Media

The photograph that settles a race is not a picture of the finish. It is a picture of the finish line, and nothing else, taken over and over.

A photo-finish camera does not see the track. It sees one vertical sliver on the line and records it thousands of times a second, laying each strip beside the last. It looks like a photograph because the eye wants it to be one. Left to right is not distance. It is time. Every runner in the frame is in the same place, at a different moment.

That is why the background smears into horizontal streaks: the grandstand never crosses the line, so it is the same sliver forever. A planted foot stretches long because it stayed on the line while the camera kept scanning. Fast is narrow and slow is wide. A runner who stopped on the line would fill the whole picture.

The Olympic version now scans the line up to forty thousand times a second. At the 2012 US trials, a camera running at three thousand had Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh crossing in 11.068 seconds each. The rule is the torso, and in the picture from the outside of the track Tarmoh's torso was behind her arm. The timing official offered an estimate from her bib and bicep. The referee refused it — an interpolation is not a fact. Dead heat. A run-off was arranged. Tarmoh withdrew.

The ordinary language is all about proximity. A nose ahead. Neck and neck. Side by side. In the one document that decides, nobody is beside anyone. Each of them reached the only place that counts alone, and the photograph is where they are set next to each other afterwards. A dead heat is not two bodies level. It is two bodies in the same column.

To get a gardenia into a bottle the old way, you have to kill the gardenia. Pick it, then drive the scent out with heat or pull it out with solvent. Both rewrite what they capture. The most volatile molecules — the top of the smell, the part that reaches you from across a garden — are the first to go, and what ends up in the bottle is a near relation produced under duress.

Roman Kaiser spent a career at Givaudan on the alternative. Seal a small dome around a flower still attached to its plant, draw the air off through an adsorbent trap, then run what you caught through a gas chromatograph. Nothing is picked. He carried it into rainforest canopies, up the European Alps, across the Cape and the Hawaiian islands, and worked through roughly five hundred endangered species.

No part of that stores a smell. What comes back is a list: these compounds, in these proportions. Scent of the Vanishing Flora describes 267 of those species and closes by summarising their analytical compositions. A perfumer can read the table and build the scent out of bottles on a shelf, not one of which has been near the plant.

I keep turning over what kind of record that is. A pressed flower is the thing itself, dead. This is closer to a score — instructions that were never the thing and cannot wilt. For the species on the list that do not make it, the score is what is left standing: a smell anyone can produce, accurate the way a translation of a lost poem is accurate.

An analogue television picture was drawn by a beam — line by line, left to right, top to bottom. When it reached the bottom, the beam needed a moment to climb back up and start over. The broadcast couldn't pause for that, so every frame shipped with blank lines: dead time, transmitted anyway.

In 1974, the BBC started publishing a newspaper in it.

Ceefax — "see facts" — began as a trick for sending subtitles to deaf viewers through those spare lines, then grew into hundreds of pages of news, weather, listings, football. The whole paper streamed past on a loop, riding in a part of the signal no screen displayed. You typed 302 and waited for the scores to come round again. News as a carousel: nothing on demand, everything on rotation, a whole country waiting at different pages.

On a badly tuned set you could even see it — a strip of twinkling white dashes at the top of the picture. The newspaper, leaking into the show.

What gets me is the shape of the existence. The gap was physics: it was there because a spot of light needed travel time. Engineers looked at pure overhead and saw real estate. And when television went digital — no beam, no flyback — the gap closed, and the medium living inside it died on the spot. Ceefax ended at 23:32 on 23 October 2012, and it didn't die of unpopularity. Its habitat was demolished.

Whole media can live in the dead time of other media. Some are only ever visible as noise.