD after two years at MIT, most recently as a senior fellow in the Dibner Institute for History of Science and Technology. At MIT, Thompson spent most of her time researching a new book about the early years of the Hollywood film industry. "I'm looking at the transition from silent to sound motion pictures in the U.S. film industry and the different technicians and craft laborers involved in making and exhibiting films," explains Thompson. "I'm trying to understand how their working lives were changed as sound came in, and their stories can help us understand this technological revolution in an industry."
The "creative, chaotic" history of early Hollywood, says Thompson, also speaks to the upheaval that the entertainment industry faces today as a result of the Internet. "With digitization, we are going through a similar revolution," says Thompson. "I think that having an understanding of the implications of how they dealt with this quite dramatic change all those years ago can provide some insight for people in a similar situation today."
One such lesson would be to anticipate unintended consequences. "The goal of the earliest sound movies was just to offer a recorded musical score to accompany a silent movie," she notes. "They wanted to replicate the quality of a big orchestra like the ones in motion-picture palaces in major cities and put it into small-town theaters using the phonograph. It was only later that studios recognized the possibilities of talking film. Talkies moved sound movies in a very different direction and transformed movies more fundamentally than anyone had expected."
Prior to MIT, Thompson was an assistant professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has juggled history and science ever since getting her undergraduate degree in physics (from the Rochester Institute of Technology), before switching to history for the Ph.D. she received from Princeton University in 1992.
The new faculty member will teach her first big lecture courses at UCSD next fall, but is getting her feet wet this quarter with a colloquium course for seniors called "Building America." "It's about the built environment -- not specifically architecture, but structures and infrastructure in American history," explains the Pittsburgh, PA native. "I'm trying to introduce the students to the idea that the built environment embodies social choices and cultural values. So it becomes an historical resource that you can explore and analyze in the same way that historians usually focus on texts to look at the past."
Professor Thompson is thrilled to be in San Diego. The history department and Calit2 have been very welcoming, she says, and after three years of Boston winters, she also appreciates the weather. "The day before I was supposed to start driving west to California, my car was buried to the roof in snow," she recalls.
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Media Contacts Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, (858) 822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu