Song King Connecting People Places

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Song King
Series Editor: Frederick Lau

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Song King
CONNECTING PEOPLE, PLACES, AND
PAST IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

LEVI S. GIBBS
COPYRIGHT

Publication of this book was supported by Dartmouth College.

© 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibbs, Levi, author.
Title: Song king: connecting people, places, and past in contemporary China / Levi S. Gibbs.
Other titles: Music and performing arts of Asia and the Pacific.
Description: Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] | Series: Music and performing arts of Asia and
the Pacific | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047738 | ISBN 9780824869908 (cloth alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Folk songs, Chinese—History and criticism. | Wang, Xiangrong, 1952– | Folk singers—
China.
Classification: LCC ML3746.6 .G53 2018 | DDC 782.42162/951009—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047738

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Cover photos: (Front) Wang Xiangrong performing at a Chinese New Year’s gala in Baoji, Shaanxi Province,
on January 5, 2012. (Back) Wang Xiangrong and the author. Photographs by Levi S. Gibbs.
CONTENTS

Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Song King as Medium

CHAPTER 1 The Meanings of a Life
CHAPTER 2 An Education through Song
CHAPTER 3 Representing the Region
CHAPTER 4 Culture Paves the Way
CHAPTER 5 Mediating the Rural and Urban
CHAPTER 6 Between Here and There
CHAPTER 7 Connecting Past, Present, and Future
Epilogue: Global Song Kings and Queens

References
Index
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have contributed to the development of this book

over the years. First and foremost, I want to thank Wang
Xiangrong for sharing his knowledge and experience with me.
Beyond what I wrote about in this book, my lengthy conversations
with him taught me about what it means to be human. I also want
to thank Wang’s relatives and several of Wang’s disciples for
sharing their time with me: Feng Xiaohong, Li Chunru, Zhou
Jinping, Zhang Liaojun, and Li Zhengfei.
The roots of this book began at Ohio State University, where I
was fortunate to learn from Mark Bender, Kirk Denton, Ray
Cashman, and Meow Hui Goh. Also during that time, I benefited
from discussions with Dorothy Noyes, Heather Inwood, Ziying You,
He Man, Mengjun Li, Rongbin Zheng, and Zuchao Shen. For
inspiring me to pursue the social function of folk songs and folk
singers in Chinese society, I am forever indebted to Su Zheng, Li
Wenzhen, and Huang Bai.
More recently, my colleagues and students at Dartmouth
College have provided an inspiring intellectual environment in
which to finish the book. This book benefited from a Leslie Center
for the Humanities Book Manuscript Review Seminar in April 2016,
and I thank Graziella Parati, Dennis Washburn, James Dorsey, Gil
Raz, Theodore Levin, and Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania)
for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. I also thank
Barbara Will, Adrian Randolph, Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Susan Blader,
Sarah Allan, Xing Wen, Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Jonathan Smolin,
Lewis Glinert, Hussein Kadhim, Lucas C. Hollister, Lara Harb, Jung
Ja Choi, Juwen Zhang, Joseph Lam, David Rolston, Charlotte
D’Evelyn, Emily Wilcox, Sue Tuohy, Nien Lin Xie, and Hesheng
Zhang.
Qiao Jianzhong was instrumental in facilitating my research in
Xi’an, and I also want to thank Huang Hu, Gao Hejie, Luo Yifeng,
Yang Cui, Huo Xianggui, and Li Shibin for stimulating
conversations and support during my fieldwork.
Institutional support for my research over the years came from
the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Fellowship
Program; the U.S. Fulbright Program; Ohio State University’s
Office of International Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, and
East Asian Studies Center; the Society for Asian Music; the CHIME
Foundation; Dartmouth College’s Walter and Constance Burke
Research Initiation Award for Junior Faculty and Junior Faculty
Fellowship; Antoinet Schimmelpenninck and Frank Kouwenhoven;
and Bernice Weissbourd.
Jonathan Chipman at Dartmouth College’s Citrin GIS/Applied
Spatial Analysis Lab produced the wonderful map.
I have presented parts of this book in its earlier stages at the
University of Michigan’s Confucius Institute, Shaanxi Normal
University, the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, and meetings of the
Association for Asian Studies, CHINOPERL, and the American
Folklore Society. Chapter 4 was published in slightly altered form
as “Culture Paves the Way, Economics Comes to Sing the Opera:
The Rhetoric of Chinese Folk Duets and Global Joint Ventures” in
Asian Ethnology 76, no. 1 (2017): 43–63. Part of chapter 7 will
appear in “A Semiotics of Song: Fusing Lyrical and Social
Narratives in Contemporary China” in Lijun Zhang and Ziying You,
eds., Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice
(forthcoming from Indiana University Press).
I am extremely grateful to Frederick Lau and Masako Ikeda at
the University of Hawai‘i Press for all of their help and
encouragement throughout this project, as well as to Cheryl Loe,
Debra Tang, Katherine Fisher, Steven Hirashima, and Cindy Yen, to
Lee S. Motteler for his excellent copyediting, to Kara Smith for her
careful proofreading, and to the Press’ anonymous readers, whose
helpful suggestions and comments inspired many improvements.
Any errors that remain are my own. Finally, I want to thank my
parents and my brother Ian for all of their love and support over
the years. I dedicate this book to my wife Aída and my daughter
Rose, who inspire me in everything I do.
Song King
Introduction
SONG KING AS MEDIUM

Standing with his back to the Yellow River and a crowd of eager
eyes, ears, and cameras fanned out in front of him, he asked us
offhandedly, “What shall I sing?” His audience included local
officials intent on advertising the region through its cultural
productions, scholars from other parts of China interested in
documenting this regional culture, foreign scholars such as myself
eager to experience and study “authentic” Chinese folk culture
with video cameras and audio recorders in hand, a cameraman
from a local TV station filming the scholars’ filming of the
performance, and assorted locals who had come to see what all
the excitement was about.1 After a moment of hesitation, the
singer continued, “How about ‘Going beyond the Western Pass’?”
He began to sing,

Dear sis—ai hei—sister, ai,

Don’t you cry for me.
If you cry, I can’t endure the ache in my heart,
At sixes and sevens, all in a bustle, my heart’s in deep trouble.

Heaven has met with disaster,

The five grains are withered and even grass doesn’t grow.
If one doesn’t go beyond the Western Pass,
The days of the poor are truly numbered.2
Full of emotion, the song is ostensibly about a poor farmer forced
to leave his loved one and find work in Inner Mongolia, but it
seems to straddle layers of meaning—personal, local, historical,
and national. The singer—Wang Xiangrong 王 向 荣 (b. 1952)—
would later tell me about various associations he had with this
song at different points in his life. Under the cloak of the
traditional, he was able to infuse the song with thoughts and
feelings about people he had known in the past and even a TV
drama he had seen in recent years.
Wang spent his childhood in a small mountain village near the
intersection of the Great Wall and the Yellow River. He has
journeyed on to become, first, “Folk Song King of Northern
Shaanxi Province,” and later, “Folk Song King of Western China.”
During the course of his career, Wang’s life, songs, and
performances have come to highlight various facets of social
identity in contemporary China.3 After winning regional contests in
the late 1970s and a national contest in Beijing in 1980 where he
met Deng Xiaoping, Wang was hired by a regional song-and-dance
troupe, traveling on regional, national, and international tours
(Zhao Le 2010). He later relocated to the provincial capital of
Xi’an, assumed positions of power in several associations, and was
selected as a National-Level Representative Transmitter for the
Intangible Cultural Heritage of Northern Shaanxi Folk Songs in
2009 (5).4
When itinerant singers from the countryside become iconic
artists, worlds collide. The lives and performances of
representative singers such as Wang become sites for
conversations between the rural and urban, local and national, folk
and elite, and traditional and modern.5 As border walkers who
move from place to place, these singers straddle different groups,
connecting to diverse audiences by shifting between amorphous,
place-based, local, regional, and national identities, and becoming
representative symbols in the process. These singers embody
connections between different “heres” and “theres,” offering
audiences a range of viewpoints and desires to engage with—
exchanges that allow audience members to resituate themselves
in the larger scheme of things. This book examines the life and
performances of Folk Song King of Western China Wang Xiangrong
to look at how itinerant performers present audiences with
traditional, modern, rural, and urban “selves” and “Others” among
whom to continually redefine themselves in an evolving world. By
looking at how one iconic singer has adapted and mediated
between different audiences on a micro level in speech and song
in specific events and connecting the insights gained to other
singers in China and around the world, this book suggests that
itinerant singers become iconic by modeling the socialization of
self to diverse audiences.
The song Wang sang that day by the Yellow River in 2006
brought together personal and social meanings, doing so in
unique ways for each audience member. The “traditional” songs
Wang sings in performances act as vessels—held up for all to see
—encompassing a mélange of public and private emotions. The
song he performed that day also served as a marker distinguishing
different groups (e.g., local, regional, national, human) against the
backdrop of others. As we listened to Wang, the territory on the
other side of the Yellow River (Shanxi Province) was distinct from
the banks of Shaanxi Province on which we stood. Wang’s song
about a local migrant traveling to neighboring lands embodies
local and regional identities within northern Shaanxi Province on
one hand, while also bridging the two provinces and a third on the
river’s edge. Wang’s position facing us on “this” side of the bank,
in this context, was emblematic of iconic Chinese folk singers—
referred to as “song kings” (gewang 歌 王 ) and “song queens”
(gehou 歌 后 ). Facing each group from the group’s edge, these
singers enact exchanges between perspectives with the goal of
redefining senses of self.
Places mentioned in the book.

In many ways, singing a traditional song with a symbolic

backdrop behind and a diverse audience in front is a typical setup
for Wang and other iconic singers. The singers project their
powerful voices toward each audience, blending together with the
visual and conceptual backdrops behind the singers and their
songs, presenting a fusion of the personal and social, the
individual and the collective to those seated before them. Through
the lives, personas, and songs of these song kings and queens,
they bring together what lies behind and what sits in front—they
serve as mediums between worlds. Acting as cultural mediators
(cf. Filene 2000; Harker 1985), folk songs and folk singers can
express the unity and diversity of a nation and/or various ethnic
groups (cf. Gorfinkel 2012; Meeker 2013). As singers such as
Wang Xiangrong move from place to place and adapt material
from one context to another, they take on interstitial identities,
making them well suited to become representatives of larger and
larger constructed regions with fuzzy borders—from locality to
region to nation. In areas of the world such as China with
increasing divides between countryside and city, these singers
offer a sense of contact between urban centers and rural
peripheries.
If the story of the song king is about mediating between what
is figuratively behind the singer and who is seated in front, my
place throughout this book is hovering at Wang’s side, watching
how it is done. During my fieldwork with Wang Xiangrong and
other singers and scholars in Xi’an and various localities in
northern Shaanxi Province in 2006, 2010, and especially 2011 to
2012, I documented Wang’s performances in Xi’an and northern
Shaanxi to see how he presented his active repertoire to a variety
of audiences in different ways, interviewed Wang extensively
about his life and songs, and translated those songs line by line
into English. Much of my fieldwork involved looking at how Wang
spoke to different audiences before, during, and after his songs.
Sometimes, the performance contexts to which I accompanied
Wang surprised me—they included weddings, business openings,
and even Christmas concerts, in addition to more “mainstream”
performances in official Chinese New Year celebrations and school
anniversaries. Throughout, I combined a singer-centered approach
with historical research on northern Shaanxi folk songs and
singers, attempting to see connections across time and space.
That day by the Yellow River in the summer of 2006, behind
Wang lay a symbolic river and an Other territory beyond, each
providing a metaphorical framework for the song’s performance.
The song’s origins lay in the past—how far back, we did not know
—and the song would continue to be sung for years to come, just
as the river’s waters came from somewhere sight unseen, heading
onward toward an unseen destination. Between the horizons of
origin and end stood the singer. His song, projected at us, was
rooted in past performances and tradition—the river’s source—
while simultaneously projecting desires for us to move toward if
we so chose. Rivers suggest movement—the passage of time—but
also a stillness within that movement, moments where we focus
on the “now” connecting what has been and what will be, calling
to mind where we come from and where we are going, offering us
an opportunity to consider how our lives fit into a larger “stream”
of events.6
Rivers, like songs, also bring to mind other places.7 Their
waters originate in some other place and flow off to yet another
place. Just as the river’s image encourages us to consider the past
and future, it also asks us to think about our relationships with
other places. Song kings and queens, as I go on to suggest, are
like rivers—each singer originating in one place and meandering
through many other places, carrying elements of their origins
while adjusting those elements to each new surrounding. Iconic
singers offer audiences opportunities to reflect on the past and the
future, as well as the audience’s geographical and social location
in the world. The songs of these kings and queens, like the river’s
water flowing by us, are both physically “here,” arriving and
adapting to our local banks and climate, and metaphorically
“there,” coming from and reflecting other places and times.
The image of the Yellow River has served as a symbol during
important moments in China’s history, a site for public
conversations much like the songs Wang sings and aspects of his
life as a song king. During my fieldwork in 2011 and 2012, Wang
would often accompany his performances with video images of the
gushing, rushing waters of the Yellow River projected on LCD
screens at the back of each stage. Depending on the event and its
organizers, other images were also present: Chinese flags waving
in the wind; celebratory messages for Christmas, Chinese New
Year, or the opening of a new business; images of revolutionary
martyrs; a large portrait of Mao Zedong; and the wedding photo
of a new couple, to name a few. Similar to the Yellow River’s
symbolic image framing Wang’s performance back in 2006, these
other images contributed to the interpretive contexts for each of
Wang’s performances. In addition, Wang’s appearance as an
experienced, older singer called to mind the past, reinforcing the
nostalgic qualities of his speeches, songs, and the river imagery
itself.
Like the river, the Other territory behind Wang offered a similar
combination of meanings. While Wang’s song meant different
things to different people, it presented some aspect of otherness
to each audience member in a relatable way. What was “behind”
Wang’s song depended in part on the observer. It could be
another place, another time, or both. What really sits “behind” a
singer as he or she performs? Sometimes, the audience sees the
singer’s elusive hometown—a place that may no longer exist
except in the memory of song, such as the small mountain village
where Wang was born near the intersection of the Great Wall and
the Yellow River, Marugeda. At other times, the audience sees a
larger region—a county, a prefecture, a province, perhaps even a
nation. They might see the history of a place or people. They
might also see the personal history of the singer as he or she
moves through time and space. The audience may see themselves
reflected back or an exotic Other—another place, people, or time
presented for their consideration. Sometimes, what the audience
sees is a mixture of all of the above.
The diverse audiences that sit before iconic singers have
different needs and expectations. Wang and other song kings and
queens, similar to legendary singer-heroes of the past, offer local
audiences a symbol of place-based identity and a means of self-
expression. These singers’ itinerant experience means that the
sense of local authenticity they bring has traveled through space
and time and returned home, validated by people in other areas of
China, foreigners, and the news media. Regional audiences look to
these singers as embodiments of the region performing songs that
unite disparate localities into a common whole, while connecting
the local to the nation. National audiences see these singers as
incarnations of Chineseness who also provide evidence of the
nation’s diversity—bridging regions, the common people, and the
elite. For foreigners and some foreign scholars, song kings and
queens offer an “authentic” Chineseness rooted in a particular
place—both culturally unique and resonating with a sense of our
common humanity.
In the singers’ performances, each of these audiences finds a
combination of the familiar and the exotic against which to form a
sense of identity, socializing the personal, relating the individual to
the collective, and delineating communities—identifying who
“they” are as individuals and groups and who “they” are not. The
worlds that singers create in song with diverse imagery and sung
personae serve as vessels of desires, emotions, and points of view
with which audience members can choose to align themselves or
distinguish themselves from, moving freely between subjectivities
as they explore how that movement feels. In the stories of the
singers’ lives and their performances of region-representing and
nation-representing songs, song kings and queens embody fuzzy
personae providing sites for audiences to merge individual and
collective desires.8 The personae in those songs—both voices
heard and entities addressed—offer models of individuals who
embody collective experiences. A peasant singer praises Mao
Zedong and China. A rural lover describes how difficult it is to get
together—a message that applies as much to sweethearts as to
urban residents in the throes of modernity.
Moving between places, song kings and queens bridge social
groups. When I interviewed Wang Xiangrong later in 2010, he
suggested that two target demographics for his 2006 CD were
“common people” (laobaixing) and “high-level” intellectuals, the
latter of which included music scholars.9 His performance by the
Yellow River included both groups. These two demographics—folk
and elite—suggest a range of people who individually find their
own meanings in his songs. Wang’s singing, then, attempts to
bridge the popular and elite, insider and outsider, here and there,
and familiar and exotic. While we might imagine a spectrum of
performance contexts from local village performances to national
and international extravaganzas, the events “in between” shed
light on some of the most interesting aspects of performance. Just
as audiences evaluate performances, deciding what is successful
and what is not, performers “read” their audiences, determining
what each audience might appreciate and sometimes playing with
their audiences’ assumptions. Performers strive to craft
performances appreciated by the diverse audiences who sit before
them—country people and city people, those from this part of the
province and that part of the province, those from this province
and other parts of China, as well as Chinese and foreigners. Ideal
performances push and pull each audience, bending without
breaking them, playing with their expectations in order to make
them sit up and take stock of who they are and where they stand.
In doing so, song kings and queens place various realms in
relation to one another, providing an order to the universe like
Chinese kings of old (D. Howard Smith 1957, 183). Social order
within and across groups is based on networks of relationships.
Kings provided a focal point for the interaction of socially relevant
groups of the time—heaven, earth, other kingdoms, other peoples
—and in doing so gave individuals and groups a means of
interacting with and defining themselves in relation to others.
Chapter 1 notes that legendary singer-heroes of the past known
as “song gods” and “song goddesses” acted as intermediaries
between the mundane and the divine, an idea that continues with
rural spirit mediums in the twentieth century, one of whom was a
childhood role model of Wang Xiangrong, discussed in chapter 2.10
Standing between the earthly and godly, these legendary singers
had dual identities allowing them to mediate between realms,
participating in each without fully belonging to any. People
referred to these singer-intermediaries as “demigods” (banxian 半
仙 , literally “half-immortals”) and “almost emperors,” suggesting
their ability to bridge social groups (Schimmelpenninck 1997, 103–
104, 107). Wang Xiangrong and other iconic folk singers seem to
share a similar dual identity. Wang has said that he continued to
be “half a peasant” (ban ge nongmin 半个农民) after becoming an
urban-based song king.11 Over the course of this book, I argue
that song kings and queens serve as intermediaries providing a
sense of continuity amidst change (Van Gennep 1960).

Singers as Mediums
The lives, personas, and songs of iconic singers mediate between
what lies “behind” the singers and their audiences in front. As with
the case of Wang Xiangrong, the life stories of song kings and
queens form powerful iterations of symbolic archetypes (cf. Bantly
1996; Pearson 1984). The dual identities of these singers—they
are both folk and elite—authorize them to represent groups and
connect those groups through performance, highlighting social
tensions of the day and overcoming those tensions through song.
The movement of itinerant singers is crucial to their ability to set
up conversations between groups. The singers’ movement
between worlds—Wang’s move from Marugeda to Yulin City—
highlights differences and similarities between the countryside and
the city, as well as traditional and modern life. In a constantly
evolving world, this ability to facilitate dialogues places iconic
singers at the center of “a crucial part of the processes of change”
(Attinasi and Friedrich 1995, 47). Song kings and queens
negotiate different points of view and serve as intermediaries
offering audiences smooth transitions through social tensions and
changes.
The life stories of these singers provide models for
incorporating the personal into the social. The symbolic power of
stories about song kings and queens often stems from the ways in
which particular anecdotes and themes resonate with earlier
stories about other powerful singers. In stories about Wang’s life,
we see elements resonating with the life narratives of other
contemporary singers as well as precedents set in the tales of
legendary singer-heroes (Gibbs 2011). This resonance in the
stories brings together two levels of meaning. These narratives are
the experiences of an individual, but they are also “more than” the
experience of an individual (Shuman 2005, 4).12 As Amy Shuman
notes, “for a story to be understood at all, it must be recognizable
as a shared experience” (27). Wang’s ability to bridge the personal
and social is further accentuated in his performances. As we will
see, through speech and song Wang brings together parallel
narratives about overcoming obstacles—personal, regional,
national, lyrical—socializing the individual and encouraging
audiences to do the same.
The stories of song kings and queens, then, like the songs they
sing, form sites of public discourse about social issues of the day—
a position both of power and precariousness. As singers cross
borders during their careers, they encounter different ways of
thinking about issues that matter, and the stories of the singers’
lives embody choices about the best ways forward. Similar to
narratives about other song kings and queens and mythological
singer-heroes of the past, the aspects of Wang’s life drawing
particular attention in articles, books, and documentaries highlight
social tensions relevant to a wide range of audiences. These
tensions often point to contradicting public mores between folk
and elite—differing opinions about how one should act in society.
The stories of iconic singers place personal actions in conversation
with the expectations of different groups. Obstacles encountered
by legendary singer-heroes in earlier tales often revolved around
tensions between folkways and Confucian morality. Many of the
obstacles faced by both ancient and contemporary singer-heroes
have to do with ideas about love, sex, and marriage, perhaps due
to a long-standing connection between singing and courtship. We
also see conflicts of class and, more recently, the rural-urban
divide reflected in issues of language, gesture, and singing style.
While the focus of criticism is on performance, the underlying
tensions connect to broader social issues.
Many of the anecdotes in life stories about iconic singers
present singing as a means of representing and negotiating
between different viewpoints. The singers’ stories show the
singers using song to overcome obstacles, gain respect, and
negotiate between groups. The singers’ dual identities allow them
to connect to and maintain a distance from their audiences. As
both “common people” and elite cultural figures, song kings and
queens bridge class, space, and time. They stand on the border of
groups, positioning themselves as both insiders and outsiders and
using that stance to authorize their construction of song worlds
where different viewpoints are exchanged. In addition to
performing songs representing particular groups, we see stories of
iconic singers modeling how to sing as they teach people songs.
During the journeys of these iconic singers, as they learn to adapt
their senses of self after encountering Others, they come to share
what they have discovered with audiences through representative
performances and instructive models. As these singers present
audiences with a range of familiar and exotic “selves” and
“Others,” they offer audiences the opportunity to redefine
themselves through interactions with each persona, providing
individual and group dialogues with difference.
 At the same time, some audiences may disapprove of the
models that song kings and queens provide for the meeting and
merging of subjectivities. Each iconic singer stands with one foot
inside and one foot outside of different groups, and that
precarious, interstitial position often leads the singer’s
representative authority to be questioned. As groups are
heterogeneous and borders often ambiguous, for everyone who
might crown a singer “king” or “queen,” there are others who
decry the singer as a fraud. If a singer becomes too engaged in
presenting a local tradition to others, people from their home
region may find them too cosmopolitan and argue that they have
lost their local essence and no longer merit representing the
group. If, on the other hand, the singer is too local, outsiders may
consider him or her parochial, and he or she will fail to mediate
between groups. As identities evolve in tandem with changing
relations between places, singers’ designations as song kings and
queens are forever contestable and always in flux.
Whether one designates a singer “song king” or “song queen”
or denounces them as “interlopers” or “sellouts” is tied to
individual audience members’ sense of identity and whether the
singer’s representation aligns with that sense (Malone 2011, 2; cf.
Titon 2012; Graeme Turner 2004). Objections to a singer’s
representativeness revolve around aspects of the singer’s persona
and performances that the critics feel diminish the “authenticity”
of the songs, people, and places the singer is said to represent.
The objection may be because, for example, the singer comes
from a different place than the songs she purports to represent;
because he grew up in the city, yet chooses to sing songs from the
countryside; or because she uses a vocal style the critic feels
unfairly represents the broader tradition. Critics who contest a
singer’s status as “song king” or “song queen” are in effect
positioning themselves in relation to larger groups—identifying
with certain groups while distancing themselves from others. By
judging the representativeness of these singers, we declare who
we are and who we are not, as well as who I am and who I am
not. While no singer is beyond reproach, successful singers must
learn to pivot between audiences, glossing over heterogeneity to
construct tangible, symbolic personae that diverse audiences can
relate to.

Songs as Public Conversations

The song Wang sang by the Yellow River that day presented the
audience with a tapestry of meanings connected to the contexts of
previous performances, situating the performed present within a
historical continuum. The performances of iconic songs constitute
continuous public conversations about important issues of the day
—issues that change over time as society changes—forming a site
for public memory (cf. Nora 1989) and the socialization of personal
experience (DuBois 2006; Porter and Gower 1995). The desire for
dialogue inherent to lyric song involves what Thomas DuBois calls
“the communicative nature of lyric” (97). This desire seems to be
rooted in a yearning for conversations with Others that in turn
constitute the self. Our eagerness to travel and explore new
places, peoples, and cuisines, to read novels and watch films
about other places and times, to talk with people from different
backgrounds, and to attend performances of dance and music—all
of these lead us to notice what is familiar and different, and adjust
our position accordingly. Similarly, when songs are presented from
one place to another, they offer the possibility for diverse parties
to meet on common ground and discuss different ways of seeing
things.
The goal of such exchanges is to merge different subjectivities
and find a new point of view representing a socialized self. This
pattern of merging subjectivities is repeated over and over in
many of Wang’s songs, stories, and performances I discuss
throughout this book. We see banquet attendees coming together
to “strengthen their feelings,” villagers communing with local gods
in conversations about health and propriety, and couples exploring
new terrains, sharing perspectives as a new relationship—and
point of view—emerges. At the same time, we see examples of
how failing to reach out to others is criticized. Songs about men
and women who do not call out to others and set up mutually
validating exchanges lament the failure of those individuals to
secure their continued existence. If part of one’s existence stems
from being recognized by and forming a sense of self in
conversation with others, individuals who fail to engage with
others soon cease to exist.
The power of song kings and queens such as Wang is that they
can create entire song worlds filled with conversing desires,
ephemeral yet iterable realms populated by voiced and unvoiced
personae. As those personae move through and respond to each
song world, their performed desires form public conversations that
audiences can join in on. At the same time, the song’s personae,
inflected by the singer’s persona, test the audience’s fluid notions
of self and Other.13 Each sung persona allows the performer to
play different roles and express different types of sentiments
(Fong 1990), presenting a mixture of the familiar and exotic
experienced differently by each audience member. These personae
provide crucial contexts that allow singers to sing what they
otherwise could not and audiences to hear those lyrics in an
appropriate manner. The persona of a boatman, muleteer, or
revolutionary peasant singer can say things that other personae
cannot. Furthermore, a persona’s specificity or ambiguity can
either directly address social tensions when desired or gloss over
them when necessary to bridge divergent views and groups in
order to bring those groups together into a larger whole.
 Wang’s broader repertoire of songs contains various sung
personae—a muleteer, a migrant farmworker, a cowherd, a woman
returning to her natal home during festival time, an audacious
playboy, a pair of tender peasant lovers, a guest at a drinking
party, a Mongol man and his female Han lover, a spirit medium
(shenhan 神汉) and the spirit to whom the medium gives voice.14
In some of Wang’s more recent creations—such as his a cappella
version of “The East Is Red” discussed in chapter 3 or his iconic
“The Infinite Bends of the Yellow River” discussed in chapter 7—a
song’s persona may travel through different historical periods,
offering audiences a sense of history and their place in it. By
comparing the personae of Wang’s childhood songs with those of
the songs he performed later during his career as a representative
singer, we are able to get a glimpse of how sung personae are
connected to places large and small and how more specific, local
personae can be developed into larger, more ambiguous, region-
and nation-representing personae. During this process, the
meaning embodied by the lyric “I” grows. In Wang’s childhood
songs that I examine in chapter 2, the “I’s” of each song evoke
the roles of individuals who are recognizable in the village, such as
banquet hosts and guests, spirit mediums, and young people. As
Wang’s repertoire expanded to include the region-representing
songs discussed in chapter 3, the “I’s” in songs such as “Pulling
Ferries throughout the Year” and “The East Is Red” become
representative individuals singing on behalf of the People. By the
time we reach Wang’s iconic “The Infinite Bends of the Yellow
River” in chapter 7, one of the many layered meanings of the
song’s “I” becomes that of the audience and the singer joined
together through song into a collective “we.”
In all of Wang’s songs, the sung personae offer listeners
different Others with whom to interact and gauge their senses of
self. When an audience member hears a migrant farmworker sing
about traveling to Inner Mongolia to find work, he or she may
reflect upon what it means to stay behind and what it would be
like to leave. Hearing the voice of a local spirit sung through a
medium, the listener feels the spirit’s presence and hears its
instructions on how to cure an illness, perhaps leading the listener
to consider the relationships between people and gods. When one
hears a love duet sung between male and female personae, one
may choose to identify with the man, the woman, both, or neither.
In each case, the listener positions him-or herself in relation to the
others.
In addition to these voiced sung personae, there are also other,
voiceless personae—the silent, looming addressees to whom the
singer calls out. In Wang’s a cappella version of “The East Is Red,”
he calls out to the East and the sun, addressing each as “you.” In
another song about a tragic story from China’s pre-1949 past,
Wang calls out to a woman who committed suicide. The act of
calling out to an Other, of singing to an addressee who is
physically absent yet tangibly present in the constructed world of
song, has the effect of internalizing the external—another time,
place, idea, or person—summoning that intangible Other into the
present “time of discourse” for the singer and listeners (Culler
2015, 225). In doing so, the singer’s act of calling out pulls both
singer and listeners toward a desire connected to the song’s
addressee. For example, calling out to a deceased female relative
can express the desire to indict the tradition of arranged marriage.
Calling out to the East or the sun can represent a desire for the
warmth of national community.
As singers address these Others, they set up mutually defining
conversations. On the one hand, the singer constructs the Other
through the singer’s address (Althusser 2001). A peasant singer
praising the greatness of Chairman Mao constructs Chairman
Mao’s greatness as the singer calls out to him. A male sung
persona constructs the tragedy of a deceased woman as he calls
out to her. At the same time, the singer’s persona is also
constructed through the act of calling out to an Other (Frith
1996b, 183). By calling out to the dead woman in the example
above, the male sung persona shows that persona’s concern and
despair. By calling out to Chairman Mao, the peasant singer
persona in the earlier example constructs himself as a
representative of the People. Though these exchanges are
seemingly one sided—only the singer is physically present and
heard—the act of address suggests a conversation that audiences
can observe and join in on, identifying with the sung persona or
the addressee, or choosing to stand on the sidelines (cf. Fiske
2011).
What makes these conversations unique is that they take place
in front of an audience. The singer “addresses both his [or her]
audience and the interlocutor of the story” via a “double
directionality” (Frankel 1974, 262; Gilman 1968). Jonathan Culler
(2015, 8) calls this “triangulated address,” where audience
members are free to position themselves at varying distances from
the various personae on display (cf. Fiske 2011).15 Just as the
singer is both within and outside of the sung personae he or she
embodies, the audience can also choose to identify with or
objectify those personae—what John Fiske calls “implicating” and
“explicating” (2011, 174–175). Allowing us to be both inside and
outside of those personae with the freedom to shift between the
two positions, lyric song offers us the experience of subject
positions from within and without, without fully committing
—“being of two minds” (Brown 2004, 133; cf. Samei 2004, 7). We
as the audience have the freedom to choose, as well as the
freedom not to choose—floating in between, saying while not
saying, agreeing yet not agreeing.
In Wang’s performances and those of other iconic itinerant
singers, the singers adapt the in-betweenness of their lives,
personas, and songs to each audience as they model the meeting
and merging of self and Other. Mediating between the rural and
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 12 feet, thus holding water adequate to the development of
about 100,000 horsepower. The mouth of the canal is 600 feet
from the shore line proper, and considerable work was
necessary in its protection and excavation. The bed is now of
clay, and the side walls are of solid masonry 17 feet high, 8
feet at the base, and 3 feet at the top. The northeastern side
of the canal is occupied by a power house, and is pierced by
ten inlets guarded by sentinel gates, each being the separate
entrance to a wheel pit in the power house, where the water is
used and the power is secured. The water as quickly as used is
carried off by a tunnel to the Niagara River again. …

"The wheel pit, over which the power house is situated, is a

long, deep, cavernous slot at one side, under the floor, cut
in the rock, parallel with the canal outside. Here the water
gets a fall of about 140 feet before it smites the turbines.
The arrangement of the dynamos generating the current up in
the power house is such that each of them may be regarded as
the screw at the end of a long shaft, just as we might see it
if we stood an ocean steamer on its nose with its heel in the
air. At the lower end of the dynamo shaft is the turbine in
the wheel pit bottom, just as in the case of the steamer shaft
we find attached to it the big triple or quadruple expansion
marine steam engine. …
{440}
The wheel pit which contains the turbines is 178 feet in
depth, and connects by a lateral tunnel with the main tunnel
running at right angles. This main tunnel is no less than
7,000 feet in length, with an average hydraulic slope of 6
feet in 1,000. It has a maximum height of 21 feet, and a width
of 18 feet 10 inches, its net section being 386 square feet.
The water rushes through it and out of its mouth of stone and
iron at a velocity of 26½ feet per second, or nearly 20 miles
an hour. More than 1,000 men were employed continuously for
more than three years in the construction of this tunnel. …

"The American Company has also pre-empted the great

 utilization of the Canadian share of Niagara's energy. The
plan for this work proposes the erection of two power houses
of a total ultimate capacity of 125,000 horsepower. … With
both the Canadian and American plants fully developed, no less
than 350,000 horsepower will be available."

"Within the last five years," said the "Electrical Review," in

a "historical number" issued at the beginning of 1901, "there
have been built in many parts of the world electrical
installations of great magnitude, transmitting the power of
cataracts for considerable distances. The longest of these, in
California, operates over a distance of 115 miles. Perhaps the
largest of them is that at Niagara, where 105,000 horse power
is developed, and much of it transmitted … to the city of
Buffalo"—20 miles.

The first transmission of power from Niagara Falls to Buffalo

was made at midnight, November 15-16, 1896, when 1,000
horsepower was sent over the wires to the power-house of the
Buffalo Railway Company. The important event was signalled to
the citizens by the firing of cannon, the ringing of bells and
sounding of steam whistles.

ELECTRICAL SCIENCE:
The rotary magnetic field.
Polyphased currents.
Nikola Tesla's inventions.

"At about the same time [1888], Galileo Ferraris, in Italy,

and Nikola Tesla, in the United States, brought out motors
operating by systems of alternating currents displaced from
one another in phase by definite amounts and producing what is
known as the rotating magnetic field. This invention seems
destined to be one of the most important that has been made in
the history of electricity. The result of the introduction of
polyphase systems has been the ability to transmit power
economically for considerable distances, and, as this directly
operated to make possible the utilization of water-power in
remote places and the distribution of power over large areas,
the immediate outcome of the polyphase system was power
transmission; and the outcome of power transmission almost
surely will be the gradual supersession of coal and the
harnessing of the waste forces of Nature to do useful work."

Electrical Review,
January 12, 1901.

The following description of Tesla's invention was given by N.

W. Perry in the "Engineering Magazine": "If the north and
south poles of a small horseshoe magnet be suspended over a
bar of soft iron free to revolve in a horizontal plane, or be
placed over an ordinary compass-needle, the latter will be
attracted at either end by the poles of the magnet and take up
a position parallel to a straight line drawn between the two
poles of the magnet. Now if the latter be revolved through any
angle the soft iron or needle will follow, being dragged
around by the magnet, and if the magnet be caused to revolve
regularly the iron will also revolve, being pulled around by
the full force of the magnet. It was not feasible, however, to
cause the magnet to revolve in this way, and Tesla's invention
consisted in obviating this trouble and, in fact, greatly
simplifying the problem. He conceived the idea that if he took
an iron ring and used two alternating currents, one of which had
its maximum value at the instant that the other had a zero
value—or, in other words, two currents whose periods were such
that one waned as the other increased—he could produce in that
iron ring by winding these circuits in alternate coils
surfaces that without any mechanical movement of the parts
would travel around that ring with a rapidity equal to the
number of changes of direction of the currents employed. He
thus had a ring, the north and south poles of which were
rapidly revolving just as would the poles of the horseshoe
magnet were it tied at its middle to a twisted string and
allowed to revolve. A piece of iron pivoted at its middle
placed concentric with this ring would therefore be dragged
around by the changing poles of the ring. He had thus
discovered what is somewhat awkwardly expressed by the
expression, 'the rotary magnetic field,' and also the use of
what have been termed 'polyphased currents'—the one referring
to the magnetism and the other to the combination of currents
by which this changing magnetism was produced. This discovery
is undoubtedly one of the most important that has ever been
made within the domain of alternating currents."

Engineering Magazine,
volume 7, page 780.

Another of Tesla's inventions or discoveries which excited

greater popular interest was that which produced what were
called "high frequency effects," first publicly shown in
connection with a lecture at Columbia College, in the spring
of 1890. "Mr. Tesla started with the idea of setting matter
into vibration at a rate approximating that of light (some two
and a half millions a second), with the expectation that
under such violent molecular agitation it would emit light. He
has not as yet succeeded in obtaining so high a rate, but a
much lower one produced some very surprising luminous effects.
… The dynamo method for getting very high frequencies was soon
abandoned as inadequate, and the oscillatory discharge of a
Leyden jar or plate condensers was substituted. … Perhaps the
most surprising of the new facts elicited from his
investigations is that the shock due to these very high
voltage and high frequency currents can be supported by a
person without any serious inconvenience. He passes a current
of two hundred thousand volts through his body with perfect
impunity."

F. J. Patten,
New Science Review,
volume 1, page 84.
ELECTRICAL SCIENCE:
Development of the Telephone System.

The annual report of the American Telephone and Telegraph

Company (by which the property and business of the American
Bell Telephone Company were taken over at the close of the
year 1899) for the year ending December 31, 1900, contains the
following brief review of the development and growth of the
telephone system, especially in the United States: "The year
just passed rounds out the quarter century, within which is
compassed the discovery and application of the art of
transmitting speech by telephone.
{441}
A brief review of the development and growth of this new
industry, which has become so important a factor in commercial
and social life, seems appropriate at this time. Twenty-five
years ago the wonderful invention of Professor Bell was made
known to the world. Twenty-three years ago the first telephone
exchange in the world was established in the United States, and
from that beginning has been built up the great system of
exchanges, and the network of connecting lines over which
conversation can be held between points over a thousand miles
apart. Twenty years ago there were 47,880 telephone
subscribers in the United States, and 29,714 miles of wire in
use for telephonic purposes. At the end of last year, there
were 800,880 exchange stations equipped with our instruments,
and 1,961,801 miles of wire were employed for exchange and
toll line service. The United States has, from the beginning,
held the leading place among nations in respect not only of
the extensive development of the business, but in the
employment of modern and improved appliances, tending to
greater efficiency of service.

"In connection with the record of development of telephone

service in this country, some comparison of the systems of
foreign countries is of interest. The latest reports that can
be obtained, part of which are for the year 1899, others to
 the close of 1900, show the countries next in order to the
United States, as respects the development of telephone
service, to be the German Empire, having 229,391 stations;
Great Britain, 171,660; Sweden, 73,500; France, 59,927;
Switzerland, 38,864: Austria, 32,255; Russia, 31,376;
Norway, 29,446.

"As before stated, there were, at the close of last year, more
than 800,000 stations connected with the exchanges of our
licensee companies, which exceeds the aggregate number of
subscribers in all the countries of Continental Europe. In
addition to this, there were over 40,000 private line stations
equipped with our telephones. The number of exchange and toll
line connections in the United States now reaches almost two
thousand millions yearly."

More detailed and precise statistics of the telephone service

in the United States are given in the report as follows:

January 1,
January 1,
1892.
1901.

Exchanges. 788
1,348
Branch offices. 509
1,427
Miles of wire on poles. 180,139
627,897
Miles of wire on buildings. 14,954
16,833
Miles of wire underground. 70,334
705,269
Miles of wire submarine. 1,029
4,203
Total miles of wire. 266,456
1,354,202
Total circuits. 186,462
508,262
Total employees. 8,376
32,837
Total stations. 216,017
800,880

The estimated number of exchange connections daily in the

United States, made up from actual count in most of the
exchanges, is 5,668,986. Or a total per year of about
1,825,000,000. The number of daily calls per station varies in
different exchanges from 1 to 15.9, the average throughout the
United States being 7.1. The average cost to the subscriber
varies according to the size of the exchange and character of
the service, from less than 1 to 9 cents per connection.

ELECTRICAL SCIENCE:
Dr. Pupin's revolutionary improvement
in long-distance Telephony.

The most important advance in telephonic science that has been

made since the invention of the Bell instrument was announced
at about the beginning of the new century, as the result of
studies pursued by Dr. Michael I. Pupin, of Columbia
University, New York. Mathematical and experimental
investigations which Dr. Pupin had been carrying on, for
several years, led him to a determination of the precise
intervals at which, if inductance coils are inserted in a long
conductor, an electric current in traversing it may be made to
travel far without much loss of force. He is said to have
taken a hint from seeing how waves of vibration in a cord are
strengthened by lightly "loading" it at certain exact points,
determined by the wave lengths. It is probably correct to
 describe his invention as being a scientific ascertainment of
the points in a long telephonic circuit at which to load the
electric current in it, and the precise loading to be applied.

In a paper published in the "Western Electrician," describing

his investigations mathematically, Dr. Pupin wrote: "If an
increase in efficiency of wave transmission over a cord thus
loaded is to be obtained, it is evident that the load must be
properly subdivided and the fractional parts of the total load
must be placed at proper distances apart along the cord,
otherwise the detrimental effects due to reflections resulting
from the discontinuities thus introduced will more than
neutralize the beneficial effects derived from the increased
mass. … The insertion of inductance coils at periodically
recurring points along the wave conductor produces the same
effect upon electrical wave transmission as the distribution
of the small loads along the stretched cord … produces upon
mechanical wave transmission along the cord."

The result is said to be that conversation by telephone over a

distance of 3,000 miles is made not only practicable but easy,
and that it is believed to be as practicable through submarine
cables as through overland wires. If it does not make the
telephone a common instrument of communication from continent
to continent, it will, at least, improve oceanic telegraphy
beyond measure. According to newspaper report, Dr. Pupin's
invention has been sold to the Bell Telephone Company for a
very large sum.

ELECTRICAL SCIENCE:
Wireless Telegraphy.

"In 1864 Maxwell observed that electricity and light have the
same velocity, 186,400 miles a second, and he formulated the
theory that electricity propagates itself in waves which
differ from those of light only in being longer. This was
proved to be true by Hertz, in 1888, who showed that where
 alternating currents of very high frequency were set up in an
open circuit, the energy might be conveyed entirely away from
the circuit into the surrounding space as electric waves. … He
demonstrated that electric waves move with the speed of light,
and that they can be reflected and refracted precisely as if
they formed a visible beam. At a certain intensity of strain
the air insulation broke down, and the air became a conductor.
This phenomenon of passing quite suddenly from a
non-conductive to a conductive state is … also to be noted
when air or other gases are exposed to the X ray.

{442}

"Now for the effect of electric waves such as Hertz produced,

when they impinge upon substances reduced to powder or
filings. Conductors, such as the metals, are of inestimable
service to the electrician; of equal value are non-conductors,
such as glass and gutta-percha, as they strictly
fence in an electric stream. A third and remarkable vista
opens to experiment when it deals with substances which, in
their normal state, are non-conductive, but which, agitated by
an electric wave, instantly become conductive in a high
degree. As long ago as 1866 Mr. S. A. Varley noticed that
black lead, reduced to a loose dust, effectually intercepted a
current from fifty Daniell cells, although the battery poles
were very near each other. When he increased the electric
tension fourfold to sixfold, the black-lead particles at once
compacted themselves so as to form a bridge of excellent
conductivity. On this principle he invented a
lightning-protector for electrical instruments, the incoming
flash causing a tiny heap of carbon dust to provide it with a
path through which it could safely pass to the earth.
Professor Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti of Fermo, in 1885, in an
independent series of researches, discovered that a mass of
powdered copper is a non-conductor until an electric wave
beats upon it; then, in an instant, the mass resolves itself
into a conductor almost as efficient as if it were a stout,
unbroken wire. Professor Edouard Branly of Paris, in 1891, on
this principle devised a coherer, which passed from resistance
to invitation when subjected to an electric impulse from afar.
He enhanced the value of his device by the vital discovery
that the conductivity bestowed upon filings by electric
discharges could be destroyed by simply shaking or tapping
them apart. …

"The coherer, as improved by Marconi, is a glass tube about 1½

inches long and about 1/12 of an inch in internal diameter.
The electrodes are inserted in this tube so as almost to
touch; between them is about 1/30 of an inch filled with a
pinch of the responsive mixture which forms the pivot of the
whole contrivance. This mixture is 90 per cent. nickel
filings, 10 per cent. hard silver filings, and a mere trace of
mercury; the tube is exhausted of air to within 1/10000 part.
… The coherer, when unexcited, forms a link which obstructs
the flow of a current eager to leap across. The instant that
an electric wave from the sending-station impinges upon the
coherer it becomes conductive; the current instantly glides
through it, and at the same time a current, by means of a
relay, is sent through [a] powerful voltaic battery, so as to
announce the signal through an ordinary telegraphic receiver.

"An electric impulse, almost too attenuated for computation,

is here able to effect such a change in a pinch of dust that
it becomes a free avenue instead of a barricade. Through that
avenue a powerful blow from a local store of energy makes
itself heard and felt. No device of the trigger class is
comparable with this in delicacy. An instant after a signal
has taken its way through the coherer a small hammer strikes
the tiny tube, jarring Hs particles asunder, so that they
resume their normal state of high resistance. We may well be
astonished at the sensitiveness of the metallic filings to an
electric wave originating many miles away, but let us remember
how clearly the eye can see a bright lamp at the same distance
as it sheds a sister beam. Thus far no substance has been
discovered with a mechanical responsiveness to so feeble a ray
of light; in the world of nature and art the coherer stands
alone. …

"An essential feature of this method of etheric telegraphy,

due to Marconi himself, is the suspension of a perpendicular
wire at each terminus, its length twenty feet for stations a
mile apart, forty feet for four miles, and so on, the
telegraphic distance increasing as the square of the length of
suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, July, 1898, Marconi
sent from a yacht under full steam a report to the shore
without the loss of a moment from start to finish. This feat
was repeated during the protracted contest between the
'Columbia' and the 'Shamrock' yachts in New York Bay, October,
1899. On March 28, 1899, Marconi signals put Wimereux, two
miles north of Boulogne, in communication with the South
Foreland Lighthouse, thirty-two miles off. In August, 1899,
during the manœuvres of the British navy, similar messages
were sent as far as eighty miles. …

"A weak point in the first Marconi apparatus was that anybody
within the working radius of the sending instrument could read
its message. To modify this objection secret codes were at
times employed, as in commerce and diplomacy. A complete
deliverance from this difficulty is promised in attuning a
transmitter and a receiver to the same note, so that one
receiver, and no other, shall respond to a particular
frequency of impulses. The experiments which indicate success
in this vital particular have been conducted by Professor
Lodge."

G. Iles,
Flame, Electricity and the Camera,
chapter 16 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.).

"Shall we not," said Professor John Trowbridge, in an article

published in the "New York Tribune," January 6, 1901, "in the
 next hundred years dispense with the limitations of wires and
speak boldly through space, reaching some expectant human ear
hundreds of miles away with the same ease that we now converse
in a room? It is already possible to send messages by dots and
dashes sixty to seventy miles without the use of wires. In the
early days of the telephone this was the practical limit of
that instrument, and we are all familiar with the immense
extension which has taken place. Shall we not see a similar
extension in the field of wireless telegraphy? Some late
experiments which I have made lead me to be optimistic in
regard to a possible great extension of the methods of
wireless telegraphy.

"In the first place, I believe that these experiments prove

that wireless telegraphy is not necessarily or merely
accomplished through the air, but, on the contrary, that the
earth plays the controlling part, and that the message flows,
so to speak, through the earth or over its surface rather than
through the air. The most striking experiment was as follows:
The poles of a storage battery of twenty thousand cells were
connected with the ground at the Jefferson Laboratory, and I
was enabled to receive the message in a room three quarters of
a mile from the laboratory without the use of masts or wires
of any sort. The earth was the medium of communication, and it
seems possible, by arranging the sending and receiving apparatus
suitably in connection with the electrical capacity of the
earth, that we may dispense with lofty masts and overcome in
this way the curvature of the earth."

{443}

Extensive experiments in wireless telegraphy are being

conducted by the United States Weather Bureau, of which the
following is a recent report: "Recognizing the advantage that
would result to commerce and navigation by the establishment
of wireless electrical communication between vessels at sea
and exposed points on our lake and sea coasts, and also
between islands along said coasts and the mainland, the
Weather Bureau was directed to systematically investigate the
various methods of electrical communication without wires. The
progress made is eminently satisfactory. New appliances have
been devised for the transmission of signals, and receivers
have been constructed that probably are more delicate than any
heretofore made. Messages already have been successfully
transmitted and received over 50 miles of land, which
presented a rough and irregular surface, conditions most
unfavorable for the transmission of electro-magnetic waves. It
is believed that the efficiency indicated by such transmission
overland is sufficient to operate successfully over several
hundred miles of water. The apparatus used is capable of
further improvement. I hope the time is near at hand when the
great number of craft employed in the coastwise commerce of
the United States and over its great inland seas will be
placed in instantaneous communication with the numerous
stations of our Weather Bureau, which are located at all
important ports. The matter is one of such great importance to
our commerce that I have authorized extensive experimentation,
which, from the success so far attending our efforts, will be
vigorously prosecuted."

United States, Annual Report of the

Secretary of Agriculture,
November 24, 1900, page 12.

On the 12th of March, 1901, the chief of the Weather Bureau,

Professor Moore, gave to the Press the following statement as
to experiments in progress along the Virginia and North
Carolina coast: "The most efficient method of long distance
transmission has been found to be from wire cylinders. The new
coast stations are being equipped with cylinders of sixteen
wires each and 140 feet in length. From these cylinders it is
expected to cover a magnetic field of not less than five
hundred miles. The stations now in operation are at Hatteras
and at Roanoke Island, in Pamlico Sound, North Carolina.
 Workmen are beginning the construction of a station at Cape
Henry, which will be the third station. When this is finished
the two remote stations will be 127 miles apart."

MECHANICS:
Steam turbines.

"The latest form of steam-engine recalls the first. The

steam-turbines of De Laval and of Parsons turn on the same
principle as the æolipile of Hero. That simple contrivance was
a metallic globe mounted on axes, and furnished through one of
its trunnions with steam from a boiler near by. As steam rushed
out from two nozzles diametrically opposite to each other, and
at tangents to the globe, there resulted from the relieved
pressure a swift rotation which might have done useful work. …
Before the steam-turbine could be invented, metallurgists and
mechanics had to become skilful enough to provide machinery
which may with safety rotate 10,000 times in a minute; Watt
had to invent the separate condenser; means had to be devised
for the thorough expansion of high-pressure steam; and the
crude device of Hero had to be supplanted by wheels suggested
by the water-turbine.

"The feature which gives the Parsons steam-turbine its

distinction is the ingenious method by which its steam is used
expansively. In a piston-engine the cylinder is filled to
one-twelfth or one-fifteenth of its capacity with
high-pressure steam, when communication with the boiler is cut
off; during the remainder of its stroke the piston is urged
solely by the steam's elasticity. In the Parsons turbine, by
arranging what is practically a series of wheels on the same
shaft, the steam passes from one wheel to the next, and at
each wheel parts with only a fraction of its pressure and
velocity. …

"The 'Turbinia,' a torpedo-boat of 44½ tons displacement, 100

feet in length, and 9 feet in beam, driven by this turbine,
 has consumed but 14½ pounds of steam an hour per indicated
horse-power. The 'Viper,' a torpedo-boat destroyer of 325
tons, and provided with a turbine capable of developing as
much as 12,000 horse-power, ran at the rate of 37 knots in a
rough sea during her trial trip in November, 1899."

G. Iles,
Flame, Electricity and the Camera,
chapter 5
(New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.).

MEDICAL AND SURGICAL:

The determination of germ diseases.

"Since 1880 it has been proved that anthrax, Asiatic cholera,

cerebro-spinal meningitis, diphtheria, one form of dysentery,
erysipelas, glanders, gonorrhœa, influenza, certain epidemics
of meat poisoning, pyæmia and suppuration in general,
pneumonia, tetanus, relapsing fever, tuberculosis, bubonic
plague, and typhoid fever are due to minute vegetable
organisms known as bacteria; that malarial fevers, Texas
cattle fever, and certain forms of dysentery are due to forms
of microscopic animal organisms known as microzoa; and for
most of these diseases the mode of development and means of
introduction of the micro-organism into the body are fairly
well understood. To the information thus obtained we owe the
triumphs of antiseptic and aseptic surgery, a great increase
of precision in diagnosis, the use of specific anti-toxins as
remedies and as preventives, and some of the best practical
work in public hygiene."

Dr. John S. Billings,

Progress of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
(New York Evening Post, January 12, 1901).

MEDICAL AND SURGICAL:

Antitoxine.
 Treatment of diphtheria.

"In the early study of germs and their relation to disease it

was supposed that the symptoms of the disease depended
directly upon the germs themselves. This, however, has been
proven to be false with reference to most of the infectious
diseases studied. Thus, in diphtheria, the bacilli were found,
as a rule, only in the throat or upper air passages, while the
effects of the disease were far-reaching, involving the heart,
the nerves, and other distant parts of the body. This, and
other like observations, led to the careful study of the
products produced by the growth of bacteria. As the result of
the work of Roux in Paris, and Brieger in Berlin, the exact
nature of the toxic products of the diphtheria bacillus was
discovered. It was found that this bacillus produces in its
growth a poison which is known as the diphtheria 'toxine.'
This was isolated and injected into animals with the
reproduction of all the symptoms of diphtheria excepting the
membrane in the throat. …

{444}

"In his early work upon splenic fever and chicken-cholera

Pasteur, having established the causes of these diseases, set
himself the task of discovering means of preventing them.
After very many experiments he found that animals inoculated
with the germs of splenic fever, when these germs had been
cultivated at a relatively high temperature, were protected
against the disease itself, while these inoculations
themselves were harmless. … These methods of producing
immunity have been extensively used in Europe for the past
twenty years and have been of immense practical value.

"With the discovery that it was not the bacteria themselves

which produced most of the symptoms, but their poisonous
products or toxines, new experiments in immunity were made by
injecting these toxines into animals. It was found that if the
quantity of the diphtheria toxine introduced was at first so
small as not to kill the animal, the dose could gradually be
increased until finally such a tolerance was established that
the animal could resist enormous doses of it. Many theories
were advanced as to the manner in which this tolerance was
established. The conclusion was finally reached that it was
due to the gradual production in the blood of larger and
larger quantities of some substance which neutralized the
toxine, i. e., an 'antitoxine.' … Later experiments showed
that if some of the blood of an animal, which in this way had
been made insusceptible to diphtheria, was injected into
another animal, the latter likewise became to a certain degree
and for a certain time insusceptible; that is to say, became
'immunized. …

"The present plan of producing antitoxine is somewhat as

follows. Large animals, such as the horse or cow, are usually
employed for purposes of injection. In the beginning as large
a quantity of the toxine of diphtheria is injected as the
animal will bear without danger to life. … It is found that
the dose of the toxine can gradually be increased with each
injection until enormous quantities can be tolerated. When
this point is reached at which the injection of large amounts
of the toxine produces no reaction, the animal is said to
possess a high degree of immunity. At this time the
blood-serum contains a very large amount of the antitoxine. A
long time is required for the production of this condition,
the period being from three to twelve months, according to the
size of the animal, its susceptibility, and many other
conditions. … The antitoxine is obtained from the blood of the
animal, generally by bleeding from the jugular vein. … After
standing for a few hours this blood separates into a clot and
a clear portion above which is known as the serum. The
anti-toxine is contained in the blood-serum."

L. E. Holt,
The Antitoxine Treatment of Diphtheria
 (Forum, March, 1895).

See, also (in this volume),

PLAGUE.

MEDICAL AND SURGICAL:

Discovery of the secret of malaria.
Detection of the mosquito as a carrier of disease.

"Twenty-five years ago the best-informed physicians

entertained erroneous ideas with reference to the nature of
malaria and the etiology of the malarial fevers. Observation
had taught them that there was something in the air in the
vicinity of marshes in tropical regions, and during the summer
and autumn in semi-tropical and temperate regions, which gave
rise to periodic fevers in those exposed in such localities,
and the usual inference was that this something was of gaseous
form—that it was a special kind of bad air generated in
swampy localities under favorable meteorological conditions.
It was recognized at the same time that there are other kinds
of bad air, such as the offensive emanations from sewers and
the products of respiration of man and animals, but the term
malaria was reserved especially for the kind of bad air which
was supposed to give rise to the so-called malarial fevers. In
the light of our present knowledge it is evident that this
term is a misnomer. There is no good reason for believing that
the air of swamps is any more deleterious to those who breathe
it than the air of the sea coast or that in the vicinity of
inland lakes and ponds. Moreover, the stagnant pools, which
are covered with a 'green scum' and from which bubbles of gas
are given off, have lost all terrors for the well-informed
man, except in so far as they serve as breeding places for
mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. The green scum is made up
of harmless algæ such as Spirogyra, Zygnema Protococcus,
Euglena, etc.; and the gas which is given off from the mud at
the bottom of such stagnant pools is for the most part a
well-known and comparatively harmless compound of hydrogen and
carbon-methane or 'marsh-gas.'

"In short, we now know that the air in the vicinity of marshes
is not deleterious because of any special kind of bad air
present in such localities, but because it contains mosquitoes
infected with a parasite known to be the specific cause of the
so-called malarial fevers. This parasite was discovered in the
blood of patients suffering from intermittent fevers by
Laveran, a surgeon in the French army, whose investigations
were conducted in Algiers. This famous discovery was made
toward the end of the year 1880; but it was several years
later before the profession generally began to attach much
importance to the alleged discovery."

G. M. Sternberg,
Malaria
(Popular Science Monthly, February, 1901).

"It was the French doctor Laveran who, after a stay in a

deadly malarial region of Algeria, discovered the malaria
parasite in 1880. True, that pigment-cells, which we should
now describe as malaria-parasites, were observed in human
blood as early as 1835, among others by Virchow; but their
relation to the disease was not known. In 1881, Laveran
embodied his researches in a book, but its importance was
overlooked. Bacteria attracted then general attention, and
Laveran's parasite, not being a bacterium, was little thought
of. He stuck, nevertheless, to his discovery, and was soon
joined in his researches by Golgi (the Italian professor to
whom we owe the method that led to the discovery of the
neurons), as also by Marchiafava, Celli, Councilman,
Sternberg, and the Viennese doctor Mannaberg who published in
1893 a full compendium of these researches. Dr. Mannaberg
proved in this book that the real cause of malaria is
Laveran's parasite, and he told its most interesting
life-history so far as it was then known.
 "The parasite of malaria is not a bacterium. It is one of the
protozoa—namely, as it appeared later on, a coccidium, which,
like all other members of that family, undergoes in its
development a series of transformations. … Laveran saw that
some parasites ('corps à flagelles') would send out thin and
long flagella which soon parted company with the mother body,
and, owing to a proper helicoidal movement, disappeared in the
plasm of the blood. This never happened, however, in the body of
man, but only when a drop of his infected blood was drawn and
placed on the glass plate under the microscope.
{445}
Laveran noticed, moreover, minute 'crescent-shaped bodies'
which adhered to the red corpuscles and looked very much like
cysts, protected by a harder envelope. From fifteen to twenty
minutes after these bodies had been placed under the
microscope, they also gave origin to a great number of
'flagella'; and this evolution, too, he remarked, seemed to be
accomplished only when the cysts were taken out of the human
body.

"It was only natural to conclude from these observations that

the further development of the flagella may take place in the
body of some other animal than man, and this consideration
brought Laveran, in a book which he published in 1884, to the
idea that, taking into consideration the quantities of
mosquitoes in malarial countries, they may be the agents of
transition of malaria. This remark passed, however,
unperceived. Many had the suspicion that gnats may play some
part in the inoculation of malaria: the Italian peasants
always thought so, and in the medical literature an American
doctor, Mr. King, had advocated the same idea. But the
complete life-history of the malaria parasite being not yet
known fifteen years ago, the necessity of the mosquito or of
some other living being serving as a host for the completion
of the reproduction-cycle was not understood."

P. Kropotkin,