How Media Became New

On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institute in Paris was completely full with curious Parisians who came to hear the formal description of the new reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, already well-known for his Diorama, called the new process daguerreotype. 1 According to a contemporary, "a few days later, opticians' shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky."2 The media frenzy has begun. Within five months more than thirty different descriptions of the techniques were published all around the world: Barcelona, Edinburg, Halle, Naples, Philadelphia, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm. At first, daguerreotypes of architecture and landscapes dominated the public's imagination; two years later, after various technical improvements to the process, portrait galleries were opened everywhere — and everybody rushed in to have their picture taken by a new media machine.3 In 1833 Charles Babbage started the design for a device he called the Analytical Engine. The Engine contained most of the key features of the modern digital computer. The punch cards were used to enter both data and instructions. This information was stored in the Engine's memory. A processing unit, which Babbage referred to as a "mill,"