Issue 89

We’ve spent a fair amount of time and pixels on the brand Fairchild (part 1 in issue #75, part 2 in issue #76, part 3 in issue #77, and a sidebar/part 4 in issue #82), but there is a lot more yet to be said. Or maybe I’m just obsessive.

Fairchild’s professional products are still highly-regarded and sought-after, 60+ years after their manufacture. Their designs were forward-thinking, and the build quality was what you’d expect from a company that also built airplanes and precision optics. Outside of a few recording studios, they’re seldom seen these days—so when I found a comprehensive piece on a Fairchild pro product, I immediately wanted to add it to this series.

J.I. Agnew is a recording engineer in the U.K., and wizard in all things analog—as you’ll see if you take a look at his website. J.I. undertook the rebuild and voltage conversion of a Fairchild lathe, and has even used it for direct-to-disc recording. What follows is his incredibly detailed account of that process. I think you’ll find it fascinating—but you will need to allow some time to read it! —And oh: the whole “disc” vs. “disk” issue will not be resolved by this article. Just sayin’.

I’m happy to announce that J.I. will soon be writing a column for Copper, beginning with an explanation of the whole mysterious process of how records are made. And now, here’s J.I.’s Fairchild story—Ed.

This project started from a bare bones Fairchild Model 199 disk recording lathe, which was found in Florida back in 2015. It was manufactured by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation in the mid-1930’s in New York, before the relevant patents were issued. It was originally sold to a radio broadcasting facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it saw very heavy use, at least until the 1950’s. At some point it was sold to someone in the East Coast again and from there, made it down south.

It arrived in a fairly sad state and it was clear that it was going to need a lot of work, as most old disk recording equipment does nowadays when sold at a bargain price.

It did not come with a cutter head or any electronics and was missing several parts, such as the original cutter head mounting bracket with the advance ball assembly.

 

The motor and “drive unit”

Following a thorough cleaning job and ample lubrication, the next challenge was to make it spin at the right speed. It is driven by a hysteresis synchronous AC motor, whose speed depends on the mains frequency of the supply. The motor and gearbox assembly (Fairchild called it the “drive unit”) were designed to run at the correct speed when powered by 60 Hz mains, but because we are located in Europe (50 Hz mains), it ran slow.

The original manual (available on request) noted that a “50 Hz version” of the “drive unit” was available with different gearing, so it would still spin at the correct speed, even though the motor would run slower. But, it proved impossible to find such a unit. Next thought was to machine new gears of the required ratio. The lathe was operated for half an hour at 50 Hz, and it was found that it ran a bit hot, which was to be expected due to the lower frequency. This would unnecessarily reduce its lifespan, so it was decided to leave the gearbox as is and figure out a stable 60 Hz supply. There are many ways to achieve this at low cost, but none of them are suitable for this application. Since the speed of the platter depends on the line frequency, any instability of the line frequency will result in speed instability. Moreover, any deviation from a pure 60 Hz sine wave (harmonics, noise, etc.) will be causing the motor to run hot and produce excessive vibration.

We developed a dead stable and clean 60 Hz supply unit, specifically for running disk recording lathe motors, the Type 191. Problem solved. We designed and assembled a more appropriate and stable wooden furniture for the lathe, and started the search for a cutter head.

Cutter Head Safari

The search yielded an RCA MI-4896 monophonic magnetic cutter head of similar vintage.

It also arrived in a very bad, non-functional state. J. I. Agnew promptly took it apart and rebuilt it, making it functional again.

At this stage, we wanted to do a quick and dirty test run of the whole setup, to see where there problems are and to make a plan of action.

  The easiest way to go is embossing/impressing, rather than cutting the grooves on the blank record. This process relies entirely on plastic deformation rather than the removal of material. As such, no suction system is needed to remove the chip, since there is no chip/swarf produced. It does work best warmed up with a heat lamp though, so we put one together. The platter was far from running true and the gearbox was noisy, most likely due to lack of proper lubrication in the past. Precise measurements were taken to verify where the problem lies. The platter was not very flat and the mounting method left very little room for adjustment. It had to be modified.

Platter experiments

Height adjusters were installed in the platter to compensate for the lack of flatness. Big improvements, but still far from being as precise as it should be.

Several experiments were then conducted with sandwich-type platter arrangements and a lot was learned in the process about how not to make platters.

In the meantime, we started putting together a chip suction system to be able to cut some grooves. As you can see, the blank disk is being held down by means of a "puck", which screws onto the spindle. This arrangement is far from ideal, but at least a starting point. We started out cutting plastic blanks to get the system set up without wasting lacquer disks in the process. The chip they produce is a transparent-whitish fluff, betraying the sandwich construction of the blanks, which appears to be solid black at first glance. The chip suction system needs to be precisely adjusted or it will clog up.

Stylus heating

With this sorted, it was time to try out stylus heating. This should never be attempted before ensuring that the chip suction system is operating reliably. If it fails half-way through the cut, not only is the cut ruined, but the stylus will most likely also end up being ruined. If this should happen with lacquer, it will catch fire so fast, it won’t even be funny.

Weird pattern: Vertical oscillations

Next issue was the vertical oscillations (moire pattern on the disk). This is a very usual problem which is easily solved by means of an adjustable dashpot (which we can supply if required). First we tried an airpot, which sort of worked with the light-weight monophonic head but was not easy to adjust right.

Pitch control system

Then the focus shifted to a more versatile pitch control system, electronically variable, to be able to upgrade to an automatically variable pitch system in the future when the rest of the issues are dealt with.

Upgrade to stereophonic cutter head

The time was finally ripe to upgrade to a stereophonic feedback cutter head, the Caruso Nr. 135! A new head mount was needed, so we designed and built it (we can supply custom cutter head mounts to fit almost any head to any lathe, just ask). The airpot was not adequate for the much heavier Caruso head, so we had to upgrade to an oil dashpot as well. A stereophonic feedback cutter head of course also needs a serious amount of electronics and a different chip suction arrangement. The need for a high performance cutting amplifier system and the lack of any commercially available products at the time, resulted in the development of the Type 891, described in detail in a paper published in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES).

Gearbox overhaul

Now the tiny details are really starting to show. Bearing noises, clattering sounds, rumble, and so on. Time to get dirty and do a full-on gearbox overhaul. While we are at it, why not also get the lead screw sorted out? We actually had to disassemble and put the gearbox back together twice on this machine. The first time was to measure the bearing dimensions and purchase replacements, and adjust the assembly without replacing parts. This kept it running for a bit longer until all the bearings could be found. Some proved very difficult to source, so, as soon as we found any stock, we purchased all of it, to have a good supply. We probably hold the last remaining stock for some of these bearings, and they are running out fast as we rebuild gearboxes and supply other Fairchild lathe owners. When our stock runs out, the only way to keep these lathes running will be to modify the gearboxes to be able to make use of other bearing types which are actually in current manufacture. We can do such modifications in-house, when the need arises. The second disassembly and reassembly was to replace the bearings when all the parts had arrived. Should you require modification or repair work on disk recording lathe motors or gearboxes, do not hesitate to get in touch. Beautiful engineering! Considering that this was actually made in the 1930's, long before CAD, CNC, and digital measurement tools had even been dreamed of, it is absolutely astonishing! The precision of this assembly, the quality of the materials, and the level of craftsmanship would put to shame most modern manufacturing! You can tell that Fairchild was also manufacturing aircraft! No wonder that even nowadays, for the most demanding precision engineering work, manually operated machine tools from the 1950's and even earlier are still being used. They really did use their knowledge, understanding of science, and abilities to their full potential back then, and their results are often still unsurpassed. To be fair though, this is not because it cannot be done as good at present, but simply that it is unfortunately seen as uneconomical to work to such high standards.

Pitch Control

In original form, the Fairchild Model 199 and the almost identical Model 539 were essentially fixed pitch machines, in that the pitch could not be altered during the cut. The operator had a choice of four pitches, ranging from 96 to 161 LPI, which could be selected by means of changewheels, as in early screw cutting lathes. Changewheels are little gears that can be changed out only when the lathe is not in operation. Once the lathe starts spinning, the pitch is defined by the gear installed. A lever is provided to select between inside-out and outside-in direction of cut and there was a fixed relationship between platter speed and pitch, resulting in highly accurate, constant groove spacing. However, it is possible to fit more music per side if the grooves can be made to come closer to each other during silent passages, and the spacing between them opened up for loud passages. This can be achieved manually with electronic pitch control, or automatically with a suitable pitch automation system. The Fairchild was first converted to manually variable electronic pitch control, and a Pitch13 automation system was eventually installed.

Dashpot

The previously made, enclosed dashpot, proved difficult to adjust, so a new head mount adapter was made, with a built-in oil cylinder, along with a plunger. At first, the plunger was made simple and non-adjustable, but was soon replaced with Type 6022, our standard high performance adjustable plunger. This setup allows the vertical damping to be fine-tuned, an essential feature for cutting stereophonic records, where quality matters.

Platter upgrade

So, with the gearbox running as good as new, the platter was no longer satisfactory. Apart from the warping which made it impossible to true it up to the required level of accuracy, it also suffered from an additional major disadvantage: It was made of cast iron, which interacts with the stray magnetic field of a stereophonic cutter head (monophonic heads have weaker fields so it is usually not much of a problem) and ruins the depth of cut adjustment. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the puck clamping of the blank disk is really not a good idea if you are trying to do professional work. The obvious choice was to fit a Neumann-style vacuum clamp-down platter, made of a suitable aluminum alloy to very precise dimensional standards (which means flat as can be). We first had to make a sub-platter with height adjusters and a new hollow spindle, to act as an air channel for evacuating the platter. The teeth around the subplatter provide the impulse to a speed/positioning sensor, to interface with automatically variable pitch and electronic speed regulation systems. The platter is fitted on top of the new sub platter and spindle assembly. A vacuum hose is fitted to the top of the spindle, over the blank disk, and the resulting vacuum firmly clamps the disk onto the platter and most importantly, flattens it out, should it have any tendency towards warping. The 16" platter worked well, but proved uncomfortably and unnecessarily large, leaving very little room for access to other parts. While the rebuilt gearbox now offered extremely stable and quiet operation, it only ran at 33 1/3 rpm, since the 78 rpm step-up parts were removed, to reduce rumble. By this point, I felt it was time to take this lathe to the next level! A custom 14" vacuum platter was machined from an aluminum/magnesium alloy (very similar to the one we made for the Scully lathe project a while ago), a new center bearing assembly was designed, machined and installed, a long shaft was fitted and a massive, floor standing precision motor with electronic speed regulation was installed. The Fairchild has been converted to direct-drive! Now the platter can spin at any speed from 0 to 120 rpm with extreme stability and no rumble whatsoever. In the presence of a "preview" signal, arriving at the automation system in advance of the same signal reaching the cutterhead, the spacing between the grooves can be automatically and dynamically altered, in proportion to the amplitude of the audio signal, calculating the required space along with platter rotary positioning. In the analog domain, when cutting records from tape, a preview head tape machine is required, to derive the preview signal. With digital sources, the "program" signal can be digitally delayed. However, with live sources, as in direct-to-disk recording, there can be no preview signal. In such cases, the lathe can be switched to manual mode, the pitch being varied in real time by an engineer with strong nerves. The heavily modified lathe is now regularly used to cut masters for vinyl record manufacturing. Fairchild lathes, being solidly engineered, make an excellent basis for extensive modification and can result in systems offering performance and functionality giving any of the more modern "status symbol" lathes a good run for their money! I suspect we may be seeing more and more of the vintage Fairchild machines in professional use, as the supply of Neumann and Scully lathes is in a salvageable state is rapidly drying up. I had a really interesting moment some years ago, when I was preparing to solder in some of the automation circuits for that lathe. It suddenly occured to me that I was about to solder a brand-new, state-of-the-art SMD chip, manufactured by Fairchild Semiconductor, on a 1930's disk recording lathe, manufactured by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Cortporation...! - J. I. Agnew

Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

– Salman Rushdie

I’d rather play jazz, I hate rock and roll.

– Ginger Baker

Appreciating music can be so many different things. It can be a tune casually whistled strolling down the sidewalk. It can be a jazz band expertly warping a commonly whistled tune into something new and amazing. Pots, pans, strings and chants, or a soloist mastering counterpoint of incredible complexity. It can be an arena rumbling with decibels of bass, or an orchestra delicately tossing a theme around the stage. Though some still argue, it can even be 4’33” of silence. And, as always, the serious music of one generation, society, or subculture may very well be unrecognizable or intolerable to another. A delicacy in one part of the world is headed directly for the garbage disposal in another.

For some people, in some contexts, music is a neck-up art form, subject to both emotional and intellectual scrutiny. To others, musical magic happens mainly below the waist. It can be a soothing medicine or an energizing source of nourishment. It can be solitary or a social activity; it can communicate, pass the time, catalyze true love, or it can rebel and alienate. I can’t think or work if there is music playing; many cannot think or work without some. Dinner music? Barry White or Bolero? Please no! I need to concentrate. Meanwhile, I have friends who break out in a cold sweat if there isn’t something playing in the background pretty much all the time.

No matter. Human beings express themselves in limitless ways, and I see no compelling reason why, over all, the composers of the 1800’s had any more or less skill than the composers of the 1900’s. Rembrandt, Rubens, Cezanne, Mondrian, and Pollock are all acknowledged as great painters by art lovers, regardless of the profound stylistic and conceptual differences between them. As a music lover, music exploration and the search for work that speaks to me is a great joy. I have yet to encounter a style or genre that I do not get at least some value from. Maybe just a tiny and forgettable sliver that suggests I ask for my money back. But, something. It’s fun for me to hear what people do with sound, even if the result is not to my liking. (I never understood people who tell me how much they love music, followed immediately by a list of genres they detest en masse.)

So, how does this all relate to our audio hobby? It mainly comes down to speakers, the component with the most influence over how the recorded signal is rebuilt into the listening room. When I was a young audiophile…shortly after the discovery of electricity…the prevailing wisdom was that there were speakers for rock and pop, and speakers for classical. (Jazz folks were just, plain out of luck, I suppose.) On the other hand, various experts at the time insisted that, “An accurate speaker is an accurate speaker!” So, what’s the truth, at least as seen by a speaker designer?

The way I see it, there are many aspects of sound, many realms of subjective impression, many kinds of specifications and measurements, that prove to have different weights of importance to the reproduction of different musical genres. While the theoretical concept of a “perfect reproducer” is appealing, that’s not how it works in the real world. In practice, all product design is a series of compromises and trade-offs, and speaker design has more than its fair share. How these are adjudicated by the designer must necessarily take into account the priorities of the listening, and the techniques used to make the recordings that are to be reconstructed. As an example, vocal purity tends to be degraded by rich ambience…just ask a concert hall designer. Deep bass and tight bass rarely go hand in hand. Imaging and seating coverage are at odds.  Etc.

Heck, these days, between computer-aided design and DSP processing, obtaining a flat frequency response, however one wants to measure that, is very doable. Instead, it’s all those trade-offs, that keep a speaker designer up at night. (Well, that and cheesy subwoofer porn.)

I can think of dozens of such balances that must be struck during the design of a speaker. A big one, well known, is that recordings of classical music tend to like a smooth power response from a speaker-room combination. While this can often lead to some deterioration of stereo imaging, that is not a big impediment to getting a concert hall experience. In contrast, EDM, rap, and other electronically-derived music does well with very little room reverberation, so that the sound is clear and spatially precise. Rock is a tricky one, since both electric and acoustic sources might be present. I think you get the idea: No matter what the review said, your favorite speaker for all your minimalist recordings of acoustic jazz is going to be less than ideal on classic rock. Hate classic rock? OK, you’re all set.

Over the coming months, I’d like to explore some of these issues and tradeoffs in more detail, and relate them to the specifications and design details that a listener can use to help understand how a given loudspeaker is likely to perform with a given style of music and a particular recording technique. At the same time, we can look at some approaches both in the design of speakers and in how a listener can set them up, that will help get the most from a wide variety of musical styles. They all deserve to be heard.

I think.

[As I mentioned in Opening Salvo, Ken will be joining Copper as a regular columnist, writing about speaker design, psychoacoustics, and whatever in audio strikes his fancy—Ed.]

Hmmmm……

If I weren’t a writer, always looking for interesting stories, this article would not have been written.

Why?

Because I wouldn’t have ruminated over the fact that, as an atheist, my entire music foundation and love of rock ‘n’ roll and the blues is steeped in black music and, by extension, artists that were, more than likely, taught their craft through the connection of the Southern Baptist churches. It also extends to gospel music as well.

Isn’t it ironic that gospel music is a celebration of the Christian faith whereas rock ‘n’ roll and the blues is viewed as the flipside, often considered “devil’s music”?

Either way, religion in general permeates the music and the sound of the music that I hold most dear.

I say “the sound” because whether it’s the gospel music of The Edwin Hawkins Singers, Ben Harper, and the Blind Boys of Alabama, or the blues sung by Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, or the pop music of Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Levi Stubbs (4 Tops), Eddie Kendricks (The Temptations), Aretha, Martha Reeves (Martha & the Vandellas), Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson— I love hearing it all.

The lyrics almost never matter.

Maybe that’s why.

The lyrics have almost never mattered, regardless of who is doing the singing.

Even Dylan. As much as I love his music, as a teenager, I never understood a lot of it lyrically.

Okay, yes, some songs, such as the Beatles’ “In My Life” and Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” (just to name a couple of examples), do matter and can bring an emotional response out of me, but for the most part, it’s always been the melody.

Oddly, the non-African-American singers I feel the most connection with are directly coupled to blues artists, and almost all are British (another phenomenon of the confluence of timing as they all come out of the same era, 1965-1975): Eric Burdon (The Animals), Mike Smith (The Dave Clark 5), Van Morrison (Them), Rod Stewart (Jeff Beck Group), Gary Brooker (Procol Harum), Steve Winwood (Traffic), Paul Rodgers (Free), Steve Marriott (Humble Pie), as well as Americans Greg Allman, Janis Joplin, and the most underrated American female blues singer from the 1960’s and ’70s, Tracy Nelson.

What we have here is my list of singers (and bands) that I love. Add to that list BB King, Albert King, Freddy King, Memphis Slim, Magic Sam, Paul Butterfield, Johnny and Edgar Winter – just about every blues singer you can imagine – and you get the idea.

So…whether it’s the uplifting gospel-style pop leanings of Earth, Wind & Fire, or the “hell on wheels” devil’s music of Little Richard, I love it.

All of it.

And, none of it makes me want to believe in God— or the devil, for that matter.

I don’t believe there is a Heaven or a Hell.

I wasn’t here before I was born and I’m not gonna be here after I’m gone. Period.

But there is something about the culture of the church that brings out some of the most amazing talent that I have ever heard.

This also extends to country music, as I believe that the discipline that the church experience creates in young people forces a certain weeding out process of the talent pool.

No, I have no studies to prove this but I can tell you this:

On any given night, you can walk into a bar in Manhattan or LA and hear some pretty awful musicians.

That’s what is known as “alternative” music to me. It’s an alternative to actually learning how to play, write, and sing songs with real musical foundations.

I have never walked into the Apollo Theater or any bar in Nashville and seen sucky players. It just doesn’t happen. It’s like it’s against the law or some kind of standard that the older ones pass on to the young ‘uns.

There is something to this, and all I have to say is if it’s the belief in a higher power that somehow imbues the artist to reach for the magic that great artists possess, then I’m all in as a fan.

Ironically, many of you know that I write for other publications and, on occasion, the stories I write about can overlap as my life reflects business, music, and my audio hobby.

I will leave with a quote from a gospel song written by an artist I used to manage. The refrain will be the subject of an upcoming article for Inc.com (a business magazine). The purpose of my articles for Inc.com are to give entrepreneurs tools to help them move their businesses along, and help them to get through tough times.

Great gospel music can be very uplifting, and nothing is a greater example of that than this line from a song called “I Say Grace”. It speaks entirely to how one can approach failure with unyielding optimism.

Andy Fortier, the artist who wrote it, has gone through incredibly hard times, but has always pulled through them with grace and a belief that everything will be all right. This line is so good that even I use it and reflect on it when things seem the bleakest:

“And when the roof caves in, it lets the sunshine in.”

What do we do, as a society, when we are obliged to face uncomfortable realities that require us to make major changes to things we have grown to think of as fundamental? It is a problem we face on a global scale with the emergence of Climate Change, for example. On a personal level, there is absolutely nothing that you or I could do that would make one iota of a difference. Instead, we must look to our leadership at a governmental level. But what we demand of them is that they introduce measures that will address the problem without having any negative impact on our personal convenience. It becomes convenient to frame the issue as someone else’s fault, and it therefore becomes their obligation to get their own house in order first. And of course, nothing of substance actually gets done.

But what of other issues, where, for example, there are things that we are getting dramatically wrong on a societal basis, with disastrous consequences, but where we can each take substantive personal measures that will have an immediate individual impact on a personal level? What then? What changes would you be prepared to make to your personal lifestyle if the payoff was a major, measurable impact on virtually every aspect of your personal health and wellbeing? There is such a thing, if you are prepared to face up to it. It is called sleep.

I have just read a book called Why We Sleep – Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker. If it sounds like another of those new age nostrums concocted by a self-appointed wellness guru, or, worse still, some pig-ignorant celebrity, then I must first correct that misconception. Walker has a PhD in neurophysiology, was professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, and is currently professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley where he is the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on sleep, and his book has become an instant international bestseller. Walker has been invited to speak on TV shows around the world, and his April 2019 “Sleep is your Superpower” TED talk is one of the most-viewed with over a million views in the first 24 hours alone.

 

Walker’s book is a relatively dry and fact-based journey through the various contributions sleep makes to a person’s health and wellbeing. But, dry as it is, it makes for powerful, compelling reading. Even, to be perfectly honest, terrifying reading. What you will learn about sleep may well haunt you for the rest of your life. It should, in my humble opinion, be required reading for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Am I perhaps being a little over-dramatic? That would be a natural conclusion for you to draw. All I can say is, read the book, and form your own informed opinion. But let me share a handful of snippets with you anyway…

First of all, just how much sleep do we need, and how often do we need it? There are two major mechanisms which govern when we need to sleep. The first is a natural rhythm which has evolved at a deep level within our brains, and synchronizes with the diurnal cycle of night and day. It creates an internal clock which makes you feel tired and sleepy at night, and alert and wakeful during the day. The second is a chemical process which builds up in your brain, creating a “sleep pressure” which continues to build inexorably while you are awake, and is gradually relieved as you sleep. If you sleep a regular eight hours every night, both of those processes are in balance. However, if you stay up unnaturally late on a regular basis, even if you get up correspondingly late in the mornings, your sleep cycle will not be properly synchronized with your circadian rhythm and sleep disturbance will result. And if you pull an all-nighter then sleep pressure will build up to a point where you become dangerously drowsy, and scientific research has proven clearly that such drowsiness has effects very similar indeed to those of alcohol. A person who has been awake for 19 hours will be as cognitively impaired as a person who is a legally drunk driver.

Persons who do shift work, or who work for organizations such as the US Navy, whose sleep cycles are grossly disturbed on a regular ongoing basis, can take virtually no comfort from the fact that they have “adequate opportunities” to catch up on their requisite 8 hours of sleep. Your circadian rhythms tell your body when it must sleep, and it is when your body signals that it wants to sleep that you must sleep. A naval rating who has just completed a 16-hour tour of duty cannot simply sleep for 8 hours just because his superior officer commands it. The body will not generally respond. Even though you are dog tired, it can often take a couple of hours to unwind and actually fall asleep. The poor seaman may only get 6 hours of sleep, and that sleep will typically be of poor quality – on top of being at the wrong time.

Even if we talk about aiming for a regular 8 hours of sleep on an “optimum” schedule every day, that still does not resolve the issue completely. At different stages of life, we require different amounts of sleep. It is well known that babies and children sleep a lot more than adults, and as responsible parents we tend to provide for those developing individuals to get all the sleep they need. But at the same time it is also known that teenagers and young adults have a propensity to stay up late, and stay in bed all morning, yet we ascribe this behavior to laziness. It turns out that this is plain wrong. For reasons that remain unclear, the natural sleep cycle of youths is naturally skewed towards late nights and late mornings, and they function notably better on a whole smorgasbord of important tests when they are allowed to sleep on that natural schedule.

In America, many school boards are moving to a schedule that starts the school day at 7:30am, primarily to suit the convenience of parents and teachers. However, this practice exacts an appalling penalty on the ability of those students to learn effectively. But authorities are desperately reluctant to face up to the consequences of these facts. Even at UC Berkeley, where Dr. Walker is director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, the powers-that-be are remarkably reluctant to acknowledge this important – and now unambiguously proven – finding, let alone consider strategies to act upon it. A whole chapter in Walker’s book shines a profoundly disturbing light on the role of sleep in children and developing adults, and the way our society so thoroughly mishandles it.

Even among the adult population there is somewhat of a distribution of how the sleep cycles of individuals synch to their circadian rhythms. Some have naturally early-to-bed, early-to-rise rhythms, whereas others prefer to sleep and rise later. Unfortunately, our social norms have become strongly skewed towards the former, with breakfast-meeting types being seen as proactive, industrious, and strong leaders, whereas natural late risers are seen as lazy, unreliable and unworthy. It turns out that these stereotypes are entirely without foundation, but extreme societal pressure forces the latter types to adopt the behavior patterns of the former, to their dramatic detriment.

What are these dramatic detriments? A better question might be what aren’t they? Let me list a few of them, in no particular order.

• Memory and learning. Sleep plays a critical role in transitioning recently-acquired information from short-term to long-term memory, functions which take place in very different regions of the brain.
• Weight gain. Sleep loss causes the build-up of a hormone that signals hungriness, while at the same time suppressing a companion hormone that signals satiety.
• Tests on mice show truly terrible links between sleep deprivation and cancer. Not only are sleep-deprived mice more likely to develop tumors when exposed to triggering carcinogens, those tumors turn out to be significantly more aggressive.
• Blood sugar. Inadequate sleep disrupts blood sugar to such a profound degree as to classify a person as pre-diabetic.
• Alzheimer’s disease. Some early research on the development of Alzheimer’s is showing what look like clear links between inadequate sleep and the propensity to develop this unpleasant disease.
• A certain part of our DNA is made up of structures called “telomeres”. Long strings of telomeres are found at the ends of the DNA sequences known as chromosomes, and form a kind of protective cap. It is not known what telomeres actually do, but a gradual loss of telomeres are a significant aspect of aging. And – wouldn’t you know it – the less sleep a person obtains, the more damaged are the capping telomeres of that person’s chromosomes.
• Drowsy driving is a major cause of traffic accidents. In fact, vehicle accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined. Furthermore, the inherent nature of drowsy-driving impairment (something Walker covers in great detail) means that those accidents actually tend to be far more deadly.

Walker’s book presents these – and more – not as mere headline-grabbing sound bites. He goes into each one in scientific detail, citing researchers, data and hard numbers, and providing context and counterpoint. It is one of the disappointing aspects of Western culture, its societal values, and indeed its approach to hard science, that we tend to want to reduce critical issues to black and white positions. For example, butter has for fifty years been seen as a BAD THING, a fundamentally unhealthy foodstuff, whereas the reality is quite different, and the product developed to replace it – margarine – is in fact considerably worse for your health. Thus it is with sleep. Mankind has never fully understood the need for sleep. Why we sleep, what happens when we sleep, what doesn’t happen when we don’t sleep…these are questions to which, until now, we have had no detailed answers. And our response to such matters is generally that if we don’t understand something we conclude that it can’t be all that important. Clearly, this has been doing us a great disservice.

As you can tell, this book has made a most profound impression on me. I gave copies to my son and daughter, and feel like I should be recommending it with almost evangelical fervor to anybody else who wants to listen to me.

Or read me.

As a parent, I’m used to my references being met with blank stares or an overt “Huh??” from my children.

But I know I’m getting old when more and more, I encounter the same reactions from regular folks who are otherwise polite. Somehow, “Huh??” is not considered rude. But then, I live in a place where half the adult males wear caps indoors, looking like 12/8ths versions of Beaver Cleaver. So what do I know about etiquette?

As usual, I digress.

So: dropping into conversation the phrase used as this article’s title is, these days, met with a laugh—and no sign of recognition. If I cite it as the title of a book by Richard Fariña—yknow, Mimi Fariña’s husband—y’know, Joan Baez’s sister…..

“Joan WHO?”

JOAN WHO??

>sigh<

I get it, I’m old. But how is it that I’m expected to be able to tell the difference between Post Malone and Watsky—I’ll bet I lost you there— but the younger folk around me have no sense of anything that occurred before their birth, especially when it comes to music?

This is not the standard “bash the millennials” rant: I’ve spent a lot of time defending millennials and twenty-somethings, as I think they’re being left a world of diminished possibilities and an awful lot that’s just completely going to shit…and in general, I find them to be industrious, inventive, and resourceful. They have to be, just to get by.

So—here’s something that’s either amusing or pathetic—you be the judge: I’ve often gone to trivia nights at bars and restaurants, gone up to a group of —umm, youngsters, and asked: “do you need somebody who can answer questions about things that happened before 1990?”

About a dozen times, the answer has been, “sure!” And I’ve helped those teams to kick ass. The other times? Yes, I’ve gotten that look as though I were some type of creeper, and they turn back to their frou-frou fruit-infused beers. It’s a percentage game, like everything else.

There are basically two schools of thought regarding historical awareness. On one side is Henry Ford’s “history is bunk”–but keep in mind this is the man who, when faced with Chevrolet’s six-cylinder engine (introduced to compete against his four-cylinder Model T), said, “I’ve got no use for an engine that has more cylinders than a cow has teats.”

Yup, he said that. Look it up. You think Elon Musk is nuts? Read a little Ford history.

The other side of historical awareness is George Santayana’s “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—which, like most well-known statements, has been misstated and spun in innumerable ways through the decades.

As usual, I agree with both— sorta. Being unaware of history has clearly caused some of the issues we face today; at the same time, I think it’s foolish to feel constrained by the precedents of history.

I really shouldn’t be shocked when someone in their twenties doesn’t recognize the name of Joan Baez. I remember rolling my eyes at my parents’ infatuation with big band and schmaltzy instrumental music, and only begrudgingly learned the names of Tommy Dorsey and my father’s inexplicable favorite, Carmen Cavallaro.

The flip side to not knowing Baez, is me not being able to tell the difference between dubstep and regular EDM, or bachata from reggaeton. I try, but they all run together for me.

I imagine my kids try as well, but somehow all the “whiny white chicks”—their global term for everyone from Baez to Joni Mitchell to Aimee Mann—run together for them.

I guess the moral of the story is that when you can’t tell when “millennial” stops and “Gen Z” begins, you shouldn’t be too critical of other people’s unawareness.

…but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be the graying curmudgeon who yells, “you damn kids! GET OFF MY LAWN!”