Trying to trace an April Fool spoof article

[Phil G4SPZ]

My memory is good in parts. For example, I can't recall the journal I read this article in - I think it was RadCom in the 1980s or 90s - but I can remember the story quite clearly. I would dearly love to read it again, but to date my searches have been fruitless.


The April Fool story was something about the very early days of radio, when a small low-powered commercial radio station with the callsign HAM was constantly having its frequency used by higher-powered stations. The operators hatched a plan to get friendly stations around the world to tune their highest powered transmitters to HAM's frequency in an attempt to jam the opposition out of existence.


Does anyone else recall this? I won't give the punchline yet as it will spoil the surprise, but it was very funny indeed...

[Jon_G4MDC]

Sorry can't help with that one.

If anyone recalls it, also looking for something called "The evolution of the simplest rig" it was in CQ/73 or another American mag. Featured Lady Tonsils Chattersley G2YAP or some such. Not read since 1970s. I would like to find it again.

[Terry_VK5TM]

Jon, can't find anything like that in my 73 or Ham Radio mag indexes.

[Jon_G4MDC]

Well many thanks for looking Terry.
I hope someone can find it because I found it very funny.

I mustn't reveal more because that would spoil it. Safe to say that after 197x when it was written we could bring it way more up to date today. I would be tempted to try but not until I have read the original again.

[Malcolm G6ANZ]

Another April fool I remember was on Radio 3 or possibly 4. The gist of the spoof was that Leonardo da Vinci had invented the record player. They gave a creditable history of the finding of a record in some Italian ruins and even played a part of it. The sound was similar to an early Edison cylinder but with more wow and less frequency response. The spoken voice was Italian.
It was up to the BBC standard of being almost believable.
Anyone else remember it? or am I imagining it?

Malcolm

[Ted Kendall]

Radio 3's Music Magazine did a spoof so convincing I suggested my TS producer sought it out for our Talking About Music strand - the premise was that Bruckner's supposed enthusasm for steam engines influenced the rhythms he used in his symphonies - given that some of his climaxes seem to take hours, much in the manner of a train struggling up an incline, and that his near-contemporary Dvorak was in fact a train-spotter, most of the Radio 3 producers accepted it without question as well. Only when they had praised it at a production meeting did the perpetrator blow the gaff...

[Electronpusher0]

Originally Posted by Malcolm G6ANZ

Another April fool I remember was on Radio 3 or possibly 4. The gist of the spoof was that Leonardo da Vinci had invented the record player. They gave a creditable history of the finding of a record in some Italian ruins and even played a part of it. The sound was similar to an early Edison cylinder but with more wow and less frequency response. The spoken voice was Italian.
It was up to the BBC standard of being almost believable.
Anyone else remember it? or am I imagining it?

Malcolm

That's almost true, there was some quite serious research to see if sounds had been recorded in old paintings, the theory was that the canvas would vibrate in response to the sounds in the studio and long brush strokes would show minute variations as the canvas vibrated.
Nothing came of it though.

Peter

[Malcolm G6ANZ]

A bit more googling, slow day, comes up with various similar ideas. Notably that sound could be recorded onto pots during the time they were on the wheel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzd4AVXBP9k
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!to...ed/5JecJ-EWmNk

All probably fake but interesting reading.

[Dave Moll]

This all reminds me of the Nigel Kneale television play, The Stone Tape, which was predicated upon the idea of events being recorded in the walls.

On a more serious note, I remember seeing an article about an early sound recording with an inked needle on paper, though I don't recall the details. Needless to say, there was no way of playing it back at the time, though playback has been achieved with modern technology.

[Malcolm G6ANZ]

A good film. I must watch it again

[John KC0G]

From post #2

Originally Posted by Jon_G4MDC

If anyone recalls it, also looking for something called "The evolution of the simplest rig" it was in CQ/73 or another American mag. Featured Lady Tonsils Chattersley G2YAP or some such. Not read since 1970s. I would like to find it again.

The article was by Larry Dart, W6RTE, and appeared in the CQ Magazine, September 1962, pp 40, 41 and 90. It is very funny.

73 John

[Electronpusher0]

Well done, I'd love to read the spoof but do not have access to CQ magazine.

Peter

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

I remember seeing an article about an early sound recording with an inked needle on paper, though I don't recall the details. Needless to say, there was no way of playing it back at the time, though playback has been achieved with modern technology.

Indeed - this was Leon Scott's Phonautograph of 1857, which used a diaphragm and hog bristle to trace a soundwave in a layer of lamp-black on the surface of a cylinder - not far away from the layout of the tinfoil phonograph. With modern digital technques, it has been possible to render these waveforms into sound of very restricted bandwidth and to straighten out the inevitable speed variations. The result is eerie - an intelligible rendering of a snatch of "au clair de la lune" recorded the better part of two centuries ago.

Around 1970 there was a BBC spoof called "The Graphophonsts", which embellished the idea of the activites of Colonel Gouraud, Edison's European agent, who recorded many famous people in the 1890s, including Brahms playimg his own music. This was very neatly done, with the audio suitably distressed, until the very final words of the last insert faded into clear, this being a Kipling poem on the virtues of a lie.

[Radio Wrangler]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Radio 3's Music Magazine did a spoof so convincing I suggested my TS producer sought it out for our Talking About Music strand - the premise was that Bruckner's supposed enthusasm for steam engines influenced the rhythms he used in his symphonies - given that some of his climaxes seem to take hours, much in the manner of a train struggling up an incline, and that his near-contemporary Dvorak was in fact a train-spotter, most of the Radio 3 producers accepted it without question as well. Only when they had praised it at a production meeting did the perpetrator blow the gaff...

I suspect that sometimes this sort of thing doesn't get blown and gets repeated and propagated to the point where it becomes the new truth.

On the internet in the nineties there was an American guy who claimed to have suggested the green marker pen thing on the edge of CDs to absorb light propagating anomalously in the plastic of the disc, to improve the sound. He swore blind that it was a wind-up and he was most upset that the monster he'd created had sprouted legs of its own and founded a new religion. A juggernaut he couldn't stop.

The green pen thing would have been a great wind-up if that's what it was. And was he really the real originator? The whole field is covered in so much crap (as fields often are) that we'll never know.

David

[Dave Moll]

Thanks Ted. That's the one!

[SiriusHardware]

Elektor magazine was quite prolific in this way, there were exquisitely technically correct projects with some sort of logical flaw, like the solar powered torch which worked, but only if there was a light source to power it: The car lock de-icer which was powered from the lighter socket... inside the car, and the 'zero noise amp' which had its output shorted to ground.

There were also spoof technical articles or snippets, like the one about the forthcoming new logic IC package containing 'Maybe' gates... when the logic state on the input of one of the gates changed, the state of the output might or might not change. It was expected, the article said, to find uses in random value generation for things like games.

That last one was so good I remember thinking that it ought to be true.

[Radio Wrangler]

There was an article printed in Radcom some years ago about a 'toroidal antenna' It was published in an April edition, and the author was a prof I'd not come across before.

The folk at the ARRL were mystified by it and wondered about referring to it in QST. They asked me if it was an April fool article.

I said I didn't know for sure, but I felt it had to be. A toroid of wire, even without a core, is a lousy structure for an antenna. Pass a current through it and the magnetic moments of all the segments of wire sum to zero in the far field. Not a popular characteristic of antennae. THis thing was a bare toroid of wire ending in a short whip described as a loading element. I reckoned that any radiated signal came from the whip and that the toroid acted as a base-loading coil for it.

The guys at Newington agreed and that was that.

It turned out it wasn't a spoof.

Pity, it would have been great if it had been.

Peter Dodd had become interested in them and made a number of them full size and as models. He brought them along to a doo I was at, and presented them in G3RJV's church as a lecture theatre. I measured them and whether it was radiation resistance or wire resistance that got transformed, they made a reasonable approximation to 50 Ohms on the intended frequency. Length of whip had a big effect.

So I dropped myself right in the mire by thinking it was a spoof.

In my defence, I think it was a spoof, just a case where the author wasn't aware!

Editors ought to be very careful just what goes in an April edition.

David

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

Elektor magazine was quite prolific in this way, there were exquisitely technically correct projects with some sort of logical flaw, like the solar powered torch which worked, but only if there was a light source to power it: The car lock de-icer which was powered from the lighter socket... inside the car, and the 'zero noise amp' which had its output shorted to ground.

There were also spoof technical articles or snippets, like the one about the forthcoming new logic IC package containing 'Maybe' gates... when the logic state on the input of one of the gates changed, the state of the output might or might not change. It was expected, the article said, to find uses in random value generation for things like games.

That last one was so good I remember thinking that it ought to be true.

Not forgetting the "one-shot" and the "fuse destroyer", which appeared in Summer Circuits one year - the skull and crossbones were a clue...

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

The whole field is covered in so much crap (as fields often are) that we'll never know.

Too true. I once had the task of "doing the bones" for a self-confessed remastering engineer who was a legend in his own mind. As a substitute for competence he latched onto every trend going, green pens included. The number of "prepared" blanks he required me to use was beyond sense. And if I ran out and sent a master to the pressing plant on a standard blank he never noticed.

[Station X]

I remember data sheets for Write Only Memory and a self powered IC which was a miniature nuclear power station.