call boxes for what's hot in SW DC

As part of the Art on Call project, the Southwest neighborhood of Washington, DC is refurbishing about 40 police and fire call boxes still existing in the neighborhood. The Dupont Circle and Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhoods of DC have completed similar projects, while the Foxhall neighborhood is moving forward. In Southwest, the Earth Conservation Corps, an organization that has made important contributions to community life in the Southwest, recently started repainting Southwest call boxes. Refurbished call boxes could help to signal Southwest’s long history and vital present.

Call boxes installed in Boston in 1852 formed part of the world’s first fire-alarm telegraph system. Each call box had a crank and a bell. Turning the crank signaled a fire alarm by sending via telegraph the fire district number and the call box number (within that district) to a central operator. The central operator responded to the alarm by ringing via telegraph large fire bells located atop churches, schools, and fire engine houses. The central operator also rung via telegraph the small call-box bells.

The central operator’s telegraph signals specified the number of rings that both the large fire bells and small call-box bells periodically made. The number of rings of the large fire bells indicated the fire district from which the alarm originated. The number of rings of the small call-box bells indicated the call-box location within that fire district. Thus when a fireman heard the large fire bells ring, he would count the number of rings to learn in which fire district the alarm occurred. He would run to a fire-alarm call box and count the number of rings periodically made on that smaller bell to learn the alarm location within that fire district. Fire trucks throughout the city were thus directed quickly and simultaneously to the specific location of the the fire alarm.[1]

Washington, DC, installed a fire alarm telegraph system in 1864. The system initially had twenty-five call boxes. By 1881 the system had expanded to eighty call boxes and incorporated about 200 miles of telegraph wires. In 1926, Washington, DC had 1500 call boxes. The call box system remained in operation until 1976, when DC established emergency 911 telephone service.[2]

call box in Southwest DC

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose headquarters is located in Southwest, has played an important role in the development of public safety communications. The FCC worked with AT&T to define 911 service in 1968. In 2000, the FCC established rules and timetables for mobile telephone operators to provide emergency 911 service with location identification (enhanced 911). In 2005, the FCC required a class of Internet telephony (VoIP) providers to implement 911 service. Public safety requirements are currently a major issue in the FCC’s 700 MHz band plan and license assignments.

Five historic call boxes remain within three blocks of the FCC. Three are fire alarm call boxes, and two are police call boxes. The style of the call boxes indicates that they were installed in the 1930s.[3] These call boxes remain to be refurbished under Southwest’s Art on Call effort.

View historic call boxes near the FCC in a larger map

I suggest that some call boxes be refurbished to include communication technology directing call-box users to socially identified “hot” sites. A screen in the call box might present a choice among a small number of sites. When the call box user selected a site, the call box would provide information about the site and directions to it. Like the historic call boxes, the refurbished call boxes would be connected to a network, but now the network would be the Internet. The basic idea would be to update continually the list of hot sites based on choices at the call boxes and other indications of current hot sites or events. With respect to the later, one could set up a website where visitors could vote for events to be downloaded into the call boxes. Unlike social rating features on Internet services such as YouTube, Digg, and many others, this system would publicly communicate relevant information about socially defined “hot” sites in a real-world neighborhood.

Perhaps volunteers from the FCC could work with other volunteers to implement a great new communication service in call boxes in the Southwest neighborhood around the FCC. Count me in for such a project.

For more information about the Southwest Call Box project, contact the Southwest Call Box Committee at 202 479-2750.

Update: Lida Churchville, who works on the Southwest Call Box project, told me of another police call box that I hadn’t noticed. I’ve updated the text and the map above to include this additional call box.

Update 2:  Here’s a video of DC Metropolitan Police Department Historian Sgt. Nicholas Breul talking about police call box history.  See also historical data on police and fire alarm networks.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] William F. Channing first described a fire alarm telegraph system in 1845. Moses G. Farmer, “one of the ablest and most ingenious telegraphic engineers in the country,” implemented Channing’s system in Boston in 1852. See Channing, William F., The American Fire-Alarm Telegraph, A Lecture Delivered Before the Smithsonian Institution, March, 1855 (Boston, Redding & Company, 1855) p. 10. The above description of operation of the Boston system is based on id.

[2] On the establishment of the DC fire-alarm telegraph system, see District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) History, p. 2. The date given, July 1, 1884, clearly is a mistake; it was July 1, 1864. For information about the three engine companies started in that year, see DCFD Company History. The information about the system in 1881 is from the Annual Report of the Fire Commissioners, as reported in the Washington Post, Sept. 13, 1881, p. 3. Subsequent information is from the Paul K. Williams (DC Heritage Tourism Coalition), History of District of Columbia Fire and Police Call Boxes.

[3] See Williams, History of District of Columbia Fire and Police Call Boxes.

poethic bog-justifying

My Blog, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them they need not fear,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

no music but in things

Radiohead’s offering of its new music has two parts. One part, a pay-what-you-will digital download, has the blogsphere abuzz. The second, less noted, part of Radiohead’s offering is, for £40, a discbox:

This consists of the new album, In Rainbows, on CD and on 2 x 12 inch heavyweight vinyl records. A second, enhanced CD contains more new songs, along with digital photographs and artwork. The discbox also includes artwork and lyric booklets.
All are encased in a hardback book and slipcase.

Radiohead’s discbox illustrates different physical instantiations of music. The availability of digital downloads does not necessarily imply that sellers of music must sell only one standard bitstream. Music fans will embed digital downloads into a wide variety of devices customized in a huge number of ways. Music makers can create additional value by supporting a wide range of representations and uses of their music.

Book publishers have long recognized the importance of different physical presentations of the same book. One important issue was the size of the book. A large size (a quarto or octavo) indicated a weighty, luxury work. A small size that could fit into a pocket or purse (duodecimo) was meant to be taken as light reading.

Book bindings contributed significantly to the value of books. In late-eighteenth century England, books were typically sold unbound. Readers chose whether and how to augment, bind, and personalize the book. Book-binding and related crafts were an important business.

Book purchasers had many choices for binding their books. At the top end, books were bound in goat skin (Morocco binding). Bibliographic information might be inscribed in gilt on the front cover and the spin of the book, the page edges might be cleanly cut and painted with an ornate design, and marbled end-pages might be added. In addition, an elaborately designed bookplate (ex-libris) often was pasted inside the cover of expensively bound books. Other bindings types included (ordered by decreasing cost) full-calf, half-calf, sheep, cloth, cardboard, and paper.

Publishers of cheap novels (“dime novels”) in the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century used book size, binding style, and illustrations to market the same text to different customer groups. One strategy was to print a series of small-total-page, paperback novels that could be mailed under the relatively cheap rate for periodicals. Another strategy was to use colored covers to make cheap paperbacks stand out on the newsstands where they were sold.  In the second half of the nineteenth century, many dime novels were published multiple times:

Over the years, the stories were not changed at all — they did not become more sensational, or more violent, or less puritanical over the years, as the standard narrative of the dime novel genre would have it. What did change was the format in which they were published, how much they cost, and where they were purchased. [1]

Inability to assert successfully exclusive publication rights increases the important of product design and distribution. In 1892, when Houghton, Mifflin & Company’s copyright on The Scarlet Letter expired, Houghton, Mifflin increased the number of editions of The Scarlet Letter to at least eight. A low-cost edition was the paper-bound “Salem Edition,” costing 15 cents. At the luxury end of the offerings was a $7.50 large-paper, vellum-bound ‘”Riverside Edition” illustrated with photogravures of specially made drawings.[2] With the text of The Scarlet Letter in the public domain, publishers created value through book design and distribution.

Unimaginative marketing is more of a threat to the music business than is illegal music sharing.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] Erickson, Paul (1999) “Help or Hindrance? The History of the Book and Electronic Media,” pp. 2-3.

[2] Winship, Michael (2001) “Hawthorne and the ‘Scribbling Women’: Publishing the Scarlet Letter in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Studies in American Fiction, v. 29, pp. 8-9.