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<html> <head><script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/bundle-playback.js?v=HxkREWBo" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/wombat.js?v=txqj7nKC" charset="utf-8"></script> <script>window.RufflePlayer=window.RufflePlayer||{};window.RufflePlayer.config={"autoplay":"on","unmuteOverlay":"hidden"};</script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/ruffle/ruffle.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> __wm.init("https://web.archive.org/web"); __wm.wombat("http://www.acmi.net.au:80/AIC/CASELLI_BIO.html","20080429224928","https://web.archive.org/","web","/_static/", "1209509368"); </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/banner-styles.css?v=S1zqJCYt" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/iconochive.css?v=3PDvdIFv" />  <title>Adventures in CyberSound: Caselli, Giovanni</title>  <meta name="beginpackage" content="Adventures in CyberSound: A Future for Radio?, A Radio for the Future?"> <meta name="Author" content="Russell Naughton"> <meta name="keywords" content="radio, radio with pictures, television, telegraphy, telephony, facsimile, fax, cinema, film, history, historic, historical, vintage, antique, electric, electricity, magnetic, magnetism, Galvani, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, Maxwell, Morse, Hertz, Bell, Edison, Marconi, Armstrong, Fleming, De Forest, Sarnoff, coherer, diode, triode, audion, crystal set, xtal set, crystal radio, superhetrodyne, neutrodyne, regeneration, regenerative, AM, FM, Bain, Bakewell, Belin, Caselli, Nipkow, Baird, Jenkins, Rosing, Zworykin, receiver, transmitter, televisor, radiovisor, iconoscope, orthicon, Plateau, Horner, Marey, Muybridge, Reynaud, Armat, Dickson, Lumiere, Acres, Paul, Pathe, camera obscura, thaumatrope, phenikistoscope, praxinoscope, zoetrope, zoopraxiscope, kinetoscope, kinetograph, kinetophone, mutoscope, cinematographe, McLuhan, Landow, Derrida, Bush, Gilder, Postman, Negroponte"> <meta name="Description" content="An on-line, academic work that will research the history of radio and the related media services of telegraphy, telephony, facsimile, television, photography and cinema. The project will also develop an on-line resource centre based on the above research. The project will subsequently develop the document A Future for Radio? and a prototype interactive on-line broadcast radio service, A Radio for the Future?"> <meta name="endpackage" content="Adventures in CyberSound: A Future for Radio?, A Radio for the Future?">  </head> <body bgcolor="FFFFFF" text="000000" link="DARKBLUE" vlink="DARKGREEN"> <center> <table border="0" width="600"><tr><td width="600"> <h2>A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D</h2> Abbe Giovanni Caselli : 1815 - 1891 <hr> The idea of transmitting pictures electrically is almost as old as the electric telegraph itself. In 1865, (possibly as early as 1862) an Italian physicist Abbé Caselli invented the pantelegraph (Pantèlègraphe) for transmitting pictures. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.cnam.fr/museum/video/95/95137/95137a/95137a05.qt">Pantèlègraphe de Caselli</a> - Quicktime Movie - (3.280 Kb) Source: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.cnam.fr/museum/a/index.html">http://www.cnam.fr/museum/a/index.html</a> <hr> However, it was with the discovery of radio waves that the transmission of pictures took a major step forward and nowadays it is an important tool for press news reporting . <center> <img src="/web/20080429224928im_/http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/caselli_tx_norma.gif" alt="Picture transmitted in the 1920s by electric telegraph" align="bottom"> Picture transmitted in the 1920s by electric telegraph </center> In spite of the fact that different techniques were devised early on, it was only in 1927 that the first commercially practical equipment went into operation. In 1929, Stockholm telegraph station acquired its first phototelegraph and the capability of transmitting pictures by telegraph. During the Second World War, radio links were developed and soon pictures could be sent all over the world. Source: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.telemuseum.se/musinfo/tv/stillbild.eng.html">http://www.telemuseum.se/musinfo/tv/stillbild.eng.html</a> <hr> In 1865 Italian physics professor Giovanni Caselli established the first commercial fax system, which linked Paris and several other French cities, using a device called a Pantèlègraphe which was a modification of Alexander Bain's original idea. He transmited nearly 5,000 faxes in the first year. Made of cast iron and standing more than 2m high, this primitive but effective machine worked as follows. The sender wrote a message on a sheet of tin in non-conducting ink. The sheet was then fixed to a curved metal plate and scanned by a needle, three lines to the millimetre. The signals were carried by telegraph to the marked out the message in Prussian blue ink, the colour produced by a chemical reaction, as the paper was soaked in potassium ferro-cyanide. To ensure that both needles scanned at exactly the same rate, two extremely accurate clocks were used to trigger a pendulum which, in turn, was linked to gears and pulleys that controlled the needles. Source: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.cequel.co.uk/acclarke/shc.html">http://www.cequel.co.uk/acclarke/shc.html</a> <hr> Caselli's Pantelegraph by Julien Feydy Musee des arts et metiers La Revue, June 1995, n 11, p.50-57. Abstract Both Christophe in his The Fenouillard Family, written in 1893, and Jules Verne in his recently discovered manuscript Paris in the 20th Century dating from 1863, mention a process enabling the long-distance transmission of drawings, ideograms or facsimiles: the Caselli pantelegraph. Its inventor, Giovanni Caselli, born in Siena in 1815, was the incumbent of an ecclesiastical living. While teaching physics at the University of Florence, he devoted his research to making progress in the telegraphic transmission of images, an issue which had been proving a stumbling block for several researchers for quite a few years, including the Britons Bain and Bakewell, due to a failure to achieve a perfect synchronization between transmitting and receiving devices. In 1856, the results were conclusive enough for the Grand Duke of Tuscany to take an interest in Caselli's invention and, the following year, Caselli went to Paris where he was to be given decisive help by the famous inventor and mechanical engineer Paul Gustave Froment, to whom he had been recommended by Foucault, who had already entrusted Caselli with the task of making his pendulum. Once completed, the final device met with unequivocal enthusiasm from the Parisian scientific world and a Pantelegraph Society was created to prepare its exploitation. What is more, the Emperor Napoleon III himself, passionately interested in mechanics and modern inventions, visited Froment's workshops on May 10th 1860 to watch a demonstration of the device. The enthusiastic Emperor gave Caselli access to the lines he needed in order to continue his experiments in Paris, from the Froment workshops to the Observatory. Then, in November of the same year, a telegraphic line was also allocated to Caselli between Paris and Amiens to enable a real inter-city experiment, which was apparently a total success. Caselli had in fact managed to eliminate the last remaining fault in his machine by making the synchronization timers independent of the current relayed by the telegraphic line itself, which was too sensitive to atmospheric disturbances. The French press was brimming with laudatory articles on the pantelegraph, while the top brass from high society and the scientific and administrative worlds hurried along to Froment's workshops to find out about the new process. In September 1861, King Victor-Emmanuel invited Caselli and his machines to a series of triumphant demonstrations at the Florence Exhibition. Finally, in 1863, the French Legislature and Council of State adopted texts authorizing the official exploitation of an initial line between Paris and Marseille, while across the Channel, Caselli obtained authorization for the experimental use of a line between London and Liverpool over a four-month period. However, the Pantelegraph Society did not prove equal to the market which was apparently opening up and, failing to undertake any energetic promotion of the device, was content to wait passively for its capital to be remunerated via the flood of orders which were supposed to pour in from all over the world. In Italy, after an initially euphoric reception, the sluggishness of the administration and haughtiness of ministers led Caselli to give up any further development of his invention. In France, he clashed with the Telegraphs administration which, fearing competition with its ordinary telegraphic network, refused to lower the tariff for handwritten dispatches which were nevertheless prohibitive and even advised taxing such dispatches at a higher rate than ordinary ones. When the pantelegraph appeared, France was in fact in the process of setting up a complete telegraphic network, using the Hughes, Morse and then Baudot systems, replacing the former Chappe optical telegraph, which had been experimented since 1792. More than just a technical step forward, a qualitative transformation in the use of the telegraph system was underway. What had until then been an instrument of the governing powers and the stock exchange, was about to establish itself as a relatively commonplace means of communication, conveying a variety of urgent yet trivial pieces of news such as births, deaths, marriages or tourist hotel reservations. Because it had previously been limited to two powerful forces requiring extreme rapidity and perfect secrecy, the State and Finance, the Chappe telegraph had quickly become a myth within French society. What is more, popular literature glorified the telegraph's somewhat worrying and imperial vocation in this respect as, for example, in Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, or in the chronicles of the would-be-poet Barthelemy. The myth of instantantaneousness at the exclusive service of the government or the banking sector was about to become outdated at the very time when Caselli thought he was reaching his goal. Designed to transmit images, the pantelegraph, like today's fax, was perfectly able to transmit written texts correctly. However, whether conscious or not, there was a general refusal to allow it any other other role than the transmission of a banking signature or a trademark, since this was the only system capable of doing so, and the administration went on to ensure it was gently stifled out of existence. Any innovation strategy contains a great many traps, not the least of which is indeed to become fascinated to the extent of being hemmed in by the new technology contained within a given invention and which distinguishes it from all other existing processes, to the ultimate detriment of its flexibility of use and any real possibilities of development. In this respect, the pantelegraph adventure was all the more remarkable given that a tremendous short-cut was almost taken in the history of telecommunications at the time when its destiny was at stake in Paris. Indeed, in 1863, two top civil servants from the Chinese Empire requested a demonstration at the Froment workshops and could not hide their amazement and admiration in the face of an invention which, in one swoop, solved the tricky problem of the telegraphic transmission of ideograms. In 1884, fairly far-reaching negotiations appear to have taken place between China and Italy with the aim of carrying out experiments on the Caselli pantelegraph in Peking, but these were not followed up. However, this particular use of thetelegraph, anticipated very early on by Caselli, was taken up much later by the Japanese, to whom we owe the massive diffusion of the fax. Today, pantelegraphs lie dormant in a few rare museums. Those kept at the Musee National des Techniques were given another chance to prove their reliability in 1961, between Paris and Marseille, during the commemoration of the first tests, and in 1982, at the Postal Museum in Riquewihr, where they operated faultlessly, six hours a day, for several months." Source: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.cnam.fr/museum/Revue/Revue11/Revue11-7VA.html">http://www.cnam.fr/museum/Revue/Revue11/Revue11-7VA.html</a> and as posted on The Dead Media Project by Bruce Sterling <hr> Giovanni Caselli was born in Siena in 1815; he studied literature and science. From 1841 to 1849 he lived in Modena as tutor of the sons of Marquis of San Vitale, but as he took part in the riots for the annexation of the Duchy of Modena to Piedmont, he was expelled from the Duchy. He spent all his money saved during his Modenese period in experiments which eventually led to his Pantelegraph. At the end of the first half of last century in the field of electrochemical telegraphs, Caselli's Pantelegraph solved a problem faced by the Englishmen Alexander Bain and Frederick Bakewell In 1846 Bain was able to electro-chemically reproduce conventional graphic signs using paper soaked in potassium ferrocyanide. Bain's idea was taken up and even surpassed by Bakewell, who was able to send written script. Nonetheless both Bain and Bakewell's systems were unsuitable: reception obtained with Bakewell's method was poor, lacking synchronism between transmitter and receiver. Caselli overtook both of them with his Pantelegraph or Universal Telegraph. Caselli's experiments began in 1855, and ended in Paris, where he met one of his most enthusiastic admirers, Napoleon the 3rd who put at his disposal the whole french network. His first invention was registered in 1861. In 1865 a Pantelegraph service began between Paris and Lyon, but ended in 1870 following the defeat of Sudan. During this time Napoleon granted Caselli French citizenship to allow him acceed to the rank of general inspector and co-ordinator of the the French telegraph service and awarded him the Legion of Honor. A Pantelegraph system was also planned between London and Liverpool in order to build up a public service but the program was withheld because of the economic crisis which in 1864 struck both England and specifically Caselli's financiers. Even Russia was interested in his Pantelegraph, but instead of creating a public service, it was used to send messages between the two imperial residences of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Some of Caselli's other inventions were: an electrical marine torpedo which came back to the launching point in the event of missing the mark, an hydraulic press and an instrument that measured the speed of the locomotives. Giovanni Caselli died in Florence in 1891. Source: Abbreviated from the English version of the site <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/http://www.alpcom.it/hamradio/storeng.html">http://www.alpcom.it/hamradio/storeng.html</a> <hr> Back to the <a href="CASELLI_BIO.html">Top</a> | <a href="phd8150.html">Scientists and Engineers A - F</a> | <a href="phd4800.html">Quit</a> | eMail: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080429224928/mailto:russell.naughton@eng.monash.edu.au">Dr Russell Naughton</a> </td></tr></table> </body> </html>