Pier.

There has been much correspondence in the local press and on social media over the last week or so regarding the application that Bexley council have made for funding for new development work on Erith Pier. After many years of being ignored the local authority have applied for £300,000 worth of funding to improve facilities on what is the longest pier on the River Thames. There has been much publicity made regarding this application, which is in no way guaranteed to get approved but the council are blowing their own trumpet once again. There are a number of issues with this. First of all. £300,000 is not a huge amount of money in the greater scheme of things, although it is certainly better than nothing and the council have been rather unclear as to exactly what the money will be spent on. If the improvements to the Erith Riverside Gardens or anything to go by then the work will be somewhat underwhelming and not necessarily regarded by local people as very good value for money. Historically, the pier which is a magnificent structure has been mostly ignored by Bexley council and only really concentrated on by local enthusiasts and volunteers to act as host for events such as Erith Pride. Bexley Council's official announcement regarding the funding application reads thus:- "We’ve submitted a £300,000 bid to the Greater London Authority’s Green Roots Fund to help shape an ambitious two-year plan to transform Erith Pier into a greener, more inclusive and sustainable destination. The Erith Garden Pier Project has already gained support from 17 partner organisations, reflecting the scale of opportunity and shared ambition.The project aims to restore shoreline habitats, boost river biodiversity, and improve access for all. Plans include planting trees and shrubs to strengthen climate resilience, creating safer public spaces, and opening up new opportunities for education and research into the Thames’ unique ecology. Located within a key regeneration area, the pier is already a proven attraction, hosting events like Erith Pride and drawing thousands of visitors.The project builds on recent improvements in the town centre, including Riverside Gardens and the new community space at 68 Pier Road. With strong community involvement and a wide coalition of public, private and voluntary partners, the vision is to create a cleaner, healthier river environment and a vibrant public space that reflects local needs. If successful, the bid will help ensure Erith Pier becomes one of London’s most exciting riverside destinations. A decision is expected in November 2025". I know from bitter experience that over 10 years ago there were plans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of Radio Caroline, by hosting a group of celebrations on the pier, including mooring the Radio Caroline ship the Ross Revenge as a visitor attraction for the course of the year of the summer birthday celebrations. I know this for a certainty as I was approached to potentially be the security key holder for the ship while it was moored on the pier. Unfortunately, due to administrative and legal problems, the Ross Revenge never got moored on the pier. Part of the reason for this was that there were a number of competing authorities involved in the negotiations including Bexley Council, Morrison's supermarket and the Port of London Authority, all of whom had different ideas as to what should and should not happen. Then local MP Teresa Pearce got heavily involved, and I along with several others were engaged with negotiations with her and Radio Caroline station manager Peter Moore amongst others. Unfortunately no decision could be reached. Morrisons did not want visitors parking in their supermarket car park and taking up spaces used by customers. The Port of London Authority did not want ships mooring on the pier as they were concerned about damage to wildlife such as worms and bugs in the mud in the river bed under the pier. Some local residents did not understand about radio transmissions and thought that radio broadcasts were some kind of radioactivity and objected through a lack of education and outright ignorance, and it became obvious that a visit of the radio ship to the pier was untenable. We are now past the 60th anniversary of the creation of Radio Caroline and no celebration has ever taken place off Erith Pier. In my opinion, a valuable opportunity was wasted. I am also fully aware that a lot of local people are unaware of Erith Pier, and many people have never explored it, which is a real pity as it is a fantastic place to visit on a pleasant day. The pier was originally created to unload cargo, including giant rolls of newsprint from paper mills in Sweden on their way to the newspaper presses in Fleet Street in the 1950s '60s and '70s. Many sorts of other cargo were also unloaded on the pier and it is only nowadays that it has become a centre for leisure, fishing and casual strolling. It could be so much more with some investment and some volunteering from local people. Comments and feedback  to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

As long time readers will be aware, I am fascinated by historical media formats that are now mostly long forgotten - things such as the failed CED Video Disk format, which was briefly sold by long gone hifi shop Whomes in Bexleyheath, which I have written about in the past. Another format which achieved great success in the USA in the 1950's and 1960's, but only limited popularity in the UK was the in car record player. The rise of the record player in homes made some people question whether record players could be used in other settings. What if your road trip could be accompanied by your favourite music? What if your records could go with you on road trips? And so, the quest for a solution to this problem was imagined by car designers. Could a record player be added to a vehicle? The first in-car record player was called the “Highway Hi-Fi Record Player.” This was a device designed by Dr. Peter Goldmark, who was the head of CBS Laboratories. CBS was the inventor of the Long-Playing microgroove record or LP. This record player was first offered in Chrysler products. At first, it seemed like a win. At this time, there were two record formats that were competing for the market. These formats were the CBS, which was pushing the LP and classical music, and RCA, which was made for the 45-rpm single. When record players were being added to cars, there was always the question of which was the best record type for each situation. The 45-rpm was more manageable in a car due to its size. However, this record needed to be changed every three to four minutes. Goldmark was obsessed with the question of how to make record players work better and more efficiently in the car. He and CBS decided that there needed to be a new record format. What if there was another recording format that was suited perfectly for vehicles? This was the question that Chrysler and people like Dr. Goldmark asked. And it led to work to try and invent a solution to this problem because people wanted to bring their music with them in the car and be free from the reliance on the radio once and for all. Dr. Goldmark succeeded. There was a new record format that was created that was meant to fix all of the issues with old formats. This was supposed to be the solution that made records in the car easy to use and better than ever. The new format slowed the turntable down to 16 2/3 rpm. This was half the speed of the LP. There were stabilizers that were added to the arm to keep it from skipping and scratching. This was called Highway Hi-Fi by Chrysler, and it was very popular. The first records were produced by Columbia, and they offered many popular tracks. These tracks included work by Percy Faith, Cole Porter, and more. These were the hits of the time, and they were meant to be an inducement to make more people want to invest in this new technology. Consumer records did not test the product before it was added to vehicles, but the price tag of nearly £200 would have been a constraint for many people. This is around £1,700 in today’s money. The problem with this record was that it could only be played in the car. You could not just grab your favourite records and head out to go on a drive. This was also an option that was only available on some cars, and they were new cars. There was not a market that was needed to generate lots of records to feed this interest. The other trouble was that the record players kept breaking. Only one year into the process of adding record players to Chryslers, they began to withdraw the option from production. By the end of 1957, these devices were already slated for replacement. In 1960, a cheaper car record player landed on the market. This was the RCA Victor, which was also referred to as the “Victrola.” This record player cost £51.75, which is £410.47 today. This was a more expensive option, but you could play your 45s on this record player. This record player was tested by Consumer Reports. The testers found that the record player would hold 14 records and that these records would play for two and half hours. This was only if extended 45s were used. This record player was also found to be easier to operate, and it allowed you to focus on the road rather than changing the record. Distracted driving has always plagued road safety, and if you think that changing a CD out from your disc changer is distracting, imagine changing out a record! A year later, there was a new record player produced that was made by Norelco. This was called the Auto Mignon. This player only held one 45 rpm record at a time. This was just four and half minutes of play time. The Norelco also did not store records, so storage was an issue within the car. Having access to your records while you drove was never easy, and having loose records in the car could easily lead to broken and damaged records. Surprisingly, these new record players were actually relatively stable and did not skip when you drove. The stylus never jumped over the grooves, even when driving over ruts and grooves. These units also ran faster than the Highway Hi-Fi. This made it sound better and helped to make sure that your other records would play on the record player in your car. This was a smaller unit that fit under the dash and barely impeded the legroom at the front of the car. This was a nice change of pace when compared with the first devices, which were larger and bulkier. This smaller unit probably needed to be bigger to make storage more effective, but the sleek model was a nice change of pace. However, the RCA Victor was discontinued in 1961. The Victrola was discontinued the next year. There was a new technology on the scene, and it would actually be the device that would propel music portability forward. Without the introduction of record players to cars, the next steps of the music portability revolution might never have happened. The eight track tape cartridge quickly came on the scene to replace the record player. These were portable music devices that were easy to store and easy to insert while you were driving. You were also able to listen to lots of music without changing the tape as well. This was revolutionary, and the eight-track tape cartridge solved the problems that could not be resolved through the invention of new kinds of records. The record player was not the solution for bringing music along with you on road trips. It never was. The eight-track tape was the answer to all of these needs and more. For many years, this would be the solution to the “problem” of bringing music along with you on the road. Today’s reality of virtual music that can be carried in your hand-held device would not have been possible without the experiments with record players in cars. The motivation that led to the portability of music was the thought of bringing your music with you on adventures. The concept of a boom box, a portable CD player, or even an iPod would never have been a reality without the thought of putting a record player in a car. Even if the record player in the car idea flopped, it opened the doors to so much more technology. It’s hard to imagine a reality without portable music. You can thank the original car record player for the music that you love to listen to on your phone.

This month marks the 29th anniversary of a rather influential piece of computer hardware. In September 1996, Microsoft announced its first mouse with a scroll wheel in the UK: the Microsoft Intellimouse. It wasn’t the very first wheel mouse, but it set standards and made a huge impact, which is still being felt today. Since the invention of window-based software systems, there’s been a need to let people change what information is viewed in the window. Somewhere along the way, the scrollbar was born—a user-interface element that lets you move viewable text within a window—and it became the standard way that users scrolled through text for at least a decade. Scrollbars are handy and still in use today, but the act of finding the scrollbar on the screen and then clicking its arrows or clicking and dragging a bar slowed things down. That’s why the Intellimouse felt like such a big revelation. It included a wheel that, when rotated, let you scroll through text with ease. In fact, in its initial Intellimouse press release, Microsoft wrote, “IntelliMouse eliminates the need to use scroll bars.” Notably, the Intellimouse wheel also functioned as a third mouse button that clicked when pushed down, which added more possibilities as to how it could be used. The first Intellimouse wasn’t optical yet—that wouldn’t come along until the Intellimouse Explorer in 1999. No, this unit shipped with a then-traditional mouse ball, which tracked movement with a rolling, rubberised metal ball that moved X and Y positional rollers inside the mouse. I recall back in the day, I would spend ages taking apart Intellimice in the company where I worked at the time, in order to clean the grease and fluff the got caked on the X and Y positional rollers over time, and stopped the mouse from working properly. My colleagues thought I was some kind of mouse repair guru, and brought their Intellimice to me for cleaning and repair - and I rather made a rod for my own back in the process. The Intellimouse retailed for $85 in the US, and around £70 in the UK - a huge amount of money for a mouse when compared to today. They began shipping to the UK in November of 1996. At launch, it only worked with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3.0 web browser, File Explorer in Windows 95, and Office 97, but that was enough to make it useful - and more support would come soon. To bring scroll-wheel support to unsupported apps early on, Planet Crafters created a popular shareware program called Flywheel that allowed people to use the Intellimouse with Netscape Navigator before it gained official scroll-wheel support. But other apps soon fell in line. With endlessly scrolling websites growing in popularity at the time, the mouse wheel became a must-have productivity feature. You might say its killer app was enabling you to devour the web at record speed. Within a few years, it felt like scroll wheels had always been there. Microsoft veteran Eric Michelman, the former group programme manager for Excel, wrote an excellent account of the creation of the scroll wheel within Microsoft from his perspective. In the article, the hardware scrolling idea originated when he sought a new way to quickly zoom in and out of spreadsheets in Excel. He rigged up a prototype using a PC joystick and presented the idea to Microsoft’s hardware team, receiving a tepid response. But Michelman didn’t give up. It isn’t clear exactly where the idea of adding a wheel to the mouse originated within Microsoft. Michelman wrote that after some more experimentation on his part, “The hardware guys came back and said that they had considered adding a wheel to the mouse, but they weren’t sure what it would be used for.” Regardless of the wheel’s ultimate origins, the Office team quickly understood that it could be useful—but they disagreed about how. After some vigorous internal debate about whether the wheel should scroll text by default (in Word) or zoom in and out on data (in Excel), the scroll function won out. With a clear purpose in mind, Microsoft’s hardware team got to work crafting the mouse. With regard to scrolling vs. zooming, the Office team ultimately reached a compromise, allowing people to hold down Ctrl on the keyboard while moving the wheel to zoom in and out. This alternate zooming behaviour is still a standard feature of Windows and Windows applications today. After launching in late 1996, the Intellimouse received a warm reception from the press, who viewed the innovation with curiosity. They initially pointed out its limited software support, but soon grew to love it and cite it as an essential upgrade. Today, few recall that Microsoft also launched an Intellimouse trackball—which also included a scroll wheel—at the same time. Meanwhile, the input device industry adopted the wheel-mouse idea wholeheartedly, with several manufacturers (especially Logitech) creating their own scroll-wheel mice and trackballs in short order. Variations of the scrolling idea also sprang up, including mice that used buttons or a rocker switch to scroll instead of a wheel as well as a Trackpoint mouse from IBM. On Microsoft’s part, the Intellimouse was a big commercial success. It spawned a line of successor mice and trackballs that added more buttons, optical tracking, wireless support, and more features over the following decade. In 2018, Microsoft relaunched the Intellimouse brand with the Classic Intellimouse, a new variation on a classic wireless scroll-wheel design. Today, you can still buy Intellimouse models from Microsoft, including the Microsoft Pro Intellimouse, which is aimed at gamers. 

The end video this week features public transport journalist and YouTuber Geoff Marshall whilst travelling on the Elizabeth Line to Abbey Wood Railway Station via Custom  House and Woolwich. Comments and feedback as usual to me  at hugh.neal@gmail.com.