In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals.

Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the proposed power project a source of fertilizer in time of peace and nitrates in time of war. The dam also would completely drown out the Cascade Rapids and extend slack-water navigation some 40 miles eastward to The Dalles.

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1925 directed the Secretary of War, through the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, to prepare and submit to the Congress an estimate of the cost of surveys, examinations, and investigations of all navigable streams and their tributaries where power development appeared feasible. (Q1)

It is difficult to succinctly explain why, exactly, the United States Army has spent much of its history involved in the construction of dams. It is partly an accident of history, partly the result of interagency federal politics, and entirely a product of American culture. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner examines the history of the American West's water control projects as a religious project, one animated less by practical needs than by a sense that domination of the West's rivers was destiny.

The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, was formed for that purpose. At the time, though, the Army had already been used to survey and improve rivers for nearly 100 years. They were not content to give it up. The result was a rivalry, one with several feints and blows before the two settled into their modern areas of control. For the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hoover Dam was their signature project. For the Corps of Engineers, the battle that would go down in history was the Columbia River Project.

Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally.

While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history. Much of the work of the early independent telephone industry has been lost in the voluminous achievements of AT&T. Even very basic facts become obscure. For example, who invented the telephone? Well, we all know the answer: Alexander Graham Bell. We have mostly forgotten that, at the time, this was a hotly contested question. One of the most prominent alternate claimants to the title was a man named Elisha Gray, today immortalized as the "Gray" in electrical distributor "Graybar," but better known in his time as an inventor of telegraph and telephone equipment. Gray contracted prototyping of some of his inventions to an upstart manufacturer and de facto Western Union spinoff, founded by Enos M. Barton (the "bar" in Graybar) and George Shawk. Impressed by Barton's operation, and at odds with Shawk on its future direction, Gray put together the money to buy out Shawk and became half-owner of the company that would reincorporate, in 1872, as Western Electric (WE).

It is ironic, of course, that a man who might fairly be called one of the top enemies of Bell helped to found the company that would become one of the most important parts of the Bell System. It's not a coincidence: Gray's involvement in WE included plans to manufacture his own telephone design, for which he had filed a provisional patent. Like many of the late 20th century's telephone inventors, Gray's greatest challenge in commercializing his invention was not technical but legal. His provisional patent on a telephone transmitter, substantially similar to the one invented by Bell and possibly older, led Western Union to take take part ownership in WE to advance their own plan to compete with AT&T as a telephone company. That set off a protracted legal battle, whose end result included the termination of Gray's patent claim and Western Union's abandonment of telephony.

It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no longer limited to island nations. It is a great American pursuit, or at least, that's what modern television sports coverage leads you to believe.

There has always been an uncomfortable relationship between software and the manipulation of marks. Techniques developed by casinos became a fundamental part of consumer software, while the software industry wholeheartedly embraced "gaming" as a market (the older meaning of the term here, meaning gambling). We can readily point to a couple of reasons: first, gambling is profitable, and technology is first and foremost a means of accumulation. Second, gambling is mathematical, or at least arithmetical, in nature. Most forms of gambling involve some sort of complex calculation with real-world stakes.

Gambling predates history, or it might be better to say that gambling has been around for as long as recorded history has been able to observe it. Most early gambling seems to have been based on card or dice games, but humans have been betting on animal fights for more than a thousand years. As sensibilities and resources changed, animal fighting has mostly given way to animal competition. The most famous of these wagering opportunities is horse racing, a form of gambling with such a long and pervasive history that it has often achieved a unique regulatory status as one of the only legal sports betting venues in the US. Well, at least, before Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The earliest recorded horse races were held in England in 1539, and bets were placed. By 1666, horse racing had reached such prominence that King Charles II—himself a jockey—commissioned and then won the "Newmarket Town Plate." That event's eccentric history gave way to the King's Plate, a broader 17th-century racing series whose royal remit made up the first formal rules for the sport. Queen Anne founded the racetrack at Ascot in 1711; while it took decades for permanent facilities to be built at the track, only stands for the royal family came before a betting office. As British empire expanded around the world, horse racing spread with it. Likewise, horse racing spread throughout Europe. By the 19th century, horse racing could be found almost anywhere.

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use of submarines in combat; these were primitive machines with very limited operating endurance and navigational capabilities. These submarines were more like torpedoes: you pointed them in the right direction and hoped they went straight.

The First World War benefited from tremendous advances in submarine technology. A number of experimental designs during the 19th century had built practical experience, especially in Germany, and the Germans apt use of the first modern "U-boats" had a significant military impact. British and US designs made similar advances, and submarine warfare was born.

The chief advantage of the submarine is its ability to submerge and maneuver while hidden. WW1 submarines were diesel-electric or gasoline, so their submerged endurance was limited by the power supply stored onboard. Still, these submarines could operate underwater longer than any before, long enough to establish the submarine sneak attack as a key part of naval warfare.

It was also long enough to expose one of the trickiest challenges of underwater defense: communications. Water, especially seawater, is dense and conductive. This is very bad for radio wave propagation: by the first world war it had already been discovered that seawater effectively blocked radio communications. HF radio, the main form of communications at sea (and, in the WW1 era, in general) might only penetrate seawater for a few meters in real-world That meant that submarines had to surface in order to communicate, another de facto limitation on their endurance while submerged.

The Navy had been evaluating electronic communication aboard ships since 1887, when they demonstrated a simple and "radio-adjacent" technology using conduction of waves through the seawater itself. This scheme never worked very well, but was saved by the development of modern wireless transmitters late in that century. Marconi himself demonstrated radio to the Navy in 1899, and in 1903 the Navy bought its first radio sets. Tactical reports from conflicts elsewhere on the globe, like the Russo-Japanese war, reinforced the idea that radio would serve a key role in naval combat.

If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem ¹ had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers. That design meant that the cellular modem functioned basically as a completely independent device, a fully-capable "cellular phone" with the ability to make and receive voice calls. The role of the rest of the smartphone, and its operating system, was just to provide control messages for starting and ending calls.

In modern phones the audio path to and from the modem is digital and it's more integrated into the operating system audio service, but still not fully. You might have noticed, for example, that it is excessively difficult to record call audio on most phones. Regulatory and liability pressures are one reason for this, but another is that it's actually kind of difficult: there may not be any physical way for software running on the main processor to receive audio from the cellular modem. The designer has to put in explicit effort to make that work, effort that only became common more recently to facilitate automatic transcription—and VoLTE, a whole complication that I will simply ignore for the sake of a cleaner historical narrative. You come here to read about old phones, not new ones.

You've probably read enough of my writing to know where this is going: the design of cellular radios, which assume call audio to be part of Their Exclusive Domain, is a legacy of an age-old architectural decision traceable to the original Hayes Smartmodem. It relates to a feature of modems that was widely available, but sparsely used, for much of the PC revolution. The details are odd!