The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Video memories may be here today, gone tomorrow
This story was published Sept. 13, 1998
Which is more important, intelligence or knowledge?
They're not the same thing, you know.
Marylin vos Savant, whose "Ask Marilyn" column runs in Parade magazine, is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records Hall of Fame for the "Highest IQ." Yet, in her Sept. 6 column, she provided an excellent illustration of the principle that the value of intelligence without knowledge is limited.
Marilyn was asked: "Which would you choose for preserving personal memories: videotapes or photos?"
Marilyn made the right choice, but for the wrong reason. She chose photos because she doesn't like the way she looks in old videos, whereas she likes the way she looks in old photos.
I'm assuming some genealogical values here, because the writer did mention preserving the images and Marilyn implied an assumed passage of time. What the columnist failed to factor was the technological question.
Will she - or we - be able to view today's videotapes in another 25 years? How about our children viewing them half a cen tury down the road? Or our great-grandchildren well into the next century?
In 25 years? Maybe. Maybe not. I won't be around for you to collect on the bet, but I would be willing to wager that our descendants won't be able to view our videos in 2048.
Consider it has only been 121 years since Thomas Edison recited Mary Had a Little Lamb, imprinting his voice on a tinfoil cylinder. It was the world's first audio recording. My grandfather C.C. Day, who died in 1960, was 10 years old when Edison made his first recording. Edison's acoustic recording technology was succeeded by magnetic recordings on spools of wire, which were introduced in 1898, just 21 years later.
Of course, it took a while for acoustic recorders to find their way into the trash heap, but eventually, the technology was lost to everyone but antique collectors.
Telegraphone technology, as it was called, held sway until World War II, when Hitler's engineers perfected a plastic tape replacement for the wire.
This new technology, involving reel-to-reel tape recorders, produced far superior sound quality. Reproduction was so good Hitler was able to confound Allied intelligence for a while by playing tape recordings of his speeches around the country.
People thought Hitler was present when he wasn't.
This new technology exploded upon the mass market shortly after World War II. How well I remember drooling over my friend's reel-to-reel Wallensack tape recorder, in Japan, in 1957. It was state-of-the-art.
Reel-to-reel technology soon was superseded by diskettes. In my work for Washington State University during the mid-1970s, I wrote, produced and voiced a brief radio program called Thought for Food. It was about agricultural research and aired on radio stations in at least six states.
They were distributed to radio stations by Washington State University's tape network, a service that has been discontinued. When I closed down the program, I dutifully copied all of my programs to reels of tape, "for posterity."
Today, my office no longer has a tape recorder on which to play them and I don't have one at home.
I'm sure somewhere I can get them copied to audio diskettes, but the point is I no longer have the technology to listen to them and neither do most people.
Now, after a run of only a quarter century or so, audio tape diskettes are rapidly being pushed off the market by the latest technological wave, compact discs.
And the technology that will replace compact discs already is on the market. Before long, we'll all be listening to and viewing digital sound and pictures.
How many of us can view Dad's, or Grandpa's old home movies? Does the family movie projector still work? Where can we get it fixed or buy a new one?
Home movies are fast falling victim to video cameras, and video cameras are about to go digital.
Video and audio formats are unstable and ephemeral - here today, gone tomorrow.
Give me good old-fashioned paper any old day. Paper is the technology that allows us to view photographs well over 100 years old, paper is the technology that permits us to preserve family stories in a form that we know our great-great-grandchildren will be able to view in a hundred years from now.
I'm not discounting new technologies. They have their place, even in genealogy - perhaps especially in genealogy - but they have a short life span and are for contemporary enjoyment. They aren't good mediums for preservation.
Sorry, Marilyn, the score is 1 for knowledge, 0 for intelligence.