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Before Grout’s telegraph, information took the better part of two days to reach Boston from the Vineyard. Freeman hints at the answer in his 1807 travelogue: “About a thousand or twelve hundred sail anchor in in the course of a year.” Holmes Hole was one of the busiest ports on the East Coast, and wealthy Boston merchants were willing to pay top dollar for advance knowledge of vessels headed North toward their city. Why did Grout choose Holmes Hole for his first telegraph, and not some more prominent venue for vital information? Dr. The arrival of the ship Mercury in Holmes Hole from Sumatra was the first published news bulletin, sent and delivered on Oct. “He has asked a question and received an answer in less than 10 minutes,” wrote historian Abiel Holmes in 1805. By staffing similar stations at regular intervals, the machines delivered visual telegrams at speeds of more than 400 miles per hour, over land and sea.īy October 1801, Grout had installed 13 stations from West Chop to Cohasset, 20 miles outside Boston it was soon extended all the way to his downtown office. The three large moving parts could be rapidly rotated into 196 distinct positions with ropes and pulleys, and the patterns they produced were easily visible through a telescope up to eight miles away, weather permitting. It consisted of a 20-foot-tall mast, topped with a wide, rotatable cross beam (the “regulator”), tipped with a pair of shorter, articulated beams (the “indicators”) and counterweights. It was based on the design of French inventor Claude Chappe, who only a few years earlier had built his first working models outside Paris. (1761–1825) of Boston, who in October 1800 patented what he called the “Telegraphe,” and what we now refer to as the optical telegraph. Two generations before visionaries like Alexander Graham Bell ushered in the modern era of long-distance communication via electricity, there was Jonathan Grout Jr. And though many have focused on the band’s use of vintage synthesizers and theremin, the band does not rely on any one instrument to create its bizarre sounds – proof that brains and hands are a musician’s most important tools.The machine was a telegraph - the first one built in the nation - and it could deliver a complex message to Boston in under 10 minutes. In fact, the mountains and people of western North Carolina are a primary influence on the band’s sound. Close attention to the band’s lyrical content will show that USX is not at all concerned with outer space, but rather focuses on themes of earth, nature, and terrestrial human history.
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However, USX are not simply continuing the space rock tradition (although USX, Minsk, and Harvestman recently recorded a tribute to the British space-searchers Hawkwind ), but are rather a group of musicians who pay attention to a wide variety of music from all eras and origins. The band has often been associated with space rock, and German Rolling Stone even included the band in an article/compilation cd on the history of that genre. USX now approaches a decade of playing, recording, and evolving, and continues to blur the boundaries of heavy music with earsplitting rock that is by turns jangly, crushing, and dark.