Science and Technology | Flashback : Dallas

August 13, 2024

Telesign: Flashing News to Downtown Dallas — 1951

All the news that fits… on a moving sign

by Paula Bosse

Well, this is pretty interesting.

Once upon a time, downtown Dallas had one of those moving “tickertape” electronic news message signs. It debuted on the exterior of the First National Bank (and part of an adjacent building) at Main and Akard on December 11, 1951. It was Dallas’ version of the famous New York Times news-ticker-bulletin sign (“the Zipper”) in Times Square. The sign was comprised of 3,136 light bulbs; the crawling, flashing letters were 30 inches high, and the sign stretched 190 feet, with the moving message bending around the bank building. The “hot news” could be really “hot” — like only minutes old, unlike the NYT sign, which could take hours to get a constantly repeating message up and running. The sign flashed the news to downtown passersby from 7:30 AM until 10:30 PM.

This “traveling-message” sign was the creation of Irving Naxon, of the Naxon Telesign Corporation of Chicago. (Naxon, a prolific inventor, is perhaps best known as the man who introduced the Crock Pot slow cooker to the world.) See the 1929 patent application for his “traveling-message sign” here.

How did it work? Briefly, United Press wire copy received in the WFAA newsroom was punched onto a paper ribbon and then fed into a transmitter. Theoretically, a hot-off-the-wire newsflash could be racing across the Main Street sign in the amount of time it would take to type the message — seconds. (Read more about it the article at the bottom of this post.)

There is silent footage from December 1951 of the Telesign in action, with shots of inventor Irving Naxon demonstrating how his system works: see the WBAP-TV footage on the Portal to Texas History website here. (The accompanying news script is here.)

I don’t know how long this sign was operational, but I have a feeling it wasn’t very long — but at least through 1953. Imagine how frequently those 3,000 light bulbs burned out and had to be replaced! I had never heard of this sign — or seen photos of it — so this was a very interesting little discovery.

Dallas magazine, Dec. 1951

A 1953 ad for Federal Signs:

Dallas magazine, Jan. 1953

A couple of screenshots of the sign in action from a Channel 5 news clip (Dec. 12, 1951, Portal to Texas History). The first shows men in hats checking out the new sign as darkness falls:

And here’s what they were looking at:

UNT Libraries Special Collections

How it worked (click for larger image):

Dallas magazine, Dec. 1951

Excerpts from a couple of trade magazine articles:

The First National Bank in Dallas, Dallas, Texas has recently installed this telesign containing 3,136 individually controlled bulbs which form letters corresponding to those punched on tape as it is fed through a cigar-box size transmitter. Following formal dedication ceremonies, the sign flashed its first message: “UNCENSORED NEWS IS THE BASIS OF FREEDOM.”

The Telesign is operated continuously from 7:30 A.M. to 10:30 P.M., bringing to the people of Dallas, as a public service, news bulletins highlighting the latest developments in the big stories of the day, local, national and international. (Bankers Monthly, Feb. 1952)

Bank Installs Telesign: The first fast-moving line of words — “UNCENSORED NEWS IS THE BASIS OF FREEDOM: — chasing each other across First National Bank of Dallas’ new sign, echoed the dedicatory statement of President Ben H. Wooten. The telesign is operated as a community service to give downtown crowds a constant flow of news reports. Second in length only to that of the New York Times, it is believed to be the first ever installed by a bank. (Trusts and Estates, March 1953)

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Sources & Notes

Top photo is from Bankers Monthly, Feb. 1952.

More about this can be found in the following article from the Dallas Morning News archives: “Bank Unveils Its New Telesign, Latest Word in News-Flashing” (DMN, Dec. 12, 1951).

In a related vein — as far as giant outdoor news signs downtown — check out the 2016 Flashback Dallas post “How Dallas Used to Get Election Returns.”

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July 2, 2019

Viewing the 1878 Solar Eclipse in North Texas

Waiting…

by Paula Bosse

Today there will be a solar eclipse, best viewed in Chile and Argentina. On July 29, 1878, there was also a solar eclipse — that one was fully visible in the United States, and the best place to observe it in Texas was Fort Worth. As seen in the photo above, interest in the event was high. A party of academics from Harvard and other institutions set up on the property of S. W. Lomax of Fort Worth. They were joined by Alfred Freeman, a photographer from Dallas who was a successful portrait photographer and who also sold his photographs of special events (such as this one of a 4th of July parade and this one of a Mardi Gras parade in Dallas) — he no doubt sold reproductions of his eclipse photos taken on July 29th. (He is not identified in this photo, but he may the second man from the right. Freeman is a pretty interesting person, and I hope to write about him soon.)

Here are a few magnified details.

Read several lengthy articles on the preparation for the viewing and the description of the eclipse itself in these contemporary articles (they may not be easily viewable on mobile devices):

“The Sun in Eclipse: How It Will Be Observed Here by Astronomers” (Fort Worth Daily Democrat, July 21, 1878)
“The Total Eclipse, A Grand Heavenly Phenomenon, A Most Brilliant Success, Scientifically and Otherwise” (Fort Worth Daily Democrat, July 30, 1878)
“The Late Solar Eclipse, History of the Observations at Ft. Worth” (Galveston Daily News, Aug. 1, 1878)

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo is titled “Total Solar Eclipse in Fort Worth (1878),” from the collection of Tarrant County College Northeast and can be found on the Portal to Texas History, here.

Newspapers linked above are also via the fabulous Portal to Texas History.

2 Comments

December 20, 2017

The Texas Instruments Semiconductor Crystal Christmas Tree

The semiconductor tree… (click to see a larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a Christmas tree made from models of semiconductor crystals. I can’t even begin to understand this, so I’ll hand it over to the “explanation” seen on the card in the photo and pretend to nod knowingly. (Click picture to see larger image; transcription is below.)

SEMICONDUCTOR CRYSTAL CHRISTMAS TREE

In a 12-step cycle, the crystalline atoms light in sequence, illustrating the many planes in which they are oriented in a semiconductor crystal.

This demonstrator applies to Germanium, Silicon – both of which TI uses in its semiconductor products – Diamond, and compound semiconductors such as Indium Antimonide, Gallium Arsenide, Silicon Carbide and Zinc Sulfide.

The central yellow and blue round atoms form a “unit cell,” or basic crystalline building block.

The white round and blue conical atoms represent alloying elements producing semiconductor action and occurring only once in a thousand crystal segments this size.

Green and red atoms would be of different elements in the case of a compound crystal, or the same element in the case of a simple crystal.

MAGNIFICATION – 500 MILLION TIMES LIFE SIZE

Model manufactured by: The Thermoelectric Materials Group, Central Research Laboratory

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INCORPORATED

So … yeah. Merry Christmas from the fine folks at TI’s Thermoelectric Materials Group!

***

Sources & Notes

This circa-1959 photo — titled “Semiconductor Christmas Tree” — is from the RG-06 Semiconductor Group, Texas Instruments records, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; more info on this photo can be found on the SMU site, here.

Speaking of germanium (…there’s a phrase I’ve never used before…), SMU also has another TI photo showing a close-up of “a germanium crystal being pulled (grown) out of a crucible of molten germanium material” here. In fact, SMU’s DeGolyer Library has a whole slew of material in their Texas Instruments records — browse through the collection here.

Semiconductors, single-crystal germanium, silicon, and transistors … the world owes Dallas’ Texas Instruments a huge “thank you” for their cannot-be-overstated contribution to the development of the technology that, dare I say, changed life on earth.

AP wire story, May 10, 1954 (click for larger image)

One of the inventors of “single-crystal germanium” was Dr. Gordon K. Teal (1907-2003), a Dallas native whom Texas Instruments snapped up from his previous employer, Bell Laboratories. Read more about Dr. Teal’s remarkable career in an Engineering and Technology History Wiki, here, and in a portrait (literal and figurative) from Baylor University (his alma mater), here.

More about the importance and applications of “single-crystal germanium” in the new Transistor Age can be found in an interview with Dr. Teal in the Dallas Morning News article “Mighty Transistor: Dr. Gordon Teal ‘Grows’ A Gadget” by Robert Miller (DMN, Feb. 8, 1953).

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July 14, 2016

The Jefferson Hotel and Its “Wireless Telegraph” Rooftop Tower — 1921

The view from Union Station… (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

I haven’t seen many photographs showing this striking view of Dallas along Houston Street. This is what visitors saw when they emerged from Union Station after having arrived in the city by train: in the distance, the John Deere Plow Co. Building on Elm, the Dallas Jail and Criminal Courts Building, the Dallas County Courthouse, the Texan Hotel, the Jefferson Hotel, and (mostly out of frame at the right) the very pretty Ferris Plaza.

This photo was taken as one of several coinciding with the formal opening of the Jefferson Hotel’s major new addition (the addition is the taller, lighter-colored half of the hotel) — it was published in the May 8, 1921 edition of The Dallas Morning News in a special Jefferson Hotel section of the paper. I guessed that the the date of the photo was later because of what looks like a radio broadcast tower on the roof. Commercial radio broadcasts were not available in Dallas until June of 1922 when WFAA went on the air (their rooftop towers looked like this). WRR — the municipal broadcasting station — was a little older, but in those early days it was used exclusively for police communication (they appear to have had an aerial on top of the City Hall by at least September of 1921, if not earlier). So what was that tower on the roof?

jefferson-hotel_UTA_tower

It took a while to find out what it was, but … turns out it was, in fact, an antenna. It was part of the “wireless telegraph” equipment owned by the Continental Radio Telegraph Co., which had a Western Union-like office in the hotel’s lobby (the company had to relocate their tower and office from the Southland Hotel, their home for a little over a year before moving to the Jefferson’s roof).

The Continental Radio Telegraph and Telephone Co. began in about 1919. It was one of the first companies in the Southwest to attempt to commercialize the nascent “wireless” technology which allowed the sending and receiving of messages via radio waves. The initial motivation for establishing this new-fangled business appears to have been the inability of those with interests in the remote Texas oilfields to communicate with their workers in areas not served by telephone and telegraph wires. The plan was to build radio towers in these areas to broadcast and receive messages. When a “radiogram” was received and transcribed, a “polite, intelligent boy” would be dispatched to deliver the message to its recipient — all for about the same price as sending a regular telegram. Not only did the company envision the ability to one day communicate with ships, trains, and airplanes that were in transit, they also hoped to develop “wireless telephone” communication.

The Continental Radio Telegraph Company was based in Dallas from at least January of 1920, but they were gone by the time the 1922 city directory was printed — gone just a few short months after planting that aerial on top of the Jefferson Hotel. They seem to have erected only four towers: in Dallas, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, and (possibly) Breckenridge. Then, as now, technology has a way of racing ahead of somewhat limited business plans.

But at least we have a nice photograph of their rooftop tower as proof that they existed.

(Click articles to see larger images.)

Dallas Morning News, Feb. 27, 1920

April 29, 1921

“Wirless”! — DMN, July 31, 1921

Here’s a shot from the same location a few years later; the tower has been replaced by the huge Dr Pepper sign which became something of a city landmark, and the Hotel Lawrence has popped up and is open for business next door. (More on this sign can be found in the Flashback Dallas post “Neon Refreshment: The Giant Dr Pepper Sign.”)

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo is from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, UTA Libraries; more information is here. When the picture ran in the May 8, 1921 edition of The Dallas Morning News, the credit line read “Photo by Raymond.”

Photo with the Dr Pepper sign was purchased at an antique mall/flea market and was uploaded to Tumblr, here.

The Jefferson Hotel — which opened in October, 1917 — was demolished in 1975.

All images larger when clicked.

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March 12, 2016

Photo-Pac: The First Disposable Camera — 1948

A. D. Weir and his invention, 1949

by Paula Bosse

Alfred D. Weir (1909-1996) was the son of A. F. Weir, the successful retail furniture merchant who founded Weir Furniture in 1922. The younger Weir graduated from SMU in 1933 with a degree in mechanical engineering and started his career, fresh out of college, at Dallas’ Ford assembly plant. During World War II, he was the chief industrial engineer at North American Aviation and was later employed by Fairchild Engine and Aircraft, Ford’s aircraft division in Kansas City, Texas Instruments, and Bell Helicopter.

After the war and before his time in Kansas City, Weir took time out from his engineering career to try his hand as an entrepreneur: he invented, patented, and manufactured the Photo-Pac, a single-use camera made of inexpensive fiber board and pre-loaded with 35mm film (loaded by blind employees in total darkness). The user would buy one of these cameras at a drug store, department store, or gas station for $1.29, take eight photographs, and then write his or her name on the side of the camera and drop the whole thing — with the film still inside the camera — in a mail box. Photos would be processed in Dallas, and prints and negatives would be returned to the customer in a couple of days. The camera would not be returned.

San Bernardino County Sun, April 2, 1950

Arlington Heights (Illinois) Herald, Dec. 23, 1949

It appears to have made its debut at the 1948 State Fair of Texas at an introductory price of only 98¢ (click for larger image).

Billboard, Oct. 9, 1948

Manufacture and distribution of the camera began in earnest in May, 1949. And then … ads for the camera were everywhere! (The home-grown invention appeared in a hometown newspaper advertorial on May 1, here.) Weir and his small team managed to get the camera in retail locations all over the country. He was also worked hard to line up distributors. Ads such as this one were placed in several U.S. newspapers:

photo-pac_FWST_061649 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 16, 1949

It seems to have been very popular — both as a novelty impulse buy and as a useful product for people who either did not own cameras or who did not want to take their family cameras on trips. Here’s a typical ad (see text below):

FWST, Nov. 16, 1949 — from ad for Fort Worth’s Fair Department Store

The camera won a “prize gadget” award from Mechanix Illustrated (click to see very large image).

Mechanix Illustrated, Sept. 1949

By the summer of 1950, the number of exposures went from eight to twelve, and the price increased to $1.49. It seemed that the business was growing, but by the fall of 1950, Photo-Pac seems to have reached the end of the road. Court dockets showed a couple of lawsuits filed against the company. Newspaper ads showed stock of the cameras being deep-discounted to as low as 50¢ apiece. The next year, 1951, saw Weir returning to his engineering career — he accepted a position with Ford in Kansas City and apparently left his business dreams behind. It was a great idea, but, for whatever reason, it never fully caught on.

36 long years after A. D. Weir’s Dallas company folded, Fuji introduced their very popular disposable camera; Kodak followed with theirs in 1987. Those things were everywhere — everyone’s had one of them at one time or another. I bet A. D. Weir was miffed.

FWST, July 2, 1986

A. D. Weir, SMU Rotunda, 1930

Weir, SMU Rotunda, 1933

1953

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo is an inset from the Mechanix Illustrated “prize gadget” page, from the blog Modern Mechanix, here.

Weir’s patent can be found on Google here. To view Google Patent Image separately (and really big), click image below.

There seems to be some debate about whether Weir’s Photo-Pac was actually the first single-use disposable camera — if it isn’t strictly the first, it seems to have been the one that made the most headway into the American marketplace. A great article on the topic can be found on the Disposable America website here.

Wikipedia’s “disposable camera” page is here.

A. D. Weir’s father, Alfred Folsom (A. F.) Weir opened Weir Furniture at 2550 Elm Street in 1922; in 1934 the company was incorporated to include his wife and son. A. F. Weir sold the Dallas company to his brother Earl (who had owned furniture stores in Fort Worth and Arlington) in the 1940s — that business closed sometime between 1945 and 1948. In 1948, Earl’s son John Ray Weir opened Weir’s Furniture Village on Knox Street, a business still going strong today.

Most images are magically larger when clicked!

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February 10, 2015

University Park’s Monarch Butterfly Wrangler

Carl Anderson & friends (John Dominis, Time-Life Pictures/Getty Image)

by Paula Bosse

Carl Axel Anderson (1892-1983) was a mild-mannered internal revenue executive by day and a mild-mannered Monarch butterfly expert by night (and weekend … and probably every waking second). Anderson had been interested in insects and butterflies from an early age, and he studied entomology at the University of Minnesota and Columbia. When he was away from the office, he was raising, tagging, tracking, and, perhaps, training Monarch butterflies at his University Park home on Centenary Avenue, which writer Frank X. Tolbert dubbed “the Butterfly Ranch.” Even the neighborhood children — who called themselves The Centenary Monarchs — joined in and learned all about Monarchs from Anderson, their butterfly mentor.

Anderson’s primary interest was studying the migration patterns of the Monarch butterfly, and, conveniently, Dallas was on their pathway, twice a year, so he had a front-row seat. Not only did he observe them passing overhead, he also raised them from eggs laid on the underside of his milkweed plants, enjoyed them as caterpillars, and when they became butterflies, he “branded” their wings painlessly (see below) and released them into the wild, hoping to be able to track their migration from fellow butterfly spotters around the country. He wrote letters to newspapers around the country and mailed hundreds of postcards to groups and individuals, hoping to get his message out. His message, in part:

Monarch butterflies raised from the egg are being released. A number is placed on their wings before they are released. Members of the public are invited to join the observers on the magic carpet of these wings to see where it will take us. Invite your friends and associates to come along, too…. Examine the wings of the Monarch…for numbers or other marks. Allow the butterfly to go on its way after your observation. Please report any observation where marked wings are found….”

In 1950, big news was made when one of his butterflies — one with the number “9” on its wing — was reported to have been seen in California by a 10-year old boy named Ben Harris in Santa Monica, California. That must have been one of the happiest moments of Anderson’s life.

Every year during Monarch migration over Texas, Mr. Anderson was a reliable go-to story for the local media. Particularly fascinated by Anderson and his “butterfly ranch” was Dallas Morning News writer Frank X Tolbert, who wrote about him numerous times. A very early profile by Tolbert rhapsodized about Anderson’s “pet” butterfly Pete which set the tone for all his very sweet subsequent articles about Anderson that appeared over the years. (Next time you’re wandering around in the Dallas News archives, check out Tolbert’s story “An Affectionate Fellow Was Pete the Butterfly” published on May 16, 1948 — but if you like happy endings, beware of the last two paragraphs of the story: personally, I’d advise readers to stop reading when Pete sets off on his journey.)

Anderson was the subject of newspaper and magazine articles all over the country, but the high point was, undoubtedly, his appearance in the pages of Life magazine in 1954, accompanied by the striking photo of him with several of his butterfly pals resting on his face.

The caption for this photo reads: “Mottled with Monarchs, butterfly breeder Carl Anderson stares serenely ahead as the domesticated insects swarm all over his face.” (That is NOT a “swarm,” Life!)

The two-page photo spread was titled “Monarch Man: Texan Breeds Bushels of Them To Help Map Butterfly Migration.”

Each spring Mr. Anderson raises hundreds of Monarchs in cages. If released, they flutter about him, looking for a sip of sugar water. When the Monarchs mature, he brands them and turns them out, alerting friends across the U.S. to watch for them. One of Anderson’s butterflies turned up 1,200 miles away. But instead of clarifying the northward migration it added another enigma by flying cross-country and winding up almost directly west of Dallas. (Life, May 24, 1954)

monarch_life_052454-b

monarch_life_052454-c

Anderson died at the age of 91, having spent the bulk of his long life engrossed in the study of his beloved Monarch butterflies. This excerpt from a 1955 interview shows a glimpse of the wonder and enthusiasm that kept him fascinated by the butterflies his entire life:

“Just at dusk on Oct. 26, the wind shifted to the north with a velocity of 15 MPH. It brought in a huge cloud of Monarchs riding ahead of the cool front. The cloud changed into the shape of a tremendous, brown, moving carpet of unusual surging design. A signal from some leader or leaders in the great flight designated a grove of our hackberry trees as the resting place for the night. Down came the flying carpet of thousands of butterflies. And in a few minutes every twig was bent by the weight of Monarchs. They took off in small groups the next morning, leaving our Dallas hackberries bare of leaves.” (DMN, May 3, 1955)

Thanks, Carl. I wish I’d known you.

Below, a short clip from Oct. 1973 featuring an interview with Carl Anderson by Arch Campbell of Channel 8 News (Campbell mistakenly refers to the park as being Tenison Park — it is Lake Cliff Park).

***

Sources & Notes

Color photo of Carl Anderson by John Dominis (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image). It is from the same session that produced the slightly different black and white image featured in Life magazine.

The profile of Anderson (which includes the text and photos reproduced above) appeared in the May 24, 1954 issue of Life; it can be accessed here.

The Channel 8 film clip is from the WFAA Collection, G. William Jones Film & Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, SMU; the direct YouTube link is here.

Read another profile of Anderson from the Bakersfield Californian, “Lepidopterist Traces Branded Butterflies” (July 11, 1949), here.

A bunch of Monarch butterfly sources:

“The Monarch Butterfly’s Annual Cycle” from the Monarch Butterfly Fund, is here.
“The Monarch Butterfly Journey North News,” a regularly updated blog on the current (overwintering/leading-up-to-Spring 2105) migration, is here.
A regularly updated map of Monarch sightings (currently at Winter 2015, showing Monarchs warming up in the bullpen along the Texas coast) is here.
An animated map of 2014’s Spring migration is here. UPDATE: An animated map of the Fall/Winter 2015 migration is here.
“Monarch Butterflies Could Gain Endangered Species Protection,” from the Scientific American blog, is here. (“Populations of the iconic and beloved Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) have dropped an astonishing 96.5 percent over the past few decades, from an estimated 1 billion in the mid-1990s to just 35 million in early 2014.”)
Information on the Monarch butterfly conservation program — and some beautiful photographs — can be found on the World Wildlife Fund site, here.

Keep your eyes peeled — they’ll be on their way soon

4 Comments

January 6, 2015

Earthquake! — 1925

earthquake_dmn_0731_25

by Paula Bosse

I think, perhaps, the reporter was incorrect on the earthquake of July 30, 1925 being the “first in history” to hit the Texas Panhandle, but it makes a great Page One headline.

earthquake_dmn_073125-a

earthquake_dmn_073125-b

Okay, so it’s not Dallas (…but only because I couldn’t find any historic articles about earthquakes in Dallas!), but it seems applicable, as today I experienced my first-ever earthquake — and it was in Dallas! Actually, the official tally for the day so far is four. FOUR! Eight. EIGHT! (Actually, we’re all losing count at this point.)

A 1983 article in The Dallas Morning News (“Quake Never Struck City, but SMU Prof Studies Them Anyway,” by Jane Wolfe, July 10, 1983) reported on earthquake-study being done at SMU. The very idea of this was amusing back then, because anyone who grew up here knows (and has boasted) “there are no earthquakes in Dallas.” My, how things change.

***

Sources & Notes

Top headline and snippet of first article from The Dallas Morning News, July 31, 1925. The full report of broken crockery from around the Panhandle and Oklahoma can be read in a PDF, here.

An interesting Handbook of Texas article, “Notable Earthquakes Shake Texas on Occasion,” can be read here.

In case you’re preparing for a Jeopardy try-out, here are a couple of handy factoids on historic seismic activity in the Lone Star State (from another Handbook of Texas entry, “Earthquakes”): “The first known earthquake in Texas occurred in Seguin and New Braunfels on February 13, 1847. The largest earthquake in Texas occurred on August 16, 1931, near Valentine in Jeff Davis County; it measured about 6.0 on the Richter Scale.” And earthquakes never happen in Dallas. And it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.

3 Comments

February 25, 2014

A Robot Visits the Texas Centennial — 1936

by Paula Bosse

This “mechanical man, built by human hands” was quite the attraction at the 1936 Texas Centennial.

Four-minute lectures by a mechanical man are a feature of the exhibit by the U.S. department of labor at the Texas Centennial Exposition. The robot constructed in a Pittsburgh factory, has a ‘built-in’ speech on men and machines with which to entertain his audiences.

***

Lower image from Popular Mechanics (Sept. 1936).

Category: Science and Technology

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