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William Jennings Bryan was rarely at a loss for words. His impassioned oratory spellbound congressmen during his two terms in the U.S. House and thrilled thousands of voters during the presidential campaigns of 1896 and1900. But during his third run for the White House, 100 years ago, Bryan had trouble speaking in the intimacy of his own home.

“Mr. Bryan seemed a little nervous when he first started, much more so, he said, than he ever felt in facing an audience of ten thousand people,” Harold Voorhis recalled. Voorhis, an agent for the National Phonograph Company, was partly responsible for the candidate’s discomfort: He had brought a phonograph into the library of Bryan’s house in Lincoln, Neb., to record some of his speeches, old and current. “Considering that his words were to be reproduced all over the world in perhaps a million homes, … I thought he showed remarkable composure,” Voorhis wrote in the July 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly.

Whether for profit or prestige, the 1908 campaign was the first in which presidential candidates recorded their own voices for the mass market. “We now have Records by Mr. Bryan and Mr. Taft, so that no matter how the November election may result, we shall have Records by the next President,” an advertisement in the September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly exclaimed. “Now, for the first time, one can introduce the rival candidates for the Presidency in one’s own home, can listen to their political views, expressed in their real voices, and make comparisons.”

The sound-bite era was born.

The recordings by Bryan and Taft were played at rallies, in concert halls and at local Edison dealerships. Political clubs, depending on their leaning, featured Taft or Bryan speeches — or, if they wanted to appear impartial, both. In New York City, an enterprising businessman set up a penny arcade featuring a Bryan-Taft “debate.” Mannequins stood before a phonograph that spouted the candidates’ voices.

“You could draw a genealogy from the televised presidential debates of today straight back to these” recordings, says record historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington. “An awful lot of political speechmaking nowadays is mediated; the idea of someone simply addressing a live audience [as] the target audience …really doesn’t seem to pertain much anymore.” The 1908 recordings “are really the first step in that direction.”

The phonograph was invented in 1877. By the early 1890s, it was being used in arcades and exhibition halls. As early as the 1896 presidential campaign, elocutionists and actors had recorded imitations of presidential speeches, replete with canned applause and other sound effects. An 1896 catalog for the U.S. Phonograph Company, Feaster and Indiana University folklorist Richard Bauman note, listed what it called recordings of speeches by Bryan and his opponent in that campaign, William McKinley, but all were re-creations voiced by others.

“The concept of the on-the-spot sound bite, immediate gratification, news as it happens, didn’t exist,” says Tim Fabrizio, a phonograph collector and coauthor of several books about the early history of the phonograph. “What you had was the idea of re-creating things through various musical and sound-effects presentations — the shelling of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese war, the Battle of Manila the surrender of the Spanish fleet.…[I]t was considered that the phonographic art was such as to require a different quality, a different pedigree.”

But in 1908, says Fabrizio, “all of a sudden you had the real people sitting before the recording horn.” The “speaking phonograph,” as Edison called his invention, was already 30 and was no longer an expensive plaything restricted to an exhibition hall or the homes of the very rich. Now that inventors had come up with a wind-up, spring-driven model, housewives no longer had to worry about smelly batteries that could leak acid on the parlor rug.

“The year 1908 marked the first time Bryan had run for the presidency since the phonograph had become a common household object and since the mass production of phonograph cylinders had become practical,” says Feaster.

“The phonograph had suddenly come of age, it had gotten to the point where it can be the dispenser of reality, not just fantasy,” notes Fabrizio.

Bryan made his recordings in May, before he had secured the Democratic nomination. Some of the speeches he recorded were already well known — such as “The Railroad Question,” a plea not to wrest regulation of the railroad industry away from the federal government and give it to the states; or “Imperialism,” a shortened version of a talk on the dangers of the U.S. waging war against smaller countries, such as the Philippines. “Imperialism” was first delivered during the 1900 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

However, later that year, for the Columbia Phonograph Company, Bryan recorded a brand-new speech, entitled “Mr. Taft’s Borrowed Plumes,” specifically criticizing his opponent.

For those first recordings made in May 1908,Bryan declaimed into the recording horn in his library as a needle cut grooves on a hollow, rotating wax cylinder. “Some workmen who were engaged in repairing a porch annoyed us with their hammering and Mr. Bryan went out to tell them to let up for awhile. He did not want to arouse their curiosity so told them he was talking into the phone. For all that, we heard a few stray knocks later on and one or two of these were caught by the Phonograph in his speech on The Tariff Question,” Voorhis wrote.

“When our work was at last finished on Saturday, the library floor looked as it had been visited by a snow storm, so thickly was it covered with wax shavings,” Voorhis said. “I made apologies to Mrs. Bryan, which she assured were entirely unnecessary, and as quickly as I could get my things together I was on the way back to Orange, N.J., with the Records.”

After the Democrats nominated Bryan that July, the Edison company began promoting his recordings heavily. “No one who has ever heard Mr. Bryan speak will fail to recognize all of the wonderful charm of voice and manner by which he is famous,” noted an ad for the Edison records placed in a monthly magazine, Youth’s Companion. “‘Where does Bryan stand on the Railroad Question?’ is being asked on all sides. He has been so widely, and in most cases, erroneously, quoted. … This Record comes as his personal word on this important subject.”

Reaction to this novelty might be called mixed. Some political cartoons portrayed Bryan as a blowhard who loved nothing better than his own voice. The public, Feaster says, was still used to thinking of the phonograph as an instrument for entertainment, not serious contemplation.

Taft didn’t immediately agree to do his own recordings. He may have waited to take the plunge until after he and his advisors saw how Bryan’s records were received, Feaster speculates. But he ended up making his own 12 cylinders to answer Bryan’s 10.

“Judge Taft has consented to make several short speeches into talking machines for reproduction,” the New York Times wrote on August 4, 1908. “As the process of making a phonograph record is somewhat different than a making a campaign speech from the back of a car platform or from a front porch, Mr. Taft today found Mrs. Taft laughing at him as he did a bit of rehearsing for the real records.”

Walter Miller, manager of the Edison Recoding Department, along with an assistant, George H Werner, visited Taft at Hot Springs, Va., just after he had delivered his acceptance speech before the Republican convention in Cincinnati. “On Monday at 3 p.m. we got busy on the Records and by 5 o’clock had four completed,” Miller and Werner wrote in the September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly. “At 5:15 p.m. Mr. Taft went for his regular horseback ride and gave us an appointment for that evening at 9. At that time he dictated two more speeches, which were all he had expected to make. He had become deeply interested by this time, however, and said, ‘I’ll give you another.’ He kept ‘giving us another’ until we had twelve altogether.”

“The last of the Records was finished at 12 o’clock Monday night. We caught the first train out on the following morning and were at the factory with the Records Tuesday night, when the work of moulding the duplicates was begun.”

Both Taft and Bryan, Fabrizio says, took care to speak seriously and in measured tones — the opposite of the curtain-chewing style that presidential re-enactors usually adopted for recordings.

Listening to Bryan’s records, “I was a little taken aback that they weren’t more emotional,” says Bryan biographer Michael Kazin of Georgetown University. “But then I thought that if you’re sitting in a studio with a big horn in front of you, it’s not the same as speaking to 10,000 people. It’s pretty hard to do.” Nevertheless, Kazin adds, Bryan “has a very sort of self-assured, confident voice. … He seems like the voice of authority.”

In contrast, “Taft was a slave to his scripts,” says Feaster. “In the Edison cylinder ‘Roosevelt Policies,’ he starts at the beginning of his published speech accepting the nomination and reads it word for word until he runs out of time,” he notes.

But there was one exception, notes Feaster. Taft’s “Irish Humor,” a travelogue about the Irish and his visit to Ireland 25 years earlier “was an unexpected bonus for the company as he got swept up in the moment with his enthusiasm for the phonograph.”

As the presidential campaign progressed, the candidates made their usual stump speeches, greeted crowds at train whistle stops and had their talks excerpted in the newspapers. In the end, Taft trounced Bryan, garnering 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan. It was Bryan’s worst — and final — presidential defeat, with Taft winning the popular vote by 8 percentage points and gaining the support of nearly all the northern states. (Taft got 51.6 percent of popular vote vs 43 percent for Bryan; in actual votes Taft got 7,678,335 votes compared to Bryan’s 6,408,979.)

No one has studied what effect the recordings had on the outcome, Feaster says. But it was clear that these artifacts were establishing a place in the culture. The Columbia Phonograph Company also made cylinder recordings of Taft and Bryan, and the Victor Talking Machine company made the first records of the candidates on disk. And the recordings of both men remained in the limelight —Taft because he won, Bryan because of his continuing popularity as a great orator.

In the case of Taft, the American public could now listen to the speeches of a real-live president, as the Edison Phonograph Monthly took pains to note in March 1909. “In a few days more, Edison dealers will have something absolutely unique in the history of the world, namely, phonograph records made by the ruler of a great nation,” the publication reported. “A year ago, the mere suggestion that it would be possible to buy records made by the President of the United States would have been received with incredulity and yet, in a few days, they will exist and may be had at a price within the reach of the poorest.”

Further evidence that the campaign speech recording had staying power came in the 1912 campaign. Although Theodore Roosevelt had refused to make any recordings while he was president from 1901 to 1909, he recorded several speeches in his effort to win a third, nonconsecutive term.

Furious that Taft — whom Roosevelt had picked as his successor in 1908 — had not followed through on efforts to preserve parkland and continue trust-busting, TR ran on the Progressive Party ticket. On the recordings, says Fabrizio, Roosevelt “doesn’t sound at all like the blustery guy we imagined him. … He had a very patrician accent; he had a stutter as a child, and you can still hear the hesitation in the records in a number of instances.”

Taft discovered one of the disadvantages of being so indelibly on the record. In some of his 1908 recordings, he had clearly portrayed himself as an ally of Roosevelt. "Two selections, 'Roosevelt Policies' and 'Function of Next Administration,' do little but praise Roosevelt's anti-trust work and assure the listener that Taft will follow respectfully in Roosevelt's footstep,” says Feaster.

“By 1912 he may have wished he hadn’t said some of those things,” Feaster says, because the recordings “were turned against him.” When that year’s votes were counted, both Roosevelt and Taft had lost to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Bryan, coincidentally, served as Wilson’s secretary of state, resigning in 1915 to protest Wilson’s handling of the sinking of the Lusitania. Bryan made a series of evangelical records in the early 1920s, which sound more impassioned than his 1908 recordings, according to biographer Kazin. But by then, the phonograph was no longer a novelty. It was about to be superseded by another media upstart — radio.

1rsx

The star is 1RSX J160929.1-210524 (for those taking notes at home) — it’s a K7 dwarf, a bit cooler and smaller than the Sun — and the planet is the blip circled at the upper left. It has no real name as yet — it hasn’t been confirmed yet; more on that in a sec — but if it’s a planet orbiting the star, it has a mass of about 8 times that of Jupiter.

The image is in near-infrared, just outside the human range of vision. This is a good place to hunt for young planets, because for millions of years after they are formed, planets are hot and glow in the infrared, while stars like the Sun are faint in the IR. Well, relatively faint; they still pour out energy, but it’s a lot less than in the visible part of the spectrum. So using IR detectors means you’re looking where young planets put out most of their light, and stars put out the least.

The planet seen by Gemini appears to be about 5 million years old– the parent star is part of a cluster of stars whose age is known. They lie about 500 light years from Earth.http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

Spectra of the star and planet. Click to embiggen.

The reason astronomers think this is a planet is because they took spectra: they broke the light up into a rainbow, if you will, and when you carefully examine the spectrum you can determine all sorts of things about the object emitting the light: how hot it is, what chemical composition it has, how old it is, even if it’s spinning!

The spectrum of the object matches that of an old, very low mass star. That might make you think it’s a star, but wait! The planet is young, and still hot. The light it gives off depends on its temperature, so a young low mass object, like a planet, can look just like a more massive object like a star. Since we know this object is young, we know it has a lower mass than its spectrum naively suggests. When models of how planets cool are used, we get a pretty good match for one with 8 times Jupiter’s mass if it’s the age of the star cluster, 5 million years.

But this is not confirmed! For example, it could be a low mass star that happens to be near the other star along our line-of-sight — in other words, it’s in the background. The best way to see if that’s true is to wait a year or two and take more images. If the object moves against the background stars along with the brighter star, then it must be physically associated with the star, and therefore it’s a planet. This is how we confirmed the first image of an exoplanet back in 2005 — but that was orbiting a brown dwarf, a star very different than the Sun.

If confirmed, this one is pretty important, because the parent star is much like our own Sun. The most interesting thing about this is the distance of the purported planet from the star: 50 billion kilometers! That’s 11 times the distance Neptune is from the Sun. And that’s a lower limit; it might be farther. That makes me very suspicious: we don’t know of any way to form planets that far from their parent stars.

Stars and planets form from rotating disks of gas and dust. The stuff collects in the middle to form the star, and the stuff farther out forms the planets — we have seen many examples of this in the sky. The disks we see around new stars are big, sure, but by the time you get 50 billion km out they are very thin, and there’s just not enough material out there to form a planet, let alone one with 8 times the mass of Jupiter.

In this case, the most likely explanations for this image are that 1) this isn’t a planet, but a background star, or 2) it formed closer in and was ejected by an encounter with another planet, moving it way the heck out from the star. (1) is a bummer, and is unlikely just due to statistics; it’s isn’t high odds to see an object like this by coincidence so near another star. (2) seems unlikely to me as well; it’s hard to toss around a planet that mass unless an even more massive planet was involved. I hope this star is a target for searches for more planets, just to get more information on this scenario.

To their credit, the astronomers involved are also clear about this in their paper announcing the discovery. This is a carefully done observations, and they are appropriately careful in their announcement.

But if it’s true… WOW. This would be the second planet ever seen directly in an image, and the first to orbit a star like the Sun. The implications would profound. It would be direct evidence of planets orbiting other stars at great distances. It would mean there could be another planet in our own solar system (unlikely, but I’ve written about that before). And it would mean that it’s possible to use this method of near-infrared mapping to actually get pictures of more planets! Seeing one might be a fluke, seeing two means there are more to find.

The next clear night, do yourself a favor: go outside. Look up. See all those stars? Whether or not this particular planet pans out, we still know that a large fraction of those stars — 10%? 20? — may have planets. And some fraction of those may have planets like Earth orbiting them. We really weren’t sure about this even 15 years ago, and now we’re able to not only start plugging numbers into the equations, but we can actually take pictures of some of these objects। http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

liverpool

Our prehistoric ancestors may have been a fiery bunch. By about 750,000 years ago, the inhabitants of a lakeshore in what is now northern Israel had learned to build fires in hearths, a research team contends.

For the next 100,000 years, Stone Age folk who frequented the Middle Eastern site used hearths for what must have been a variety of purposes, including staying warm, fending off predators, and cooking meat, according to archaeologist Naama Goren-Inbar of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her colleagues.

They describe their findings in the April 30 Science.

"This is the oldest evidence for the controlled use of fire in Asia and Europe," Goren-Inbar says.

Goren-Inbar's team unearthed more than a dozen clusters of scorched flint artifacts at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. They mark where hearths were located, she proposes. Investigators also found burned seeds and bits of charred wood near the flint remains.

These finds lay just above a layer of rock that contains evidence of a reversal of Earth's magnetic field that happened 790,000 years ago. Animal bones in the artifact-bearing soil also informed Goren-Inbar's age estimate.

The Israeli researcher doubts that wildfires burned the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov material. Such conflagrations cover large areas, but only 2 percent of excavated flint and wood fragments show signs of fire. Underground wildfires, such as burning roots, don't get hot enough to scorch buried flint, she adds.

Fire making probably started more than 1 million years ago among groups of Homo erectus in Africa and possibly Asia, she says. Much previous debate has concerned whether burned sediment, bone, and wood found at several African sites dating to more than 1 million years ago reflect controlled use of fire. A few 100,000-to-300,000-year-old locations in Asia and Europe contain evidence of systematic fire use by people, although some of that evidence is drawing controversy (SN: 7/11/98, p. 22).

Because of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov's pivotal age and location, the new report supports the view that controlled fire use began prior to 1 million years ago in Africa and gradually spread to other continents, remarks archaeologist John A.J. Gowlett of the British Academy Centenary Research Center in Liverpool.http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.us

It's not known how the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site's prehistoric residents started fires or why they would have put flint artifacts in fires.

Archaeologist Andrew Sillen of the University of Cape Town in South Africa comments that the site's inhabitants may have used the remnants of wildfires rather than built their own fires. Moreover, a rapidly moving wildfire could leave behind clusters of burned flint pieces, he says.

Sillen reported in 1988 that burned animal bones unearthed in a South African cave were probably heated in a campfire around 1 million years ago. However, neither that site nor any other contains a hearth or other direct evidence of controlled fire use, he notes.http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.us