6

THE NAKED EYE GOES
ELECTRONIC

If the human body’s obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.¹

—LARRY FLYNT, HUSTLER PUBLISHER

In the early seventies, Lena Sjööblom never dreamed that there would be such a thing as the internet, let alone that she would be the most important woman in its history. Yet a clock hanging in her living room bears the inscription “Miss Internet of the World,” a title bestowed upon her by adoring fans.² While the world at large has never heard of Sjööblom, to the people who helped develop the internet in its early, formative years—the imaging community—the former Swedish model is a legend.

Sjööblom’s rise to geek fame began in 1969, when the vivacious eighteen-year-old native of Järna, a village southwest of Stockholm, set out on an adventure to the United States. Having just completed high school, she had no real plan save for visiting a cousin in Chicago. Once there, she found work as a live-in nanny. The job paid the bills and allowed her to absorb the American culture she had grown up watching on television and in the movies. She spoke English well and had no trouble making friends, including some photographers who were struck by the wholesome brunette, a rarity from a nation known for its beautiful blondes.

At the time, most photographers in Chicago fell into the orbit of the city’s recently established publishing sensation, Playboy. While Playboy had begun humbly in Hugh Hefner’s living room in 1953, by the early seventies it was one of the biggest magazines in the world, selling an average of 5.5 million copies per issue.³ That circulation clout gave Hefner a commanding position in the local photography market.

Dwight Hooker, one of Hefner’s mainstays, had already convinced Sjööblom to do some modelling work for catalogues and advertisements. With her laid-back, European attitude to nudity, she didn’t need much prodding to agree to take some test shots for the magazine. For the adventurous Sjööblom, posing nude in Playboy was simply another all-American experience.

Sjööblom made her splash as the magazine’s Playmate in the November 1972 issue in a pictorial entitled “Swedish Accent.” The five-page photo spread depicted her in various states of undress, but also clothed and socializing with friends and family back in Sweden. In one non-nude photo, Sjööblom strolled past a poker aced guard at Stockholm’s Royal Palace with her friend Eva; in another she and her family celebrated Midsummer Eve by dancing around a maypole. (Given the pagan nature of the ritual, it probably would have been more appropriate to be naked in that one.) In the accompanying article, she heaped praise on her new homeland and criticized her native country; while the modelling work influenced her decision to stay in the United States, Sjööblom was more attracted to the freedom. “Though I miss my parents and brother very much and Sweden will always be my home, I couldn’t move back unless the government changed,” she said. “The country’s becoming too socialistic for me.”⁴

Many previous Playmates had basked in the media attention their magazine appearances drew, but Sjööblom fled the spotlight as soon as it hit her. Shortly after the issue was released she moved to Rochester, New York, to do some low-profile modelling work for Eastman Kodak catalogues. In 1977, with her short-lived Playboy fame faded, Sjööblom ended her American adventure and returned to a quieter life back in Sweden, where she found work as an administrator in the state liquor agency.

The seeds of her real fame, however, were sprouting in a small laboratory in Los Angeles, where the first significant research on digital image processing was taking place. Scientists at the University of Southern California had been working on transforming print photos into electronic formats since the early sixties, and by the seventies had established the school as a global leader in the field. In 1971 the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense section responsible for the development of new technology, acknowledged that status by giving the university a contract to digitize images so that they could be transmitted across its newly minted communications network, the ARPAnet. Two years earlier military engineers had successfully tested the network, the precursor to the internet, and the Pentagon wanted to put as much data on it as possible, including photos. The university established a proper research facility, the Signal and Image Processing Institute, to tackle this challenge.⁵ In a time before scanners and other readily available digital technology, SIPI’s mission was daunting.

SIPI researchers built one of the world’s first digital photo scanners at a cost of $250,000, a sizeable fortune at the time.⁶ Newspapers and wire services had been using scanners since before the Second World War, but their devices were analogue and captured a much-degraded reflection of the photo. SIPI’s digital scanner converted photos into the ones and zeros of binary code, which made it easier to manipulate them on computers and transmit them over communications networks. Researchers used the machine to scan photos of simple textures such as wood grains and leather, then aerial pictures taken from planes and spy satellites. From there, they moved on to more varied and colourful photos, including shots of trees, houses and jellybeans. The images were scanned and manipulated on computers through the application of algorithmic patterns, which bent, distorted, fragmented, disassembled, reassembled, blurred and sharpened them. By late 1972, however, the researchers were dying for a human face.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the institute, recalls that his team was desperate for a new test image because they “were tired of looking at all those other pictures.”⁷ One team member ran out to the nearest magazine store and picked up the latest Playboy, the fateful Lena issue. The magazine was chosen because it was one of the few publications that had full-colour, high-quality glossy photos— Hugh Hefner insisted on using only the best photography and paper stock to avoid having his product considered a low-end skin rag—and its centrefold was ideal because it was the right size. Photos were wrapped around the scanner’s cylindrical drum, which measured thirteen centimetres by thirteen centimetres. Folded to hide the “naughty bits,” the top third of the centrefold fit perfectly.

The picture featured a nude Sjööblom standing in front of a full-length mirror, looking back at the viewer over her right shoulder with long brown hair cascading down her back. She wore a floppy hat with a dangling blue feather, a pair of short black boots and stockings, and had a beckoning look in her eyes, punctuated by a mysterious Mona Lisa-like smile. Cropped to show only her head and shoulders, the picture was ideal for image research because it contained a range of colour, had areas that were in and out of focus, and had alternating smooth and detailed sections. The skin tones were flat and simple while the feather on the hat was brimming with detail. It was the perfect candidate for the photo manipulation techniques Sawchuk and his crew had in mind.

SIPI first distributed the Lena image on tapes to researchers at other universities along with three other test photos: a pair of peppers, a fighter jet in flight and a colourful close-up of a mandrill’s face. Sawchuk and his team, however, didn’t tell anyone where they had found their sexy test subject. The picture was rescanned and finally transmitted over the ARPAnet in 1975. ⁸ At the time, the new field of image research was virtually all male and relatively youthful, so it was no surprise which picture got the most attention. Even a fighter jet couldn’t compete with a photo of a beautiful, naked woman.

While the other three images were all but ignored, Sjööblom’s picture quickly became the industry’s de facto standard. As imaging publications noted in later years, it was impossible to work in the industry without being constantly exposed to the photo, which became known simply as “the Lena.” Thumbing through industry journals in the seventies and eighties often turns up more than one Lena, sometimes dozens. “If the criterion is frequency of Lena, then the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing is by far the sexiest journal out there,” read a 2001 newsletter from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.⁹

The story behind the photo, like the best urban legends, was gradually forgotten. As the years wore on, scores of imaging scientists went about their daily algorithms without a clue as to where their sexy test subject came from. To them, she was “just Lena.”¹⁰ Like a modern-day Sleeping Beauty, however, the photo’s past was awakened in July 1991, when it was published on the front cover of industry journal Optical Engineering. The periodical’s editors didn’t know the photo belonged to Playboy and Playboy’s staff had no idea it was being used so widely by the research community. Playboy’s management sent a stern letter asking the journal’s editors to seek authorization before using any of the magazine’s images in the future, a request Optical Engineering was happy to oblige.¹¹

As word of the photo’s origins spread and political correctness crept into society and the imaging community, the controversy deepened and the objections multiplied, many stemming from the belief that Playboy exploited women. David Munson, editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, urged scientists in a 1996 editorial to use other pictures for testing purposes, both to broaden their studies and to placate the many researchers, both men and women, who had complained to him. Munson says his editorial had its intended effect—after 1996, use of Sjööblom’s image dropped off. “People don’t talk about it as much as they used to,” he says.¹²

Nevertheless, by the mid-nineties the Lena had more than made its mark. In the seventies, it took several hours to transmit a photo over the ARPAnet. Using a good test image, researchers were able to refine compression algorithms to both shrink the size of files and speed up transmission technologies. In effect, they made the pipes faster and the data sent over them smaller. Transmission times of electronic photos dropped exponentially as a result. By the late eighties SIPI’s research had led standards bodies to agree on standardized formats for compressed images, including the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), as well as video compression with the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard.

Sawchuk is quite proud of that fact. When I visited USC, he showed me the original lab where the Lena photo was scanned. The space, on the third floor of one of the university’s engineering buildings, its imaging equipment moved long ago, now sits largely unused and looks like any nondescript classroom. Still, Sawchuk beams with pride in showing it off. “We should have a plaque on the door that says, ‘This is where the JPEG was born.’”

The JPEG became hugely important after the American government allowed phone companies such as MCI to connect their commercial email services to its ARPAnet in 1988, a move that effectively created the internet. Electronic text and images were married shortly after, in 1993, with the launch of Mosaic, the first software program to combine the two elements on a single “page” that resided on the internet. The pages became collectively known as the World Wide Web and individually as websites. Image compression work continued through the nineties and, combined with ever-faster network speeds, culminated in near-instantaneous transmission and loading of photos on the internet and Web by the early 2000s, with video not far behind. JPEGs, GIFs and MPEG also became the de facto image and video standards on the Web.

Miss Internet of the World

On my visit to SIPI, Sandy Sawchuk told me a story that pretty much summed up the broad reach of “the Lena.” In the mid-eighties he was visiting the state university of Novosibirsk, a Siberian city deep in the heart of communist Russia, when he was asked if he would like to see the school’s imaging lab. “Would I? Of course I would,” he told me. “So they showed me around and there of course was the Lena.” I also showed the picture to Vint Cerf, the legendary computer scientist who made the first connection on the ARPAnet, and he instantly recognized it. Like many who work in his field, however, Cerf had no idea it was a Playboy image until I told him. Kevin Craig, Playboy’s digital lab manager, tells the other side: “I asked one of the IT guys here and I mentioned her name and he instantly knew who it was. I asked him, ‘Is it more of an inside-IT geek thing?’ and he said that’s exactly what it is.”¹³

The imaging community suitably honoured Sjööblom, the Playmate who inadvertently influenced all those IT geeks, in 1997. Jeff Seideman, then-president of the Boston chapter of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, tracked her down in Sweden and invited her to appear as the guest of honour at the group’s fiftieth anniversary convention. By this point, Sjööblom had three children and several grandchildren and was going through a divorce. She was managing an office that employed disabled people to scan and archive corporate financial records, ironically using technology that traced its lineage back to SIPI. Seideman, a marketing specialist amid a sea of imaging scientists, convinced Playboy to capitalize on its former Playmate’s fame. The magazine paid for her flight to Boston, and when she showed up at the convention, attendees were floored. The forty-six-year-old still had her figure, but her long auburn tresses were gone in favour of a short cut, now grey. Her eyes, however, still had that mysterious spark. “Many of them had spent their entire professional lives staring at her picture and had long since forgotten that she was a real person,” Seideman says. “I introduced her to the main meeting and people were speechless. This creature that we dodged and burned and manipulated and sharpened and did obscene mathematical formulas to was a real human being.”¹⁴

Sjööblom was just as surprised. She had no idea how famous her picture had become. She graciously met and spoke with convention delegates and signed autographs, including copies of her Playboy issue. Kodak, the firm that had produced the first electronic camera and for which she had modelled, set up a booth where convention attendees could have their picture taken with Sjööblom, creating a virtual Möbius strip for the digital age. Sjööblom returned home to Järna with fond memories. Aside from her family and a few friends, no one there knows of her fame. A self-confessed Luddite, she doesn’t really understand the impact her photo had. “I’m not into the internet,” she told me over the phone from Sweden. She does, however, like the clock the imaging scientists gave her as a keepsake. “It’s pretty cool.”

Digital Shift

The same research that went into communications networks also paved the way for the development of many consumer electronic devices, notably digital cameras. Some of the earliest work on devices that could record images onto tapes rather than film began in the early seventies at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company started by William Shockley’s “traitorous eight.” In 1973 Fairchild developed the charge-coupled device (CCD), a light sensor chip that would in later years serve as the brains of a digital camera in much the same way that a microprocessor powers a computer. Kodak licensed the chip, which converted what was seen by a camera lens into an electronic file, and quietly built the first digital camera—a hefty, four-kilo device—in 1975.

The camera took twenty-three seconds to record a single black-and-white photo onto a cassette tape, which was then played back on a television screen through a separate, additional console. Kodak patented the camera in 1977, but didn’t put it into production because of its size and complexity.¹⁵ Steven Sasson, the engineer who built it, later said the company had applied Moore’s Law, which stated that electronics capabilities doubled roughly every eighteen months, to estimate when the digital camera would be compact and cheap enough to reach the general consumer market. Kodak’s best guess was fifteen to twenty years, which proved to be fairly close to the mark: “but in reality, we had no idea,” Sasson added.¹⁶ The irony in Kodak’s work on the electronic camera, which was kept secret for competitive reasons, was that Sjööblom—whose test image was doubtlessly used in the device’s development—was modelling for the company, not that Sasson or his team could have done anything about it even if they knew. Security around the camera was so tight that no one outside of technical staff was allowed into his lab, nor was he permitted to take it outside. Besides, Sasson told me, Sjööblom’s looks would have been squandered. “I had no idea that she was working there. I would have loved to have a model come and sit, but ... they would have been wasted on the quality of the camera.”¹⁷

Other camera and technology companies noticed Kodak’s patent and got to work on their own electronic devices. By the eighties, some had made significant progress in improving picture-capture times, camera weights and image sizes. Sony made a major breakthrough in 1981 when it developed a five-centimetre-by-five-centimetre video floppy disc that allowed it to do away with tapes. Electronic cameras continued to improve throughout the decade, but by the nineties their photo quality was still nowhere near as good as film and they cost upward of $20,000. Still, there were some interested buyers, such as newspapers and the American military, both of whom deployed Kodak electronic cameras in the first Gulf War in 1991. The end of film really began in 1990, when Switzerland-based Logitech released the first true digital camera, which converted images to binary code, connected to a computer and stored images on a memory card.

The computer link finally allowed users to easily transfer photos from their cameras to their computers, where the images could be printed or sent over the internet. Memory-chip capacities grew and image sizes shrank further through new compression techniques, which created a perfect inflection point in size and performance. Throughout the nineties, as the costs of charge-coupled devices plummeted and disc storage capacity rose steadily, digital cameras edged further toward the mainstream. Tokyo-based Nikon kicked the market into high gear in 1999 with the release of the D1, the first single lens reflex digital camera that was affordable to professional photographers. By the mid-2000s, the digital revolution was in full swing thanks to falling prices and continuing improvements in photo quality. In 2002 about 27.5 million digital cameras were sold, accounting for about 30 percent of the total still cameras shipped that year.¹⁸ By 2007 digital cameras had all but killed off their film-based predecessors and essentially made up the entire market, with more than 122 million units sold.¹⁹

The key to the whole revolution was the ever-decreasing size of the photo files themselves, an advance that reached a high point with the JPEG and MPEG standards established in 1988. Like the internet, all still cameras used JPEG as their standard file format by the mid-2000s, while video cameras relied on MPEG.

Eyes in the Sky

The U.S. military’s return on its original investment in SIPI also bore fruit in the form of improved satellite surveillance. Before SIPI, the CIA had relied on spy photos delivered through its top-secret Corona project, an initiative launched in 1960 to spy on the Soviet Union, China and other regions of concern. Corona’s satellites were equipped with high-altitude cameras that ejected spent film canisters, which parachuted to Earth only to be intercepted in mid-air by specially equipped aircraft. The canisters were designed to float in the ocean for a short time if they were missed in mid-air pickup, and then sink.²⁰ Amid the tensions of the Cold War, Corona was a necessary but hugely inefficient project—only about 70 percent of the 144 satellites launched during the project’s twelve years returned usable imagery. There was also the constant risk that the parachuting film would literally fall into the wrong hands. The axe finally fell on Corona in May 1972, shortly before SIPI was founded, when a Soviet submarine was detected waiting below a mid-air retrieval zone.

The Landsat satellite program, which used sensors and cameras built by RCA and General Electric as well as an electronic transmission system that incorporated image compression started by SIPI, largely replaced Corona. Much of the Landsat project is still classified, so we can only guess at its military uses. Its commercial applications, however, have been widely publicized. Satellite imagery from the program has been purchased by agricultural, geological and forestry companies, and used by governments to predict and prevent natural disasters through the monitoring of weather patterns.

One of the program’s first major commercial customers was McDonald’s, which in its early days had scouted new locations by helicopter.²¹ In the eighties, the fast-food chain converted to using satellite photos to predict urban sprawl. McDonald’s later developed a software program called Quintillion that automated its site-selection process by combining satellite images with demographic data and sales projections. The software allowed the chain to spy on customers with the same equipment once used to fight the Cold War.²²

Satellite photography was made broadly available in 1992, when Congress decided to sacrifice some of Landsat’s secrecy in order to offset the project’s cost. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act declassified some of the data being produced and established that while “full commercialization of the Landsat program cannot be achieved within the foreseeable future... commercialization of land remote sensing should remain a long-term goal of United States policy.”²³

Landsat added a major new customer in the mid-2000s in the form of internet search engine provider Google, itself no stranger to the military. Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page designed the algorithms that resulted in their ground-breaking search engine in the mid-nineties while they were students at Stanford University, right next door to Silicon Valley. The duo were the archetypal poor students, eating macaroni and cheese and begging for charity wherever they could get it. Among the handouts they received were computers from Stanford’s Digital Library project, which was funded by the government’s National Science Foundation, NASA and DARPA.

Google became the most successful company to emerge from the dot-com boom of the nineties by revolutionizing the internet with its innovative search engine. After striking it rich by tying search results to online advertisements, the company moved to diversify its business in 2004 by acquiring Silicon Valley-based start-up Keyhole. The smaller company’s main product was its EarthViewer 3D software, which used satellite imagery bought from Landsat and other commercial sources to create three-dimensional maps of the world. Keyhole was initially funded by Sony in 2001 and then backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm started in 1999 by the CIA to provide the intelligence agency with state-of-the-art spy technology.

The company was headed by John Hanke, who prior to receiving his MBA from Berkeley in 1996 worked in a nondescript “foreign affairs” capacity for the American government in Washington and Indonesia. When I asked Hanke what he did in foreign affairs during a visit to Google’s headquarters, he wasn’t exactly forthcoming. “Pretty much that. That’s really the extent of what I’ve said publicly, so let’s leave it at that,” he told me with a grin.²⁴

The company’s main customers when it was acquired were the U.S. Army’s Communications Electronic Command and the Department of Defense. Keyhole, not coincidentally, was also the name of the satellites used in the Corona project. The company’s software was renamed and relaunched in 2005 as Google Earth, a program that wowed internet users with its lightning-fast rendering of satellite imagery. The pictures, benefiting from new super-fast computer processors, rapid internet speeds, and of course, better image compression, loaded so quickly that they looked like full-motion video. Google Earth users also enjoyed the unprecedented novelty of zooming in on any location on the planet and viewing it in extraordinary detail.

Like virtually every Google Earth user, the first thing I did with the software was navel-gaze. I zoomed in on my home and was astonished by the level of detail, like the garbage cans out on the sidewalk. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who was amazed: “Since its debut on the internet three years ago, Keyhole has had a high gee-whiz factor,” wrote a technology reviewer for the New York Times. “When I first saw the site, I sat transfixed as it zoomed from an astronaut’s-eye view of our planet down to a detailed shot of my house, with individual shrubs visible in the yard.”²⁵

Google expanded the software in 2007 to include Hubble Space Telescope photos of the moon, the constellations and Mars, and added the ocean floor in 2009. The company’s internet competitors, including Microsoft, Yahoo and MapQuest, were all forced to follow suit with their own three-dimensional mapping software, creating a boom in the commercial satellite photography market.

While the loosening of restrictions succeeded in creating a vibrant market for satellite photography, it also created headaches for governments and privacy advocates around the world. Google Earth’s launch was immediately followed by media commentary on the software’s potential negative effects, from complaints about invasion of privacy to concerns over national security. “Terrorists don’t need to reconnoiter their target,” said Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the KGB. “Now an American company is working for them.”²⁶ Google deepened the criticism in 2007 when it launched Street View, a feature that provides 360-degree panoramic ground-level views of city streets. Communities and privacy watchdogs around the world, including those in Canada and the United Kingdom, have raised concerns about Street View or passed outright bans of the software. Google relented somewhat in 2008 when it agreed to blur people’s faces captured in Street View photos, but concerns about the company’s further intrusion into daily life continue to swirl.

Home Invasion

Playboy’s effect on imaging technology was accidental and indirect, but by the eighties, new technologies meant that the larger sex industry was exerting a much greater and more purposeful influence on the emerging home entertainment business. While cable television systems began rolling out in the United States in 1948, primarily to serve mountainous areas that couldn’t get strong over-the-air reception, they only gained acceptance in the late sixties when competition emerged in the form of satellite TV providers. Cable penetration went from only 6.4 percent of American households in 1968 to 17.5 percent ten years later and 52.8 percent in 1988.²⁷ Rolling all that cable out, however, was costly for the providers, who needed quick revenue to justify the expense. Porn was just what the doctor ordered (or rather, what the companies’ shareholders ordered).

At first, cable companies launched adult-oriented channels that customers could subscribe to for an extra fee. This set-up proved problematic, as morality groups argued that the content could be accessed too easily by children. A compromise was reached in the late eighties when cable companies switched to offering the majority of their X-rated channels exclusively through a pay-per-view ordering system, which effectively filtered out minors. Pay-per-view allowed cable providers to beam compressed, scrambled signals to subscribers; when the customer ordered a showing of a movie or event over the phone, the signal was unscrambled.

The technology first showed up in the late seventies and took off after a 1981 boxing match between “Sugar” Ray Leonard and Thomas “Hitman” Hearns. In 1985 a number of cable providers banded together to service the burgeoning market by launching several channels devoted exclusively to pay-per-view, including Viewer’s Choice and Cable Video Store. Viewer’s Choice II was launched shortly afterward to cater to a more mature audience with R-rated and soft-core pornographic films. Viewer’s Choice II changed its name to Hot Choice in 1993 and, by 1996, was one of four adult channels, led by Playboy and Spice Networks, that controlled the business, collectively bringing in about one-third of the $600 million American pay-per-view market.²⁸

The reason for their success was simple: for the first time, cable brought the product to the consumer, rather than the other way around. The porn buyer no longer had to sneak into a peep show in a shady part of town or sheepishly buy a magazine at the corner store, enduring the shopkeeper’s disapproving looks. Now the consumer could simply order pornographic movies and enjoy them in the privacy of his or her own home. The trend was repeated in the late nineties, when cable providers spent hundreds of millions investing in new fibre-optic networks that enabled two-way digital television communication. With new digital technology allowing cable subscribers to order movies and watch them whenever they wanted, rather than at pre-defined times, cable providers continued to look to porn to help pay for their investments. In 2000 porn brought in an estimated $500 million, more than 15 percent of all pay-per-view revenue.²⁹

The same principle—bringing the product to the consumer— was responsible for the massive success of the home video market, which began with a war of technologies. Sony was first to market in 1975 with a home video cassette recorder (VCR), its Betamax player, followed two years later by the Video Home System (VHS) from Victor Company of Japan, or JVC. Netherlands-based Philips released a third format, the Video 2000, in Europe only. VCRs defied traditional rules of consumer electronics and flew off shelves despite the technology war, which carried with it the risk that buyers would be stuck with an obsolete product if one format lost the battle. The gadgets were also expensive; in 1979 VCRs sold for between $800 and $1,000, or about $2,300 to $2,900 in today’s terms.³⁰ Still, more than 800,000 households had a unit before the seventies were through.³¹

Video players introduced several new experiences to the home. For the first time consumers could record television programs for repeated or later viewing, and buy and rent videotapes. At first, movie and television studios were apprehensive about licensing films to a format that could be either sold or rented, since this meant that their products could easily be pirated. In 1983 Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony and claimed the VCR encouraged violations of their copyrights. In what became known as the “Betamax case,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that making copies of television shows for time-shifted viewing was fair use and did not constitute copyright infringement, clearing the way for the industry’s further development.

The studios later flip-flopped and came to see videotapes as a significant source of revenue, but in the early days they only grudgingly offered up their movies for transfer to videocassette. That left a void that was rapidly filled by porn. The June 1979 issue of television technology trade magazine Videography listed two porn titles, Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, among its top-ten-selling films (MASH led the list, followed by The Sound of Music). According to rental store owners, there was little doubt that porn was driving the business: “We’re selling fifty times as many porno tapes as any of the other material,” one New York store owner said. “We have all ages, all types ... [most are men] but some women are buying the porno tapes too.”³²

Merrill Lynch estimated that half of all pre-recorded tape sales in the late seventies were porn, a percentage the genre held until mainstream movies finally caught up in the mid-eighties.³³ As with cable television, the secret to porn’s success on the VCR lay in the fact that it brought the product to consumers, again saving them from visiting seedy or disreputable establishments. Most rental shops set up discreet sections where customers could browse porn titles. “There are some people who would like to frequent sex theatres, but for various reasons they don’t. They’re either ashamed to go in, they don’t want to take their wives with them or whatever,” said Joseph Steinman, president of Essex Distributing Company, one of the largest porn producers in the seventies. “This way, they’re able to see the X material in the privacy of their own home, and it doesn’t seem so distasteful to them.”³⁴

VCRs also had a huge impact on the porn industry itself. Shooting straight-to-video was dramatically cheaper than using film. While the average feature-length film cost $100,000 to $300,000 to make, video brought that cost down tenfold. By the mid-eighties, the cost was again halved to around $15,000. The barriers to entering the pornographic film market were suddenly and dramatically lowered, leading to an explosion in production. In 1976 about one hundred new porn features were released; by 1996 that number had climbed to more than eight thousand a year.³⁵

The sexual revolution may have begun in the sixties with the hippies and their mantra of free love, but it reached its climax— so to speak—in the late seventies and early eighties, when sex went fully mainstream. In the mid-nineties, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani took credit for cleaning up Times Square by driving out all the drug dealers, prostitutes and pornography shops. The truth is, the job had already been half done by cable television, pay-per-view and VCRs, which had all allowed porn to go to the consumer, rather than the other way around. The shady, two-bit peep-shows that had proliferated in Times Square for decades were already feeling the pinch. By the time the nineties rolled around, porn was firmly ensconced in the home.

The VCR format war was finally settled when Sony threw in the towel on Betamax in 1988. JVC’s rival VHS format offered longer running times and was cheaper to produce, and had gradually increased its market share to nearly 90 percent; only about 21 million of the 170 million VCRs sold to that date were Betamax, while Philips had gained only a sliver of sales with its format.³⁶ In the aftermath, the war became one of the most studied cases in marketing and business courses, spawning a plethora of theories to explain why Sony had lost despite being first on the market with a strong product. Some analysts pointed to the influence of porn and the fact that, at first, Sony had refused to license its technology to producers on moral grounds. Porn producers also leaned toward VHS because it was cheaper. Others argued that Sony misjudged the market for VCRs, mistakenly assuming that the main use for the device would be recording television shows rather than renting and buying movies. As it turned out, consumers picked the latter use, for which VHS, with its longer running time, had the edge. Both theories are good, but regardless of which you favour the fact remains that in its early days, like so many new technologies, the VCR was supported by porn producers, who stepped into the breach created by hesitant mainstream studios.

Porn had a similar effect on video cameras, the first of which was released by RCA in 1977. By 1984 several of the largest American camera companies, including Kodak, RCA and General Electric, had partnered with Japanese manufacturers such as Hitachi and Matsushita (Panasonic) to release compact “camcorders” that sold for between $1,000 and $2,000.³⁷ The manufacturers marketed the gadgets as perfect for taping live events, but industry observers believed their main uses lay elsewhere. Assessing the emerging market for video cameras in 1978, Forbes magazine suggested that despite official marketing efforts, “it is an open secret that the biggest market is [visual sex].”³⁸ Indeed, most of the earliest camcorders had low- light capabilities, which didn’t exactly lend themselves to filming sporting or family events. As Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology professor at Texas A&M University, puts it: “If you think about it, there are very few children’s birthday parties which are really done with very low levels of light.”³⁹

Some entrepreneurs also cashed in on the popularity of using camcorders to film sex. Starting in the eighties, brothels offered customers “fantasy rooms” equipped with a video camera and VCR.⁴⁰ Fuelled by such uses, camcorders sold quickly. Sales for 1986 hit one million, nearly double the 517,000 sold in 1985. “The camcorder has quickly established itself as a potential billion-dollar business in only its second year of broad existence,’’ said William Boss, vice-president of RCA’s consumer electronics division.⁴¹

Prices continued to fall in the eighties, with the average camcorder costing less than $1,000 by 1986. That further spurred acceptance by mainstream buyers, who actually did use the gadgets to film children’s birthday parties and baseball games. By the time the camcorder was ubiquitous, buyers with primarily sexual uses in mind made up just a small percentage of the total market, but porn’s impact on the device’s early development was undeniable.

Talk Dirty to Me

It wasn’t all about the eyes, though. Along with cable television and digital photography, pornography spurred a good deal of development in phone technology, particularly in developing nations. Take Guyana, a small country at the northern tip of South America, for example. Today, the country’s economy is dependent on agriculture and mining, with sugar, rice, bauxite and gold accounting for the majority of its exports, mainly to the United States and the United Kingdom. In the nineties, however, Guyana relied mainly on exports of an entirely different product to those same trading partners: phone sex.

It started in the United States in 1982 with a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to end phone companies’ monopolies on recorded messages. “Dial-a-porn” providers wasted no time in sprouting up, using new phone technology to offer customers recorded sex through 976 numbers for a fee. They also wasted no time in becoming immensely profitable: one phone-sex provider received 180 million calls in its first year and raked in $3.6 million.⁴² In 1985-86, Washington-based C&P Telephone pressed the issue by saying it had not only earned $1.7 million through phone sex, it had also benefited the community at large by helping to keep basic calling rates low.⁴³ The story was similar in the United Kingdom. The industry began there in 1986; in 1987 it generated an estimated eighty million pounds in revenue.⁴⁴

Phone-sex services were easy for children to access, so the moral question soon cropped up. In 1985, New York-based Carlin Communications was the first to be charged by federal prosecutors for interstate transportation of obscene matter. Authorities tried to shut down the $2-billion-a-year industry in 1988 with a law that made it illegal to offer either obscene or indecent messages for commercial purposes. The Supreme Court, however, threw a wrench into the works a year later when it ruled that banning “indecent” phone calls violated the constitutional right to free speech. “Obscene” calls could be banned, but the discrepancy would have to be judged by local juries according to “community standards.”⁴⁵ The FCC got involved in 1990 with new rules that forced providers to adopt age-verification technologies, including credit-card authorization, access codes and scrambling.

The court and regulatory actions, emulated in the United Kingdom, did little to shut down the operators—they simply moved them overseas. Phone-sex providers got around regulations by routing calls to phone banks in other countries, which then re-routed them to a third country where the call was actually answered. The migration began in the eighties, and by the end of the decade, international sex-related calls were pulling in nearly a billion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire domestic call market in Europe.⁴⁶ Phone-sex providers chose to route calls through small, poor nations because those countries needed the money and because the three-digit country codes of places such as Guyana, Moldova and the tiny Pacific island of Niue resembled North American area codes, so most callers didn’t even realize they were dialling overseas. The system paid off handsomely for the developing countries; Guyana alone generated $130 million in 1995 from routed phone-sex calls, nearly 40 percent of its gross domestic product.⁴⁷

Phone sex fell off considerably with the advent of the internet, which catapulted the porn industry to another, much higher level. Family Safe Media, an online tracker of pornography, estimated that phone sex combined with cable, pay-per-view, hotel-in-room and cellphone porn to bring in about $2.6 billion in revenue in 2006, only slightly more than it was averaging on its own during its heyday a decade earlier.⁴⁸

The decline, however, may be only temporary, as the rest of the world catches up in developing telephone systems. As of 2006, only about 13 percent of Indians and 23 percent of Chinese had access to a phone.⁴⁹ As the world’s two most populated nations add phones, phone sex is sure to follow. China is already facing the issue in its early stages, about twenty years after the United States and United Kingdom. In 2004 the Chinese government began a crackdown on phone-sex services, shutting down nearly a hundred operators in the second half of the year. “With the rapid development of the paid call service market in China, some lawbreakers make use of this form to spread obscene information and even conduct prostitution,” said Wang Xudong, China’s Minister of Information Industry. “This depraves social morals, and especially brings great harm to the country’s young minds.”⁵⁰

At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first-century, industry analysts expected Chinese phone-sex operators to follow their earlier American counterparts by moving offshore. The story there is only half written.

The spread of phone-sex systems in the developed world during the eighties and nineties had two far-reaching effects. First, phone sex allowed a number of developing countries with seemingly little going for them to attract foreign investment. Guyana, for example, benefited in 1991 when U.S.-based Atlantic Tele Network acquired an 80 percent stake in Guyana Telephone and Telegraph, the nation’s biggest telecommunications company. Even though the phone sex wave largely came and went, Atlantic Tele Network has maintained its interest in GT&T and has since rolled out internet and mobile phone services. While Guyana’s internet and mobile usage is low compared to the rest of the world, both are higher than they should be considering the country’s GDP, which is among the lowest in the region. The initial investment in phone sex may have helped establish an enduring telecommunications legacy in the country.

In the developed world, phone-sex providers also pioneered a good deal of calling technology, including touch-tone-based credit card and access code verification. The next time you check your voice mail or order a pizza over the phone with your credit card, remember that the technology was first rolled out to give men a way to reach out and touch someone (or, rather, themselves).

In recent years, the term phone sex has also taken on a very different meaning. Porn producers are currently stampeding onto newer, more advanced cellphones that can access the internet. Up until a few years ago, porn producers were largely at the mercy of cellphone providers, some of whom—particularly in sexually conservative North America—prevented their content from being accessed on moral grounds. In 2007 Telus, one of Canada’s biggest cellphone providers, launched a service that allowed customers to download adult content onto their mobiles for a few dollars a pop, but shut the feature down a month later after it encountered outrage from the Catholic Church. That’s why porn producers cheered the arrival in 2007 of Apple’s iPhone, the first cellphone that successfully replicated the web-surfing experience of the desktop computer in a mobile format. While Apple refused to allow custom-made downloadable porn “apps” for the iPhone, the device’s browser allowed users to view whatever websites they wanted, without interference from their cellphone provider. Porn producers quickly reformatted their websites for optimized viewing on the iPhone and the other “smartphones” it inspired. The market for mobile porn is consequently exploding. Analysts, who calculate mobile porn revenue separately from that found on the web, expect the global market to hit $4.9 billion by 2013, more than double the $2.2 billion it earned in 2008. ⁵¹

The reason for the big growth follows the logic of why VCRs and pay-per-view did so well in the realm of porn—cellphones not only allow the content to come to the consumer, they also allow it to come to them wherever they are and whenever they want. “You don’t want somebody sitting next to you on the plane watching it, but sometimes if you’re travelling and you’re in the hotel room it’s easier than getting out the laptop,” says Hustler president Michael Klein.⁵² Kim Kysar, brand manager for adult producer Pink Visual, sums it up simply: “It’s the most private piece of technology you own.”⁵³