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2018-02-01 News in Lights: The imesT Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm Dale L. Cressman PhD Brigham Young University - Provo, [email protected]

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Original Publication Citation Dale L. Cressman, "News in Lights: The imeT s Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm," Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018), 198-208

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Cressman, Dale L. PhD, "News in Lights: The imeT s Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm" (2018). All Faculty Publications. 2074. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/2074

This Peer-Reviewed Article is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. DALE L. CRESSMAN

News in Lights The Times Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the telegraph had produced an appetite for breaking news, New York City newspaper publishers used signs on their buildings to report headlines and promote their newspapers. Originally, chalkboards were used to post headlines. But, fierce competition led to the use of new technologies, such as magic lantern projections. These and, later, electrically lighted signs, would evoke amazement. In 1928, during an age of invention, the New York Times installed an electric “moving letter” sign on its building in Times Square. Popularly known as “the zipper,” the motograph drew significant attention from New Yorkers over the next thirty years and contributed to the reorganization of readerships into audiences; it both anticipated television and was eclipsed by it. Drawing on the records of the New York Times Company, this article traces the history of newspaper signs and the zipper, while correcting the historical record regarding the inventor of the sign. hen Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United print editions—in a sense anticipating the act of watching television States on November 6, 1928, thousands of New Yorkers news. Newspaper signs also transformed the solitary act of reading learned the news from The New York Times’s new electric the newspaper into a communal experience—readers consuming Wlight display on Times Tower. The Times had barely installed the individually, but doing so in a group. Over time, New Yorkers would moving-letter sign in time for election-night crowds, which had form the habit of gathering for big news stories, such as election habitually gathered to learn of election results and other breaking results. In a word, this shared experience became a ritual.3 news since the newspaper had relocated to Times Square from Park The Times’s zipper differed from the newspaper building signs Row in 1905. A “ribbon of light” 380 feet long and five feet high, the that came before it. Never had such a large and complex electric sign circled Times Tower along the building’s fourth-floor cornice. The news sign been constructed for a newspaper. The zipper was the Times originally called it “The Motograph News Bulletin” and later forerunner to the type of electronic displays that came to dominate “The New York Times Electric Moving Letter News Sign.” Eventually, Times Square and the centers of other large cities in the late twentieth it became popularly known as “the zipper.”1 Its 14,800 light bulbs and early twenty-first centuries. The innovative way in which the sign spelled out seminal news headlines for the next thirty-five years, until animatedly delivered news also foreshadowed the ticker-like design of the newspaper sold Times Tower in 1963. A successor to the sign “crawls” displayed on the lower third of television screens during news continues to operate on the building in 2018. broadcasts. The Times was not the first newspaper to use its building to The Times’s motograph was installed during a period of high display news or promote its newspaper. For decades, newspapers on modernism, the height of what Thomas S. Hughes calls the “age of Park Row had been displaying bulletin boards with election returns, technological enthusiasm,” whose chief characteristic was “inventing, sporting results, ship arrivals, and other breaking news. The advent developing, and organizing large technical systems,” including those of the telegraph as a news-gathering device had whetted the public’s related to communication.4 It was a time in which science was king, appetite for instantaneous news, particularly in New York City, where inventors were revered, and world’s fairs were staged to dazzle and residents frequently assembled at newspaper buildings to learn of amaze. As cultural historian Norman Klein points out, the fairs the latest news. Later, during the Civil War, crowds were drawn to themselves had become objects of national pride, providing society with newspaper buildings for the latest headlines and casualty lists scrawled an industrial epistemology. Machines were the fairs’ central attraction, on chalkboards.2 Just as they had once used newsboys to hawk papers, their displays treated as a type of theater.5 By the time of the Chicago newspaper publishers used signs to promote themselves and to rapidly World’s Fair of 1893, it was the electric light that had taken center transmit news. So, too, would newspaper signs move the news from stage and had, as David E. Nye wrote, “eclipsed the great machines.”6 the printed page to the street, helping to reorganize readerships into Whether bathing buildings in light to create the Chicago Fair’s “White audiences and expand the news cycle beyond morning and evening City,” or colorfully lighting jetted water fountains, electrical displays inspired awe. According to Frank Presbrey’s 1929 history of advertising, DALE L. CRESSMAN is an associate the novelty of electrified signs would “excite wonderment.” It describes professor in the School of Communications how, in 1895, The New York Times sign “composed of 250 ‘jets’ over the at Brigham Young University. He gratefully entrance to its building in Park Row,” led “an unprejudiced writer” to acknowledges the school’s Wendell J. Ashton describe the sign as “striking and almost startling to behold.” In 1898, Endowed Professorship, which funded this organizers of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition used incandescent light research. bulbs to illuminate buildings. For those who waited to see the lights come on, “It was magnificent beyond comparison or comment and the immense crowd that had been waiting patiently for the moment gazed in dumb admiration. For a few seconds the vast court was as silent as though it was peopled with wax figures.”7

198 Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) Such reactions convey feelings of amazement similar to those Row sidewalks, chalkboards took on a measure of permanence until described by philosophers as sublime. For Emmanuel Kant, sublimity the city deemed them an impediment to traffic and ordered them was the moment when one viewed something that was more than cleared in 1893. Subsequently, temporary signs were installed for big beautiful—so perfect, so divine, that cognition failed and the individual news events and featured limelights and magic lanterns to project was rendered speechless, unable to comprehend the magnificence bulletins on the sides of buildings. Electricity brought more elaborate of what he was experiencing. The rhetoric of the sublime originally projections, spotlights, and finally, motographs to present news, sports, described features of nature, but Leo Marx applied it to technology. and advertising. Publishers spent money on such displays because they In The Machine in the Garden,Marx examined the dialectic of the were competing for readers. By giving away news, and giving it to spoiled and polluted industrial landscape in juxtaposition to that of them first—what Barnhurst and Nerone refer to as the “culture of unspoiled nature and pastoralism, privileged in American literature the scoop”—they were hoping to attract readers to purchase their and political dialogue of the time. Marx’s examination of the newspapers.13 They were not above using gimmicks to report on lighter machine’s intrusion into “the garden,” its conquering of nature, and fare. For example, in 1849, the telegraph carried instantaneous reports resulting valorization of inventors and faith in progress, is articulated from a boxing match in Rock Point, Maryland, between Tom Hyer in the ideology of the “technological sublime,” wherein technology and Yankee Sullivan to large crowds gathered at newspaper buildings is given a religious-like reverence. For example, when steam engines on Park Row. Later, telegraph reports of the progress of baseball games were introduced, they were thought by many to be divinely inspired. were displayed on Park Row bulletin boards. The boards were made Later, it was electricity that elicited the sublime and held the promise to resemble baseball diamonds and wooden representations of players that machines failed to deliver.8 Nicholas Carr noted the utopian were moved on the boards to reflect the games’ developments.14 rhetoric in which it was promised that electricity “would cleanse the earth of disease and strife, turning it into a pristine new Eden,” while erhaps, more than sports news, it was election results that allowing for control of the weather and eliminating distance, “just as mattered most to newspapers. Not only did posting election electric lights would abolish the ‘alternation of day and night.’”9 The returns reliably draw crowds, but also pushed newspapers to “electrical sublime” construct was developed by Nye, who applied it Pcompete with one another to provide the grandest displays.15 TheNew- to American technological wonders such as the railroad, bridges, and York Herald used a “brilliant calcium light” to illuminate election results skyscrapers, the atomic bomb, the moon landing, and—of particular posted on its building. Likening the bright light to a “new moon,” concern to the present study—the “electric cityscape,” what he calls an the Herald claimed it was “the magnet of the moving population” on “unintended sublime.”10 election night. A Harper’s Weekly illustration shows how the New York For executives at the New York Times Company, the installation Tribune used a “magic lantern” (as the stereopticon was also known) to of the zipper was simply the next step in displaying news on its project 1866 election returns on the side of its building.16 For the 1878 building—an attempt to stay ahead of the competition. As we will election, “throngs of men” crowded into Printing House Square—where see, they likely could not have foreseen what a cultural landmark the Park Row and Broadway converged—to read headlines illuminated sign would become or what role it might play in the reorganization by “powerful calcium lights.”17 The dangerous oxy-hydrogen calcium of twentieth-century news consumers. Drawing on documents lights—or limelights, as they were also known—would soon give way from the archives of the New York Times Company, as well as other to electric lights, as Thomas Edison announced in 1878 that he was archival sources, this article traces the origins and construction of the bringing electric light to lower Manhattan.18 Ten years later, the New Times’s zipper, describes the innovations and challenges connected York Herald drew crowds to Madison Square on election night with to its operation, and illustrates its importance in the dissemination, illuminated election results projected on a screen, a scene portrayed consumption, and promotion of news. This account extends the in a woodcut illustration published in Harper’s Weekly.19 In 1888, the existing literature on the history of newspaper buildings, specifically Electrical Review reported on a novel approach taken by one newspaper, those of The New York Times. Furthermore, this article seeks to clarify in which news bulletins were “electrically automated,” spelling bulletins the historical record as to which inventors are responsible for the through a row of horizontal windows in which each window displayed Times’s zipper. a revolving wheel of alpha-numeric characters to spell out a series of Numerous historical accounts address New York’s newspaper headlines.20 An estimated 20,000 people watched the results of the buildings and Park Row, the lower Manhattan site of most newspapers 1892 election. “Historic Printing House Square, often in years past that served as a metonym for the press and was home to the Times the gathering place of crowds mighty in numbers and enthusiasm, has until it vacated to Times Square. Architectural literature establishes seldom held such a vast throng as assembled there last evening,” the newspaper buildings as the most prominent in late nineteenth- Times reported, adding: “Not a newspaper in the row failed to bulletin century New York City, a time in which monumental buildings were the returns, and there was not an office which did not have about it intended and understood as expressions of power. The use of street thousands of people anxious for every little scrap of information that signs, including electrified displays, has likewise been addressed.11 might give them an inkling as to the result.”21 However, relatively little attention has been given to newspapers’ use In addition to the bulletin boards, New Yorkers need only have of signs. Notable exceptions are Carolyn Marvin’s study of electric looked to the sky for flashes and colors thrown from a searchlight communication in the late nineteenth century, in which she defines the Herald mounted on a Madison Square Garden tower. The the electric sign as the original media spectacle and an overlooked Herald published the meaning of the light signals beforehand in its aspect of the development of mass media; Ira Chinoy’s examination newspaper.22 of newspaper bulletin boards in a larger study of election reporting; Though not a presidential election year, 1895 voting news drew and Kevin Barnhurst’s and John Nerone’s examination of newspaper crowds to Printing House Square, where The New York Times projected signs in the context of promotion and spectacle. As David M. Henkin bulletins on “an immense cloth” mounted on the newspaper’s building. pointed out in his 1998 book City Reading, historians have focused on Five stereopticons were installed on a tall scaffold next to the Benjamin the spread of newspapers themselves, largely overlooking the fact that Franklin statue in the square. TheTimes reported that results received newspapers in the nineteenth century frequently posted signs on their in the newsroom were sent by wire to the scaffold. “Within thirty buildings to display news and advertising.12 seconds after their receipt in the editorial rooms the curious in the At first, newspapers used chalkboards. On New York City’s Park street read their contents on the canvas.” In between such dispatches,

Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 199 Crowds on Park Row in New York City watch Journal and Tribune bulletin boards, in 1898, for Spanish- American War news. Getty Images. Used with permission.

the stereopticon projections kept crowds entertained with “pictorial even went so far as to float a “monster balloon” above the city, where it entertainment,” including pictures of political leaders and cartoons.23 would notify New Yorkers of a McKinley victory with green lights and It was all a warmup for the dramatic 1896 election that pitted a Bryan victory with red lights. Promising to report on the election in Ohio Governor William McKinley’s “sound money” policies against “an absolutely novel and original manner,” the Tribune tried stringing the populism of former Nebraska Congressman William Jennings red and white lights five hundred feet above its building, where it Bryan, who promised to take the country off the gold standard in planned to flash results “to the eyes of thousands with the speed of light” favor of silver-backed paper money. It was a hotly contested election, with a series of pre-arranged signals. The Tribune planned to float its bringing a record 79 percent of eligible voters to the polls. Newspapers lighting display by way of kites, promising that results would be seen on Park Row pulled out all stops for the estimated fifty thousand from thirty miles away. During the afternoon, the newspaper’s staff people who crowded onto the row and an additional 125,000 said flew nine kites from a single line, allowing it to hoist a flag measuring to have gathered in City Hall Park and adjoining streets between fifteen by twenty-one feet. “Such a large specimen of the Stars and sundown and midnight. “Never,” the New York World reported, “have Stripes was never before lifted so far above the level of the earth,” the such crowds been known.” The crowd’s demonstrations, reported the Tribune boasted. However, by evening, the wind subsided, bringing the Tribune, “were simply volcanic.”24 Richard Harding Davis wrote of the kites down and forcing the Tribune to raise its rooftop lighting display use of cinematographs—early film projectors—that showed crowds with ropes.27 Chattanooga publisher Adolph Ochs assumed control “life-sized figures in motion,” including “McKinley walking in his of The New York Times in 1896, and for his first election as publisher, garden.” Davis compared the atmosphere on Newspaper Row to one the Times provided bulletins “thrown on stereopticon screens” in of a “football crowd on Thanksgiving Day.” It was, he wrote, “the most both Printing House Square and Madison Square.28 In previous years, remarkable sight ever witnessed in New York.” According to Davis, election results were handwritten, scratched with a needle onto three- every newspaper on the row had “from four to seven places for showing and-a-half-inch, opaque glass slides and later remembered as looking bulletins instead of one as formerly.” Lanterns and stereopticons were more like Arabic, rather than English language characters.29 However, placed on “three decked affairs like great watchtowers,” Davis wrote, in 1896, the Times told readers that in both of its locations, bulletins while brass bands played in front of newspaper offices. It was, Davis were “printed on the lantern slides by typewriter” so the news could concluded, “a feature none of us had ever seen on an election night be read “with the greatest ease.” Despite the Times’s efforts, Ochs before.”25 conceded that Joseph Pulitzer’s World had a more impressive bulletin The Journal, Tribune, Times, and World enthusiastically vied for display of the election results. TheWorld ’s bulletins were projected voters’ attention. William Randolph Hearst’s Journal accompanied the from five stereopticons onto a “monster screen” that covered nearly usual bulletin boards with a stereopticon-projected map of the United the entirety of its twenty-story front facing City Hall Park. TheWorld States depicting “silver and gold states” with white or tallow-colored26 boasted that it could be seen from the west side of Broadway and electric lights and their accompanying number of electoral votes—and caused onlookers to stand on the fountain in front of City Hall.30 The

200 Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) Tribune claimed to be the first to project McKinley’s victory, at 8:45 before the Times moved into the building it used it to post the results p.m., but the crowds stayed until midnight.31 of the 1904 election. In notices printed in the newspaper in the days The 1900 presidential election, a rematch between McKinley leading up to the election, readers were instructed that a steady beam of and Bryan, also featured news bulletins, but the election night crowds light seen pointing from the top of Times Tower to the west indicated would never again be as large on Newspaper Row. Crowds gathered that Theodore Roosevelt had been elected president, while a similar for the latest news during the Spanish-American War of 1898, too, but signal in the opposite direction indicated a Roosevelt defeat. Similarly, those occasions lacked the elaborate displays newspapers produced for light signals that tilted up and down and to the west indicated that the election nights. In 1901, excavation for the new Interborough Rapid Republican Party would seat a majority in Congress, while the same Transit (IRT) subway system forced the city to temporarily close the signal to the east reported a Democratic congressional victory.43 area. “For the first time since the telegraph and the telephone made it possible for newspapers to give early information as to the result of imes Square drew an estimated thirty thousand people to follow elections,” the Times reported, “Park Row and City Hall Park were the 1910 “Fight of the Century” between James Jeffries and Jack clear of a great crowd.”32 That is not to say that election results would Johnson. The fight took place in Reno, Nevada, but theTimes never again gather a crowd. They would—in midtown Manhattan. Tposted a blow-by-blow description of the bout on three sides of Times As the nineteenth century drew to a close it was clear that Park Row’s Tower: On the north side of the building, the newspaper used a “big newspaper glory days were ending. In 1893, James Gordon Bennett Jr. revolving blackboard” to display updates; additional blackboards were moved his Herald from Park Row into an opulent building designed by employed on the side of the building facing Seventh Avenue; while Stanford White at Thirty-Fifth Street and Broadway, and convinced the in a ground-floor Times Tower window facing Broadway, theTimes city to rename the surrounding area “Herald Square.” Meanwhile, New deployed a new “automatic bulletin machine” that the paper claimed York City was expanding. Its five neighboring boroughs consolidated “showed in clear, readable type, and in quick order, everything that on December 31, 1897, and, not long afterward, the new subway went on in the arena at Reno, both before and after the fight started.”44 system would move the city northward. Lower Manhattan had become The new machine was installed shortly before the Jeffries-Johnson congested, as traffic was drawn to the Brooklyn Bridge and, what writer fight and was, the Times believed, “the only one, so far as is known, Pete Hamill described as the “ferociously ugly” post office next to Park in the world.” The device, which took six years to develop, allowed Row. It was becoming so congested it became nearly impossible to bystanders to read two-inch-high letters on a scroll of paper thirty-three distribute newspapers from the row’s presses to a growing city.33 It was inches wide and seventy inches high. An operator, whose typewriter reported in July 1903 that William Randolph Hearst was considering was connected to the machine a few feet away, updated the bulletins. moving his New York American and Journal to Columbus Circle, which “The instant a letter on the typewriter keyboard is touched,” the Times he hoped to have the city rename Hearst Plaza.34 Ochs, too, knew he told its readers, “the same letter is printed on the roll of paper” by needed to move the Times from Park Row, for he thought it “was dying, rubber letters on the periphery of an eighteen-inch printing wheel at just as old persons must die.”35 Ochs decided to move his newspaper the base of the machine.45 The machine was used a few months later to what was then Longacre Square, an area better known for horse to keep crowds abreast of Walter Wellman’s failed attempt to cross stables and brothels. Ochs foresaw the day when the area would attract the Atlantic by dirigible.46 “Of course, there is nothing new about a “probably a hundred thousand people” per day, thus giving his new bulletin service,” the Times later admitted. However, the newspaper building prominence.36 Already, electrification was well under way believed the machine added “an element of anticipation” by giving “the in New York. The Lyceum was the first theater in New York to have public the idea of being present at the actual production of the news.”47 electricity installed—by Edison himself—in 1885. By the 1890s, there The Times added another of the machines in time for the 1912 were so many electric signs in the theater district and along Broadway election, providing spectators with four different views of election that New Yorkers began to refer to the thoroughfare as “The Great results on Times Tower. In addition to the thirty-foot-high revolving White Way.” The Evening Sun reported in 1895 of signs prominently chalkboard the newspaper had used previously, the Times added a appearing as “letters of fire.”37 large canvas—“large enough to be in sight five blocks to the north”— Ochs raised barely enough financing to erect a twenty-five-story on which “opaque lantern slides” projected election bulletins. It Italian Renaissance building faced with Indiana limestone and terra was, the Times reported, “the most popular device” in Times Square cotta. It was the second-tallest building in the city, though Ochs that election night.48 Other newspapers did their best to compete. insisted on including the basement levels to proclaim it the city’s tallest As the Times noted after the 1913 election, the New York American structure.38 Times Tower, as it was called, was built on a small and posted “illustrated bulletin boards,” as did the Brooklyn Eagle, while oddly shaped lot. However, because it was built directly over the new reporters from other newspapers “elbowed their way, some of them IRT subway station, developer August Belmont convinced city fathers taking notes” about the size of the crowd, others “jotting down figures to rename the square after the area’s prominent new tenant. When from the bulletin boards to telephone to their own offices.” Although the newspaper moved into its building on the last day of 1904, Ochs election bulletins were displayed in Herald Square, Union Square, and organized a New Year’s celebration, with a fireworks display he hoped Park Row, the Times claimed that most chose Times Square. “TIMES would draw celebrants from Park Row to Times Square. Because of SQUARE NOW IS CITY’S CENTRE,” the newspaper proclaimed safety concerns, the fireworks displays were dropped and replaced in in its headline. “Thousands Flock There to Get Election Returns, 1906 with the now-famous New Year’s Eve ball drop from the top of Neglecting Former Gathering Places.”49 Times Tower.39 By then, Times Square had replaced Park Row as the Just as it proclaimed it the new center of the city, the Times gathering place for the city’s celebrations and for acquisition of news.40 left Times Square in 1913 for its new building at nearby 229 West A prominent feature of Times Tower was the lantern placed atop Forty-Third Street.50 However, the newspaper continued to own the building, used to signal news bulletins as far as thirty miles away. Times Tower, leasing office space, maintaining a classified advertising Searchlights had been part of election spectacles as early as 1879. office, and utilizing the building’s exterior for display of news However, by the time Ochs was planning his new building, the use bulletins during elections. By the 1920s, electric signs had become of searchlights to signal election results was in vogue.41 Ochs insisted more sophisticated and the Times Square landscape was fully lighted on having the lantern and observatory, despite his financiers’ concerns with colorfully animated, electrically illuminated signs known as that the publisher could not afford to build the top six floors.42 Even “spectaculars.”51 Critics thought the signs garish and vulgar, but they

Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 201 drew crowds.52Among the spectaculars were those called “talking signs” or “flashers,” animated by their light bulbs flashing on and off.53 However, a newer type of talking sign had emerged, a so called “runner,” in which letters appeared to run across the sign, from its right to left side. New York advertising sign executive Frank C. Reilly had already installed such signs in Chicago and New York City’s Columbus Circle.54 Reilly’s sign controller functioned similarly to a piano player in that content would be spelled out by punching holes on a roll of paper. Then, as the paper was conveyed past the controller, pegs would fall into the holes, thus allowing switches to turn corresponding lights on and off. Riley called it a “motograph.”55 One inherent weakness in Reilly’s sign design was that because content was punched on a roll of paper, the lighted signs could not be terribly long, lest the paper tear because of the weight of the roll.

lthough it is not known precisely when, at some point in the 1920s Reilly met a young engineer named Francis E.J. Wilde. Born in San Francisco, Wilde came to New York City to work Afor a steamship company before going into business for himself. Reilly was impressed with Wilde, introduced him to the burgeoning electric sign business, then invited the young man to join his enterprise.56 While in Reilly’s employ, Wilde found a solution to the problem of the moving letter sign being limited in size by the length of the paper roll. Wilde developed a motograph whose messages could be more readily changed by using interchangeable letters. Rather than using punched paper, Wilde’s system utilized metal letters, five and one-half inches high, and mounted on Bakelite.57 These were inserted into a magazine capable of accommodating as many as seven hundred characters or spaces. Messages were constructed in a manner similar to that of manually setting type. When readied, a magazine then traveled on a track beneath a series of brushes that were connected to light bulbs on the sign. As the letters were conveyed past the brush block, electrical current to various light bulbs was established, then broken, thus briefly lighting individual bulbs to duplicate on the sign what the operator had set in type. This produced the effect of words moving from right to left. Wilde applied for patents in 1925 and established his own company. Reilly reportedly tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, Wilde to patent the invention as his own, and the two continued to work together, on the same projects and in the same office, even as the two men had their own companies. Wilde even made Reilly the president of his company.58 Francis E.J. Wilde’s 1925 patent filing for the zipper’s controller, In 1926, Reilly suggested that Ochs make a new investment on which letters were composed and conveyed past the electric by “encircling the Times Building with a Moving Letter Sign.”59 The switches that lighted the sign. U.S. Patent Office. Times, long interested in the value of promotion, was about to install until the updated magazine was readied. Reilly and Wilde called the its most famous sign. Reilly not only sought to assure Ochs that the system the “Motogram Moving Letter Sign.”61 idea of installing a moving letter sign was “thoroughly practical,” The Times’s proposed Motogram was to display letters four he also appealed to the publisher’s pride in Times Tower, writing to feet tall, with ten rows of light sockets.62 Words would appear at the Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Ochs’s son-in-law and deputy, that “there is northwest corner of the fourth-floor cornice of Times Tower, then no location in all the world like The Times Building and the idea of move eastward until reaching the northeast corner where the letters displaying your messages and bulletins on all four sides would prove continued southward and around the building until the message a master stroke of publicity and public service.” By installing such a arrived back at the northwest corner. The letters on Wilde’s system unique sign, Reilly wrote, the newspaper would be “giving to Times would be in contact with brushes for less than half a second, requiring Square even greater meaning than before.”60 the sign to have light bulbs capable of turning on and off quickly What Reilly proposed for the Times was a motograph system enough to animate the intended words. The display would be set at with two controllers. One of the controllers would use the perforated a fifteen-degree angle to make viewing practical from street level. For roll system that Reilly had invented. It would allow for the display of Reilly’s company, it would be “the most ambitious undertaking that up to five hundred words of advertising material or, as Reilly wrote, has been presented.” However, Reilly assured Sulzberger, “We have no “stock copy, such as announcements concerning circulation, midweek concern regarding our ability to carry it through.” Reilly told the Times pictorial, sports features, rotogravure sections and Sunday features.” that by using the best materials the sign would operate for “ten or The other controller would employ Wilde’s system to display news fifteen years, or even longer.”63 bulletins. The perforated roll would alternate with the magazine of The original agreement between theTimes and the Motogram news content until the news content needed updating, in which case Company, signed July 26, 1928, called for the display to be finished in the advertising material on the perforated roll would continue to run time for the 1928 presidential election in November. “If we undertake

202 Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) this job we want to go so far in making it sure hundred percent that had been for a sign ten light sockets high, with one controller, “[b] there can be no regret of any kind on either your side or mine,” Reilly ut we were persuaded to erect two controlling apparatus to operate an wrote to Sulzberger. The cost was not to exceed $50,000.64 outside letter of twelve sockets high.” Wilde wrote that he had believed In the end, the project was much more difficult and expensive the Times would have “gladly” paid for the extra costs. However, he than either party expected—and there were regrets. Trouble might was “greatly misled and sadly disappointed” when he learned the have been foreseen in the original agreement, in which Reilly specified, newspaper company would not open its wallet.71 Though no document “Out of necessity, many of the details of construction will have to be could be found in the Times archives to suggest royalties were agreed developed as the work progresses.” Reilly proposed to “keep in constant upon, Wilde claimed that he should have been owed $54,000 in touch” with the Times regarding any changes. There were significant royalties for the use of two controllers over ten years—“quite a large changes. Rather than using ten horizontal rows of light sockets for sum to cancel without leaving a delicate feeling of regreat [sic].” Wilde four-foot tall letters, it was determined the sign would be more claimed he agreed to cancel the royalty and permit the times to use readable with letters five feet tall, which required twelve horizontal the controllers “under a personal lease without any compensation to light sockets. The number of lights would total 14,800, requiring my corporation or myself.” Then, indicating a level of animosity that 38,000 brushes, and some three tons of copper wiring. In essence, apparently had developed between the two business partners, Wilde the Times was paying for a prototype. It took eight weeks to install. wrote, “I made Frank C. Reilly the president of my corporation “Times Square has been watching for weeks,” the Times reported, “the but did not give him the privilege to personally masquerade as the installation of the massive copper panel, studded with light bulbs, exclusive genius and thereby jeopardize the interests of our company.” which girdles the four sides of the building.”65 As election night drew There is no indication in the letter that Wilde held any expectation near, work continued twenty-four hours each day, with the installation of extracting additional money from the Times. However, he did ask, finished just in time to turn it on for election-night coverage. Rather “in the interest of fair play” that the newspaper “change your records, than installing one of Reilly’s controllers, with a perforated paper roll should they at present state that any other than myself invented and for stock copy, the Times elected to build two of Wilde’s controllers, designed the Motogram news bulletin.”72 There is no record of a reply. each capable of loading news content. That decision also increased the Wilde and Reilly continued working together until Wilde’s death in cost of the sign. Nevertheless, only one of the controllers was finished October 1940, when Wilde’s son took over. When Reilly suggested in time for the election and it was installed on the fourth floor of that the younger Wilde’s Motogram interests be sold to Frank Reilly Times Tower. Direct current power was drawn by way of underground Ltd., Wilde moved out of the office to maintain his independence.73 cables from the Times’s new building on West Forty-Third Street.66 Wilde was not the only inventor who felt Reilly unfairly claimed credit for the moving-letter sign. Everett Bickley invented the original learly proud of the election-night performance of the device, motograph in 1911, installing it over the Columbian Theatre in the newspaper reported it would have the sign in nightly Detroit.74 Bickley got the idea as he watched Detroit residents looking operation “within a short time.” The Times considered its sign at a “talking” sign that consisted of an animated chariot race, with Cas a “news-reel” more than an advertisement, adding, “The apparatus is short messages below. He noticed people would watch the chariot not merely an electric sign but in one sense a newspaper as well, so the race, but when it paused, they ignored the messages, which were control room is also a news room and composing room.”67 Privately, flashed one letter at a time. He concluded that a moving letter sign Times executives were less sanguine. The newspaper had agreed to pay would garner their attention and determined to build just such a sign, the cost for the building of the sign, plus a 15 percent fee with the convincing a theater owner to fund the project. It was Bickley who total cost not to exceed $50,000. However, it cost Motogram more first came up with the idea to use perforated rolls of paper to turn than $80,000 to build the sign, bringing the total cost to the Times light bulbs on and off. He assumed that the makers of piano players to $119,619.74. Reilly and Wilde believed the newspaper would would have an efficient way to perforate the paper. They did not. pay for the increased costs associated with the project, but by the So, Bickley invented a small machine to do the job. His first sign time the project was complete, the Times had paid out only $40,000. was eight lamps high, totaling 996 lamps. Not only was it used to Times Company records suggest Motogram sued the newspaper in advertise for the theater on which it was installed, but it also displayed late February 1929. Among Sulzberger’s management team, there was election returns in 1912 for the Detroit Free-Press. Other newspapers grumbling over the increased costs and discussion over what caused it, used stereopticons to throw results on screens, but Bickley claimed his including a “lack of detailed preparation.” Blaming the “mad anxiety motograph kept the Free-Press ahead of the competition.75 to get the sign ready before Election Day,” and realizing that they had Bickley had ideas, but money he lacked. Not long after inventing purchased a one-of-a-kind in which “no drawings were made of any the motograph, he sold a 10 percent interest in the company for part of this sign and no specifications drawn up that would enable $200 to Frank Reilly. According to Bickley, Reilly was insistent on intelligent figures to be obtained from outside contractors,” Times buying into the Bickley Manufacturing Company and working as executives concluded they should have had the project “carefully its sales manager. After spinning off a new Motograph Corporation, worked out on paper before attempting to go ahead.”68 In writing to Bickley claimed Reilly spent so much money in attempts to drum Reilly’s attorney, Sulzberger indicated that Ochs was willing to settle up business in Chicago and New York, that the company’s finances the matter, paying a sum of $209,550 to cover Reilly’s additional were negatively impacted, leading Bickley to sell his interest in the costs.69 company. Reilly, meanwhile, went to New York in 1914, eventually The matter of money appeared to be settled, but it would continue taking over the company. “In numerous interviews in later years to rankle both parties. In March 1931, American Magazine published with reporters,” Bickley later said, Reilly “claimed to be the original a flattering feature on Frank Reilly.70 The magazine said Reilly was inventor of the Motograph.” Over time, Bickley said, “people had “the man who brought the moving sign to Broadway;” Wilde was forgotten who really invented it.”76 mentioned as “his associate.” However, the article appears to have For his part, Reilly also remained bitter about his dealings with enraged Wilde, prompting him to write to Adolph Ochs himself: “The the Times. In a lengthy letter to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger in 1939, articles and photographs are so worded,” Wilde wrote, “to lead the Reilly recounted the problems of installing the sign, adding, “I public to believe that the inventor of your sign is Frank C. Reilly. sometimes wonder whether it has ever occurred to you, and I am sure This is not the truth.” Wilde reminded Ochs that the original plan it has not, that I never received a penny for my enterprise and tenacity

Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 203 in sticking to the job of selling the idea to the Times, and for my personal services in planning the installation, carrying it to completion, and for the use of our rights ever since November 6, 1928.”77 Despite the hard feelings, Reilly did claim and receive a large portion of the credit for the Times zipper. When he died in 1947, the Times wrote that the zipper “was a Reilly masterpiece.”78 TheTimes even reported that Reilly’s first sign was installed in Chicago in 1912, although that was likely Bickley’s sign, given that Reilly hadn’t even filed a patent application for improvements on Bickley’s design until 1918. The perception that Reilly was responsible for the zipper’s design persists even in academic literature.79 The Motogram Company promised theTimes that the sign would last a decade. But in twenty years of near continuous operation, none of the sign’s 190 panels, would need to be replaced. Only the light bulbs—originally amber, but later twenty-five-watt white lights—would need to be replaced every two weeks.80 The zipper would continue putting out 21,925,664 lamp flashes per hour for 4,971 consecutive evenings, until it was turned off for the first time on May 18, 1942. Before acceding to the wartime dim-out, the newspaper messaged: “The New York Times bids you good-night.”81 The zipper was turned on again briefly when the dim-out was lifted on October 18, 1943, but sometime after D-day would go dark again for energy-saving brownouts.82 It would not be turned on again until V-J Day in August 1945. As the Times waited for word of Japan’s capitulation, electrician James Torpey worked for nearly twenty-four hours to get the zipper ready to announce the end of the war.83 A reported 750,000 gathered in Times Square on August 14, 1945, hopeful of receiving the official news of the war’s end. At 7:03 p.m., the zipper flashed the news: ***OFFICIAL *** TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER.84 James Torpey, standing, and an unidentified Times employee compose Never again would the zipper draw such crowds. As early headlines on the zipper controller in the fourth floor of Times Tower. New as 1948, suggestions were made that television was keeping York Times Company records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New significant numbers of people away from Times Square on York Public Library. election night.85 In 1952, the newspaper redoubled its election efforts, spectaculars. “I can’t see the Times Tower turned into a big ad sign adding an eighty-five-foot lighted sign that resembled a thermometer for Coca Cola on one side and Kotex on the other.” Sulzberger felt on the building’s north façade. It mattered little, as Meyer Berger he owed his father-in-law “too much to permit the building to be reported: “Times Square last night had the smallest Election Night misused.”89 Sulzberger was also reluctant to let go of the now-famous turnout in its long existence. It was the least demonstrative crowd, zipper, despite its diminishing impact. Nevertheless, Sulzberger’s son, too—without voice, without the traditional horns and bells, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and other Times executives convinced the utterly without enthusiasm.”86 By November 1960, the transformation elder Sulzberger that the zipper, too, could be discarded. “The sign seemed complete. “Times Square, which teemed with excited citizenry is antiquated and can be relinquished without tears,” he was told.90 on election nights of the pre-television era, drew little more than the Despite later misgivings about not allowing other publishers to usual weekday crowd last night,” the Times reported the day after use the zipper, Sulzberger agreed to part with the historic building, John F. Kennedy was elected president.87 selling it to developer Douglas Leigh in 1961.91 Just two years later, Leigh sold it to Allied Chemical. In an effort to make it look more s the crowds dwindled, so too did the newspaper’s desire to contemporary, the building’s limestone and terra cotta exterior was keep Times Tower. The building badly needed an update to replaced with marble and glass. Meanwhile, as the adult entertainment its electrical system; tenants were demanding air conditioning, industry seeped into Times Square, the neighborhood fell into a period Awhich the tower’s infrastructure could not support. Worst of all, the of disrepair and ill repute. Times Tower was renamed One Times building was deteriorating. Water had seeped into the structure, Square, its plain-looking façade noticed only because of successor corroding the steel columns. Falling pieces of terra cotta presented versions of the zipper and, later, an increasing number of advertising a danger to those below. Times executives mulled various options, signs also mounted on it.92 As Times Square was revitalized in the ranging from upgrading the building to demolishing it.88 The option mid-1990s, large video screens came to dominate the landscape, that made the best financial sense was to sell the building, something while a digital version of the zipper continued to move headlines Ochs’s son-in-law was reluctant to do. Sulzberger felt Times Tower across Adolph Ochs’s old building. Nevertheless, just as Arthur Hayes was sort of a monument to Ochs’s memory. “I will have to do a lot of Sulzberger had predicted, the building was used mostly to display thinking about it before I do say yes to that,” Sulzberger told family advertisements. Times Square continued to draw tourists year-round members. He knew the building’s small, oddly-shaped footprint and large crowds on New Year’s Eve. However, it’s unlikely anyone made it unattractive for anything else but a place to install advertising goes there just to get the news; no longer are the crowds themselves

204 Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) considered, as they once were, sublime.93 of the print media,” particularly in the 1920s, as it was challenged by This is not to suggest that news signs would disappear. News radio.100 By midcentury, television would emerge as the medium to in lights persists—both in the form introduced by the zipper and which audiences would habitually turn. When Times Square election as enormous digital video displays. However, their nature and night crowds in November 1960 were deemed no larger than those purposes have changed. No longer installed just for election nights, on any other weekday, the Times blamed television. Surveys later or with the expectation of disseminating news to large crowds, indicated that television actually overtook newspapers as a primary signs have, nevertheless, literally overtaken building façades full- source of news in 1963.101 What had once evoked amazement had time. Buildings—what Lewis Mumford had once suggested were become commonplace (as Gunning put it, “astonishment is inherently metonyms for filing cabinets—have become, in some cases, media“ an unstable and temporary experience”).102 Meanwhile, even the Times machines.”94 The zipper’s successor, Nye suggested, has become “a part came to consider the zipper a “news-reel”; its control room as both of consciousness, translating events into display, fusing the news into a newsroom and a composing room. Without fully realizing it, the the edited landscape.”95 Architecture, first made unstable by magic Times anticipated television; unintentionally, the zipper would both lantern projections, has become even more chameleon-like, a fusion of presage the medium and be eclipsed by it. ambient media content with glass and steel.96 Now, there are so many What started as a way of promoting newspapers helped reorganize signs—both advertising spectaculars and content-laden digital video readerships into audiences, as the publishers’ core business of printing displays—that Times Square itself has become something of a media was transformed into delivering news continuously, ultimately event.97 Not insignificantly, a space once known for disseminating whetting readers’ appetites for breaking news and foreshadowing news to large crowds is now dominated by advertising and other today’s continuous news cycle. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, symbols of late consumer capitalism. nineteenth-century Americans were “as hungry for instantaneity, for Preceded by chalkboards, magic lantern projections, and simultaneity, and interactivity as we are today.”103 Arguably, electric electrically lighted signs, the zipper arrived when advertising signs have been as significant for the reorganization of twentieth- “spectaculars” were already well established on “The Great White Way.” century mass communication audiences as were telephones or The zipper came about within this context of electrification: it was the the wireless telegraph were in the nineteenth century.104 Marvin next innovation for Adolph Ochs to not only transmit the news more reminds us that electric light is often overlooked as a direct ancestor quickly and efficiently, but to captivate crowds. Like the newspaper of broadcasting, as “families and individuals retreated indoors to signs that preceded it, the zipper was a product of newspaper promotion, well-lighted living rooms to watch on television the descendants of competition, and the desire to be first. Applied to journalism, this the public spectacles that had once entertained communities in the electric spectacle—known in advertising as a “spectacular”—was an town square.”105 In other words, news sign viewers became television early example of blurring the distinction between journalism and media viewers. “New technologies rarely by themselves lead to changes in the event.98 Even as publishers found themselves “giving away” news, the news,” historian Patricia Dooley writes. But “they sometimes trigger “culture of the scoop” was a commercial imperative significant enough effects in the industrial and occupational structures of journalism.”106 to justify the signs’ adoption and expense.99 As Randall Patnode points The zipper is such a technology that helped trigger changes in both the out, the “discourse of progress” was “essential to the financial well-being news and its audience.

Crowds in Times Square read the zipper’s headlines of the D-day invasion, June 6, 1944. Office of War Information, Library of Congress. Public domain.

Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 205 NOTES Carey and Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” inCommunications as 1 Reporter Milton Bracker referred to the sign as “a ribbon of light.” See Bracker, Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. James W. Carey (London: Routledge, 2009), “History of a Decade Told By a Ribbon of Light,” The New York Times, Nov. 13, 92-93. 9 1938. The sign’s manufacturer referred to it as a “moving letter sign” and advertised Carr, The Big Switch,88. 10 it as “The Motograph.” See “The World’s Greatest Moving Letter Electric Sign Is Nye, American Technological Sublime, 173. 11 the Motogram News Bulletin,” box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, Among the accounts of New York City newspaper buildings are Dale Cress- Archives of the New York Times Company, New York, henceforth NYTA. (Since the man, “From Newspaper Row to Times Square: The Dispersal and Contested Identity author accessed them, these archives have been transferred to the New York Public of an Imagined Journalistic Community,” Journalism History 34 (Winter 2009): 182- Library.) Numerous other authors have referred to the sign as the “zipper,” including 93; Allen Churchill, Park Row (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1958); Hy B. Meyer Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 1851-1951 (New York: Simon and Turner, When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street Schuster, 1951), 336; Tama Starr and Edward Hayman, Signs and Wonders: The Spec- (New York: Fordham University, 1999); and Aurora Wallace, “A Height Deemed tacular Marketing of America (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1998) 155; and David Appalling: Nineteenth-Century New York Newspaper Buildings,” Journalism History E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 191. 31, (Winter 2006): 178-89. Architectural literature includes Bradford Landau and 2 Carolyn Marvin describes the use of chalkboards. See Marvin, When Old Tech- Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven, Conn.: nologies Were New (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 216-20. David M. Yale University Press, 1996); Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fish- Henkins notes that in 1850, thousands greeted opera singer Jenny Lind upon her man, New York 1880: Architecture in the Gilded Age (New York: Monachelli Press, arrival in New York because they learned the time of her ship’s arrival from newspaper 1999); Moses King, King’s Handbook of New York City (New York: Monacelli Press, bulletin boards, and that the diarist George Templeton Strong had made note that 1999); Lee E. Gray, “Type and Building Type: Newspaper/Office Buildings in Nine- news of the Confederate surrender at Richmond was reported on the bulletin board teenth-Century New York,” in The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories, ed. Ro- of New York newspaper The Commercial Advertiser. See Henkin, City Reading: Writ- berta Moudry (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 85; and Lewis ten Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Mumford, the City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 65. Press, 1998), 87. Fred Fedler notes that newspapers in other cities employed similar The development of street signs is addressed in Presbrey, The History and Development bulletin boards, notably those on Boston’s Newspaper Row. See Fedler, Lessons from of Advertising; Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders; and Darcy Tell, Times Square the Past: Journalists’ Lives and Work, 1850-1950 (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 12 Press, 2000), 126. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New; Ira Chinoy, “The Battle of the 3 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone make the distinction between a com- Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age” (Ph.d. diss., munal audience and a those who are reading “en mass but not in a community.” See University of Maryland, 2010); and Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form Barnhust and Nerone, The Form of News (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 182. of the News: A History (London: Guildford Press, 2001). Henkin also asserts that James W. Carey characterized newspaper reading as a ritual in which news is not only since “newspapers were hawked in the streets, they could function as public signs.” transmitted, but its consumption becomes a social act. See Carey, Communications as See Henkin, City Reading, 87. As Nye points out, electric signs are seldom mentioned Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16. in studies of advertising, which focus instead “almost exclusively on broadcasting and 4 Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological the print media.” See American Technological Sublime, 175. 13 Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 3. Electricity, the zipper’s Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 182. 14 defining technology, was developed during what Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes Henkin makes note of crowds gathered at newspaper offices for details of termed the “second industrial revolution” and corresponds with what Lewis Mum- the Hyer-Sullivan fight. See Henkin,City Reading, 88. John Rickards Betts not only ford called “neotechnic phase,” a transition from mechanical to electrical systems and describes similar scenes for other fights, but links the emergence of the telegraph and a period of intense development for instantaneous communication. See Mumford, electricity with the rise of American sport. See Betts, “The Technological Revolution Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1934), 221. Tom Gun- and the Rise of Sport, 1850-1900,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, no. 2 ning identifies the period between the 1870s and the end of the First World War as (1953): 238. Marvin and Paul Young both cite The Electrical Review to describe the one of “cultural wonder” and “an era of technological acceleration and transformation use of signs to convey baseball game results. See Marvin, When Old Technologies Were of the environment.” See Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, New, 214; and Young, “Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Cen- Cinema,” in New Media, 1740-1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree tury,” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 238. 15 Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 42. Election-night crowds were not always drawn for altruistic reasons. After the 5 Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: 1841 election, the New York Herald reported that a mistaken bulletin posted on the The New Press, 2004), 191-98. Courier and Enquirer’s board led to some bad bets. See Henkin, City Reading, 87. 6 Nye, American Technological Sublime, 143. The 1860 election drew so many people to Park Row that theHerald described the 7 Nicholas Carr describes the Columbian World Exposition, held in Chicago to sound of crowd to “rumbling of distant thunder.” See “The Scene around the Herald celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the new world. It Office,” New York Herald, Nov. 7, 1860. Marvin notes that newspapers’ reporting of had its own steam plant for generating electricity for nearly one hundred thousand election results in the late nineteenth century was “the most ambitiously organized incandescent bulbs, arc lights, and neon tubes. See Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: American effort to use new technologies to deliver the news.” See Marvin,When Old Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008), 86. Frank Technologies Were New, 217. 16 Presbrey describes the display used by The New York Times in 1895. See Presbrey, The The Herald’s calcium light was described in “Scenes around The Herald Of- History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and fice,” New York Herald, Nov. 9, 1864, 8. The Tribune’s stereopticon was portrayed in Company, 1929), 507. The Omaha Daily Bee’s June 2, 1898, description of crowds’ “Election Returns—Scene in Front of the N.Y. Tribune Office,”Harper’s Weekly, Nov. reaction to incandescent light used in 1898 at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition is 24, 1866, 744. 17 cited by David Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of Ameri- “In Printing-House-Square, Scenes around the Newspaper Offices,”The New can Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 120. York Times, Nov. 6, 1878. A similar scene drew tens of thousands of New Yorkers 8 Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Sublime,” The Critical Tradition, ed. David into Park Row to learn of election results in 1884, where fights were reported, as well H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1989), 269-80. Leo Marx provides an original as songs, rumors, and insults. However, the election was too close to call, rendering formulation of technological sublime. See Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technol- newspapers’ bulletin board displays useless. See James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A ogy and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1964). Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 233. 18 See also Philip Shaw, The Sublime: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Elec- 2006). James W. Carey and John J. Quirk note that Geddes first drew a distinction trify the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 56. 19 between mechanics (the “mechanical sublime”—to which Carey and Quirk claim The building on which the screen was installed was on the future site of the Marx was actually referring) and electronics, or electrical sublime, which was seen at Flatiron Building. See “Madison Sq., N.Y., on Election Night,” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. the time as having “the power to redeem all the dreams betrayed by the machine.” See 17, 1888.

206 Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 20 Electrical Review, Sept. 1, 1888, 10, cited in Marvin, When Old Technologies 35 Meyer Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 144. Were New, 217. 36 Adolph S. Ochs to James H. Hyde, Sept. 26, 1902, box 47, Times Tower 21 “Printing House Square and Park Row Packed with Citizens,” The New York 1902-1930, Adolph S. Ochs Papers, NYTA. Times, Nov. 9, 1892. 37 For an account of the electrification of New York City, see Burrows and Wal- 22 “Election Returns,” The Electrical Review, Nov. 19, 1892, 151, also noted lace, Gotham, 1149. Descriptions of electrical signs are offered in David E. Nye,Elec - similar arrangements made by the New York World and the Chicago Herald and “many trifying America: Social Meanings of New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: other newspapers throughout the country.” MIT Press, 1990), 50; and Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 163. 23 “Large Crowds Watched the New-York Times’s Bulletin Board,” The New 38 “City’s Tallest Structure from Base to Top,” The New York Times, Jan. 1, 1905. York Times, Nov. 6, 1895. Search lights were first successfully used as “sky-signs” in 39 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 22. the early 1890s, including at the Chicago World’s Fair. See Erkii Huhtamo, “Pre- 40 Turner, When Giants Ruled, 177. envisioning Mediatecture: A Media-archaeological Perspective,” in Mediatecture: The 41 For example, the Chicago Record used a searchlight to report results of the Design of Medially Augmented Spaces, ed. Christoph Kronhagel (New York: Springer- 1896 election by using a series of signals published beforehand in the newspaper. See Wien New York, 210), 25. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 168, 219. 24 “Unprecedented Crowds Gather,” New York World, Nov. 4, 1896. See also 42 According to one account, it cost $167,186 to finish and furnish the top six “Election Night in New York,” Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 14, 1896, 1122; “Vast Crowds floors as well as install the observatory and lantern atop it. See untitled, box 47, folder Cheer; Massed about Bulletins,” New York Tribune, Nov. 4, 1896; and Kenneth 4, Adolph S. Ochs Papers, NYTA. Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst(Berke - 43 “Times Tower Rays Will Flash Results,” The New York Times, Nov. 7, 1904. ley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2009), 191. See also Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 20. 25 Richard Harding Davis to his brother, Nov. 12, 1896, Richard Harding Da- 44 “Crowd Is Saddened When Johnson Wins,” The New York Times, 4, July 5, vis Collection, box 3, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlot- 1910. tesville, Virginia. The Journal described the “cinegraphoscope, that new extraordinary 45 “Bulletins Printed by Unseen Hands,” The New York Times, July 2, 1910. See combination of electricity and photography (that) seemed to make the canvas alive also George L. Campbell and Harry G. Davis, “Telegraph Bulletin-Printer” (U.S. Pat- with moving pictures.” See Dan Streible, “Children at the Mutoscope, Cinémas: Jour- ent 950,473, filed Nov. 11, 1908 and issued March 1, 1910); and A.H. Soler, “The nal of Film Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 91-116. Electric Press Bulletin,” Yale Scientific Monthly19, no. 1 (1912): 103. 26 Tallow candles, which burned wicks in fat rendered from cows or sheep, emit- 46 “News to Crowd by Electric Bulletins,” The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1910. ted a pale amber color. In this case, tallow lights were intended to represent McKinley 47 “Bulletin Machine Fascinates Crowds,” The New York Times, April 25, 1911. and his promise to maintain the gold standard, while white lights represented Bry- 48 “Cheering Thousands Jam Times Square,”The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1912. ant and his campaign promise to replace the gold standard with silver-backed paper 49 “Times Square Now Is City’s Centre,” The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1913. money. 50 Originally named the “New York Times Annex,” the building at 229 West 27 For a description of the Journal’s displays, see Whyte, The Uncrowned King, Forty-Third Street was built in several stages between 1913 and 1948. See Cressman, 191-92. “Flashing Out the Tidings,” New York Tribune, Nov. 3, 1896, describes the “From Newspaper Row to Times Square,” 187. Tribune’s signs on its front page. TheTribune also installed a forty-million candle 51 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 44. carbon-arc searchlight on its building’s rooftop, flashing “its powerful eye over the 52 Ironically, the Times was among those in 1910 that questioned whether the city, piercing the darkness with shafts of brilliant light and making places where it rapid growth of “freak electrical advertising” was in the city’s best interests. See “Elec- rested as light as day.” See “Vast Crowds Cheer; Massed About Bulletins,” New York trical Signs; Movement in New York to Regulate Incandescent Advertising,” The Jour- Tribune, Nov. 4, 1896. TheTribune even took out an advertisement in The Sun to nalist Combined with The Editor and Publisher, Sept. 17, 1910, 1. announce its election plans. See “Signals in the Sky,” The Sun,Nov. 3, 1896,. 53 Bracker, “History of a Decade,” 152. 28 The Times’s bulletin in Madison Square was posted on the north side of the 54 “Frank Reilly, 58, Devised New Sign,” The New York Times, April 11, 1947. Cumberland Hotel, where the newspaper maintained a twenty-foot electric adver- 55 Frank C. Reilly, “Controller for Electric Signs” (U.S. Patent 1,451,112, filed tisement with its new slogan, “All the News that’s Fit to Print,” as well as a plug for Oct. 18, 1918, and issued April 10, 1923). See also Bracker, “History of a Decade,” its Sunday magazine. The building, located on a plot of land known as the “Cow- 152. catcher,” had long been a site of painted advertisements. In 1892, it was the site of 56 Frank Wilde II, interview by Dale Cressman, March 14, 2008. New York’s first “spectacular,” a giant electric light advertisement for Long Island 57 Bakelite was the first plastic to be created from chemicals and was used in this properties. Before the building was razed to make room for the Flatiron building, instance as an insulator. For more information on the development of Bakelite and its it hosted a controversial spectacular for Heinz featuring a giant pickle. See Presbrey, uses, see Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Bakelite: Toward a Theory of The History and Development of Advertising, 506; and Starr and Hayman, Signs and Invention,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Thomas P. Hughes Wonders, 55-58. and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 159-87. 29 F.E. Meinholtz to Orvil Dryfoos, Oct. 27, 1950, box 4, Buildings: Commer- 58 Francis E. J. Wilde, “Electric Sign,” (U.S. Patent 1,626,899, filed Sept. 23, cial-Times Tower, 1943-1960, Orvil Dryfoos Papers, NYTA. 1925, and issued May 3, 1927); and Francis E. J. Wilde, “Electric-Sign Control,” 30 The Times’s displays are reported in “Where to Get the News: Times Bulletins (U.S. Patent 1,626,900, filed March 24, 1926, and issued May 3, 1927). Wilde’s son in Park Row and Madison Square,” New York-Times, Nov. 3 1896; Ochs’s concession characterized his father’s relationship with Frank Reilly as “friendly enemies.” Wilde is detailed in Susan Tifft and Alex Jones,The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family said his father’s partner was a “super salesman.” See Wilde II interview. Regarding behind the New York Times (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 47. See Wilde designating Reilly the president of his company, see Francis E. J. Wilde, letter also Turner, When Giants Ruled, 177. TheWorld boasted of its displays in “At the Pu- to Adolph Ochs, March 8, 1931, box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, litzer Building, 50,000 People Stand for Hours and Cheer Sound Money’s Victory,” NYTA. New York World, Nov. 4, 1896. 59 Frank C. Reilly to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Jan. 21, 1926, box 25, folder 2, 31 “Vast Crowds Cheer,” New-York Tribune, Nov. 4, 1896. Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 32 “City Hall Park Closed, Park Row Also Cut Off to the Usual Bulletin 60 Ibid. Crowds,” The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1901. 61 Ibid. 33 The Herald reported on the new building in “Notice of Removal,” New York 62 “Huge Times Sign Will Flash News,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1928. Herald, Aug. 19, 1893. It is further described by David Garrard Lowe, Stanford White’s 63 Reilly to Sulzberger, Jan. 21, 1926. New York (New York: Doubleday, 1992). For a description of New York City’s 1897 64 Ibid. consolidation and northward expansion, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, 65 “Specification of Moving Letter News Bulletin to be erected on the cornice Gotham: A Story of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), of the Times Building, Broadway, 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, New York City,” 1219-35. For a description of congestion in Lower Manhattan, see Pete Hamill, box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hays Sulzberger Papers, NYTA; “Huge Times Sign Will Downtown: My Manhattan (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), 249. Flash News,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1928; and “The Times’ Famous News Sign 34 Cressman, “From Newspaper Row to Times Square,” 184. Will Be 20 Years Old Saturday,” The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1948.

Journalism History 43:4 (Winter 2018) 207 66 Wilde II interview. New York Times, Nov. 5, 1952. 67 “Huge Times Sign Will Flash News.” 87 “Times Sq. Fails to Get Election Night Crowds,” The New York Times, Nov. 68 Arthur Hayes Sulzberger to Charles F. Hart, March 27, 1929, box 25, folder 9, 1960. 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 88 See Cressman, “From Newspaper Row to Times Square,” 189. 69 Arthur Hayes Sulzberger to Emil Goldmark, April 16, 1929, amended con- 89 Arthur Hayes Sulzberger to Orvil Dryfoos, Sept. 25, 1959, box 25, folder 1, tract signed April 25, 1929. Both items in box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. Papers, NYTA. 90 Ivan Veit to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Sept. 6, 1960, box 25, folder 1, Arthur 70 Leonard Falkner, “The Sky Is His Blackboard,”American Magazine, March Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. In the same memo, Veit noted The Times could 1931, 78-79. invest in a “modern bulletin sign” in the Times Square area, but he calculated such an 71 Francis E. J. Wilde to Adolph Ochs, March 9, 1931, box 25, folder 2, Arthur effort would cost more than $200,000 per year. “I do not believe any electric sign is Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. worth this much to us,” he wrote. “We can get more for our money in other forms of 72 Ibid. circulation and institutional promotion.” 73 Wilde II, interview. Wilde also noted that his father lost “a lot of money” on 91 Sulzberger was alarmed when he learned that Life magazine would take over the deal: “This is one of the greatest signs in the world and it was peanuts for what the zipper when Douglas Leigh sold the building to Allied Chemical. His son, Arthur The New York Times was getting it for.” Ochs Sulzberger attempted to assuage him by explaining that although The Times 74 Everett H. Bickley, “Electric-Display Switching Mechanism,” (U.S. Patent insisted on a restrictive covenant to prevent “any New York newspaper or any radio 1,155,466, filed Dec. 23, 1912, and issued Oct. 5, 1915). Reference to the Colum- or television broadcasting station under common control with such newspaper” to bian Theatre in Detroit can be found in the finding aid for the Everett H. Bickley operate the zipper, Life was not covered by the covenant since it was a magazine. The Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Times had the option of maintaining the zipper, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger told his 75 Everett H. Bickley, undated oral history transcript, Everett H. Bickley Col- father; however, it declined because of cost. The elder Sulzberger replied with a one- lection, Everett H. Bickley Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American line message: “I was not in on this decision.” See A.H. Sulzberger to A.O. Sulzberger, History Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. April 19, 1963; A.O. Sulzberger to A. H. Sulzberger, Apr. 19, 1963; A.O. Sulzberger 76 Ibid. to A.H. Sulzberger, Dec. 31, 1964; and A.H. Sulzberger to A.O. Sulzberger, Jan. 4, 77 Francis E. J. Reilly to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Sept. 8, 1939, box 25, folder 1965, box 25, folder 1, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 92 After the remodeling work, Life magazine installed and operated a new zip- 78 “Frank Reilly, 58, Devised New Sign,” New York Times, April 11, 1947. per until 1970. Newsday, a New York City newspaper, wrote headlines for the first 79 Nye’s recounting of the American Magazine profile of Reilly appears to per- computer-driven zipper until it, too, was replaced with a digital version in 1997, petuate the narrative that credits Reilly. See Nye, American Technological Sublime, when Dow Jones took over its operation. See Cressman, “From Newspaper Row 191. to Times Square,” 189-90. Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit noted the 80 “The Times’ Famous News Sign Will Be 20 Years Old Saturday.” The normal renovation had been done in a “thoroughly insensitive manner” and that the tower operation hours for the sign were 4 p.m. until midnight, at an estimated cost of attracted attention “only for its electronic sign band and a series of signs mounted $417 per week. In September 1939, The Times considered expanding hours to 10 one above the other on its north facade.” See Landau and Condit, Rise of the New a.m. until 1 a.m., at a cost of $754 per week. See untitled Sept. 19, 1939, memo to York Skyscraper, 312. Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 93 “Vast Crowds Cheer,” New York Tribune, characterized the 1896 election Although there is no record of whether hours were extended at that time, there is crowd as “a sublime spectacle.” Ira Chinoy suggested the spectacle of the election mention of operations being extended to sixteen hours daily on Jun. 6, 1944, on the night crowd itself might be considered as the “American democratic sublime.” See occasion of the World War II D-day assault. See untitled, undated memo in Build- Chinoy, “The Battle of the Brains,” 175. ings: Commercial-Times Tower-1920, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. 94 Robert Wojtowicz, ed., Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York (New York: 81 For information on wartime blackouts and dim-outs, see David E. Nye, When Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 174. For media machine reference see Huhta- the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, mo, “Pre-envisioning Mediatecture,” 20. 2010). Also, see undated memo, Buildings: Commercial-Times Tower-1920, and 95 Nye, American Technological Sublime, 191. “The World’s Greatest Moving Letter Sign,” both in box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes 96 This fusion of ambient media content and architecture has even spawned a Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. The number of consecutive days the sign was lighted is sub-disciplined called “mediatecture.” See Kronhagel, ed., Mediatecture. from “The Times’ Famous News Sign Will Be 20 Years Old Saturday.” 97 Advertising display expert Phil Lenger calls Times Square a “top media event” 82 Worried that the sign might have deteriorated because of lack of use, The and “more theater than an urban space.” See Kronhagel, ed., Mediatecture, 172. Times tested the zipper on Sept. 21, 1943, and found it not only in working con- 98 Noting that the term “media” came into common use in the advertising in- dition, but functioning well enough to make a neighboring Coca-Cola sign “look dustry during the same decade as the zipper’s introduction, John Nerone writes that sick.” See Orvil Dryfoos to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Sept. 21, 1943, box 25, folder “journalism would find it continually more difficult to assert its independence from 2, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger Papers, NYTA. Daytime photographs exist of the zipper the less sanctified sectors of the media,” which concentrated on “producing spec- reporting on the D-day landings, June 4, 1944. tacles.” See Nerone, The Media and Public Life: A History (Cambridge, U.K..: Polity 83 Notified that Torpey had also recently lost a son during the war, Sulzberger Press, 2015), 144-45. wrote Torpey a note to tell the engineer he was “heavily on my mind as I stood in 99 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 182. Times Square that day to see the crowd react to the victory bulletin.” See Arthur 100 Randall Patnode, “‘What These People Need Is Radio’: New Technology, the Hayes Sulzberger to James J. Torpey, undated, box 25, folder 2, Arthur Hayes Sulz- Press, and Otherness in 1920s America,” Technology and Culture 44, no. 2 (2003): 289. berger Papers, NYTA. Sulzberger later presented a photo of Times Square taken on 101 Elmo Roper and Associates, The Public’s View of Television and Other Media, V-J Day, inscribed, “To James Torpey, who told this crowd in Times Square that the 1959-1964, box 2.325, folder 31, Les Midgley Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for war was over.” See “The Times’ Famous News Sign Will Be 20 Years Old Saturday.” American History, The University of Texas at Austin. 84 The Times Square website suggests that by 10 p.m., more than two million 102 Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies,” 41. people had assembled in the area. See “V-J Day History,” Times Square, http://www. 103 Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of timessquarenyc.org/events/kiss-in/v-j-day-history/index.aspx#.U4oA0ZRdWy8. The Possible Futures?” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Times reported in 1948 that there were three million “anxious folks gazing at that Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 21. sign.” See “The Times’ Famous News Sign Will Be 20 Years Old Saturday”; and An- 104 Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 190. thony Bianco, Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block (New 105 “The glittering television special,” Carolyn Marvin writes, “is as much the York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 122. fruit of electric light as any other invention.” See ibid., 189-90. 85 Bracker, “History of a Decade,” The New York Times, 152. 106 Patricia Dooley, The Technology of Journalism: Cultural Agents, Cultural Icons 86 “Times Sq. Getting Vote Result Sign,” The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1952; (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 140. and “Old Times Square Tradition Dies; Usual Election Night Uproar Gone,” The

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