If humans had been blind 2

Following on theme of previous item….

If humans had been blind, we would have no concept of 2 dimensions. The tactile world is 3d. The audio world has 4 dimensions: time, frequency, intensity, and location. The olfactory world probably can’t be dimensionalized at all. Only the retina traps the world in flat 2d. Recording and playing sound would have developed instead of 2d printing. Visual symbols would have been totally unnecessary. Morse-like codes and Braille would have been two paths for writing and reading.

Story’s Story of Wireless Telegraphy makes a salient point.

= = = = = START QUOTE:

This wonderful little instrument, the invention of Professor A. Graham Bell, was given to the world in 1876, and soon became, in a most accidental way, a potent means of advancing the study of electric communication without continuous wires. It was found almost from the first that the telephone was so sensitive that sounds being transmitted on adjacent lines could be heard in it. Professor Trowbridge goes on to say, quoting Steinheil’s dictum: “The spreading of the galvanic effect is proportional to the square of the distance, so that at the distance of fifty feet, only exceedingly small effects can be produced. Had we the means which could stand in the same relation to electricity that the eye stands to light, nothing would prevent us from telegraphing through the earth without conducting wires.” Trowbridge adds that the telephone, though far from fulfilling the conditions required by Steinheil, is the nearest approach thereto.

= = = = = END QUOTE.

Why did the earphone suddenly open new vistas? Because the early telegraphs were designed for the eye. Specifically they were all designed to PRINT a record of the message.

Printing was an old and familiar technology, and vision is always dominant over hearing.

Printing requires power.

Steinheil’s printer was as close as you can get to unpowered recording, but it still needed far more current to make a mark than the earphone needs to drive the tympanum and cochlea.

Bear in mind that the ear can detect one atom-width of air wiggle. More importantly, the ear solely detects WAVES, which are the only possible radio signal. Eyes do a poor job on the time axis, failing above 24 cycles or so. The ear picks up all possible chords and formants and harmonics up to 20k cycles, and eagerly seeks out the slightest changes in the chords.