Testing Giant Fire Darts From The Mary Rose

May 13, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Fire arrow versus the recreated fire dart. (Credit: Tod's Workshop, YouTube) — Fire arrow versus the recreated fire dart. (Credit: Tod’s Workshop, YouTube)

The Mary Rose was a carrack in the English Tudor Navy of King Henry VIII that fought in multiple battles during the 16th century before it was sunk in 1545. After its wreck was located in 1971 and raised in 1982 the ship and all the items contained within the partially preserved hull became the focus of intense study. Among these items are the weaponry found, including the cannons, but also massive darts that seemed to have been designed for an incendiary payload. Recently [Tod’s Workshop] collaborated with others to test these presumed incendiary darts.

Although fire arrows have been around for a while, seeing what appears to be super-sized versions of these is somewhat unusual, but could make sense in taking out enemy ships of the time. The main questions are how you would even fire them, and how effective they would be. Were the darts thrown by hand from e.g. the crow’s nest, or fired from a cannon?

The reproduction darts used are based on the recovered remnants of the original darts, with an incendiary mixture inside a pitch-covered cloth covering. This mixture would be ignited by wooden fuses after a set amount of time, at which point the resulting fire would be basically impossible to put out. Obviously, this also means that if you were to throw one of these darts, it can absolutely not fall onto your own ship.

First tested was throwing the dart by hand, which seems like it would clear the ship. Of course, the three recovered darts were found near a rather special cannon that appeared to be both a miscast and angled upwards. Whether that cannon was used for launching apparently somewhat experimental darts is hard to say, but it can be tested. Sadly, lacking a full-sized black powder cannon a scale model dart was fired using compressed air.

From that scale test it’s clear that at full charge the dart would disintegrate due to the rapid acceleration, but a ‘soft’, or reduced, charge could work against nearby targets. Once the dart lodges itself into the enemy ship’s structure, it would definitely cause severe damage as further tests in the video demonstrate. Having a salvo of these fire darts fired at you from a nearby ship would definitely make for a pretty bad day.

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The History Of Altec Lansing

May 12, 2026 by Al Williams 21 Comments

If you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history in a video you can watch below.

James Lansing started Lansing Manufacturing, offering high-end speakers for the fledgling “talkie” movie industry. It had some success, but the depression put them on shaky footing. Meanwhile, a company named All Technical Service Company, or Altec, was a large organization that serviced Western Electric movie theater equipment. Flush with cash, they merged with Lansing Manufacturing to form Altec Lansing. With a large infrastructure and Lansing’s engineering, they became a significant supplier to the military during World War II.

After the war, the company produced a landmark theater speaker system that became the gold standard in theater audio. However, Lansing didn’t like the big company environment and left to found a company that bore his full name, James B. Lansing, which you may know as JBL.

Altec Lansing continued to grow. However, a series of mergers and sales starting in 1969 caused the Altec Lansing company to decline. By the 1990s, Altec Lansing was making cheap PC speakers. A far cry from the gold-standard massive speakers made by the company during its heyday.

We love the history of technology and the people that drove them. Bing Crosby, for example. Or the lesser-known heroes like Edwin Armstrong.

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The Vacuum Tube’s Last Stand(s)

May 11, 2026 by Al Williams 113 Comments

When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept away by the transistor in the 1950s. But the reality is much more interesting. Vacuum tube technology did not simply stop evolving when the transistor appeared. In fact, some of the most sophisticated and technically impressive tube designs emerged after the transistor had already been invented.

During the final decades of mainstream tube development, manufacturers pushed the technology in remarkable directions. Tubes became smaller, faster, quieter, more rugged, and more specialized. Designers experimented with exotic geometries, ceramic construction, metal envelopes, ultra-high-frequency operation, and even hybrid tube-semiconductor systems. Devices such as acorn tubes, lighthouse tubes, compactrons, and nuvistors represented a last gasp of thermionic electronics.

Ironically, many of these innovations arrived just as solid-state electronics were becoming commercially practical. Vacuum tubes were improving rapidly right up until the market abandoned them.

The Pressure to Improve

By the 1930s and 1940s, vacuum tubes dominated electronics. Radios, radar systems, military communications, industrial controls, and the first digital computers all depended on them. But everyone was painfully aware of their problems.

Traditional tubes were fragile, generated heat, consumed significant power, and suffered from limitations at high frequencies. Internal lead lengths created parasitic inductance and capacitance. At radio frequencies and especially microwave frequencies, those unwanted effects made design difficult.

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Remembering The BBC Computer Literacy Project

May 9, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

There comes a point in everybody’s life when things that they were a part of are presented as history, and for the 8-bit generation, that time is now. It’s interesting to see the early history of 8-bit home computers presented as history, not from a 2026 perspective but from the early 1990s. The BBC archive has recently posted a retrospective from 1992 looking at ten years of the Computer Literacy Project, a British government programme intended to equip the young people of the 1980s with the skills they would need to approach the information age. It’s a much more immediate history of something which was largely still in place at the time, making it a time capsule in which this past isn’t quite the other country we see it as today.

The Computer Literacy Project was run by the nation’s broadcaster and included a raft of TV programming about computers, as well as the commissioning of a machine specifically for the project. You know this machine as the Acorn BBC Micro, and aside from eventually providing the genesis of what would become ARM, it remains one of the most high-spec 8-bit machines in terms of built-in hardware. We hear from the luminaries of Acorn about the development of this machine, and then the film moves into some of the wider cultural effects.

If you were there, you’ll doubtless remember some of the TV programmes featured, and you might have used a BBC Micro at school. If you weren’t there, it’s an encapsulation of the promise on offer in that era, an optimism that seems sad when you reflect that educational computing descended into learning Microsoft Word during the following decade. It would be another two decades before the Raspberry Pi and BBC micro:bit picked up that fallen torch.

The Beeb, it seems, has long had an interest in home computers. Schools, too.

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The Montgomery Ward Gasoline-Powered Clothes Iron

May 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Before the advent of electricity in the home made electrically-heated clothes irons a possibility, ironing was a cumbersome process, with self-heated irons being an arguable improvement over solid (so-called sad) irons that required heating in an external heat source like a stove or fire. These self-heating irons used a variety of fuels, with the one featured on the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel using gasoline for fuel, making it technically a gasoline-powered clothes iron.

The used gasoline form is LSR, which is commonly referred to as naphtha and is also sold as camping fuel today. In addition to the gasoline version a kerosene-powered version was also sold, so you had to better make sure you refueled your iron with the right fuel.

After pouring in fresh fuel you have to prime it by pushing the plunger a couple of times, before igniting the burner with a lit match via a hole in the side while opening the fuel valve. If you did things right, the iron will now be heating up. In a sense this makes it effectively like a camping stove, with also many of the same caveats, with such irons gaining a reputation for starting fires and causing bodily harm.

Due to decaying seals this iron in the video wasn’t fired up, but it was disassembled to show the internal components, along with a comparison of the kerosene version. Inside is a kind of crude carburetor that mixes air in with the fuel to get a combustible fuel-air mix, along with plenty of soot to attest to this iron having been regularly used.

Although electrical irons eventually removed all need for gasoline-powered irons, they were still used in mostly rural settings until the 1950s. Reading the Wikipedia entry on clothes irons makes one rather glad that these days we can iron our clothes without all the fuss and significant risk of accidents of these old irons.

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How TTY Opened Up The Phones For The Hard Of Hearing

April 30, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

The telephone was an invention that revolutionized human communication. No more did you have to physically courier a letter from one place to another, or send a telegram, or have a runner carry the message for you. Instead, you could have a direct conversation with another person a great distance away. All well and good if you can speak and hear, of course, but rather useless if you happen to be deaf.

Those hard of hearing were not left entirely out of the communication revolution, however. Well before IP switched networks and the Internet became a thing, there was already a way for the deaf to communicate over the plain old telephone network—thanks to the teletypewriter!

Over The Wires

The teletypewriter (TTY) has been around for a long time. The first device came into being in 1964, developed by James C. Marsters and Robert Weitbrecht, both deaf. Their idea was to create a method for deaf individuals to communicate over the phone network in a textual manner. To this end, the group sourced teleprinters formerly used by the US Department of Defense, and hooked them up with acoustic couplers that would allow them to mate with the then-ubiquitous AT&T Model 500 telephone. Thus, the TTY was born. A user could dial another TTY machine, and key in a message, which would print out at the other end. The receiving user could then respond in turn in the same manner.

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What Have We Dumped On The Moon?

April 22, 2026 by Al Williams 53 Comments

If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our only natural satellite?

The Obvious

Of course, we’ve left parts of rockets, probes, and rovers. Only the top part of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module left the moon. (See for yourself in the Apollo 17 ascent video below.) The bottoms are still there, along with the lunar rovers and a bunch of other science instruments and tools. There are boots and cameras, as you might expect.

But what about the strange things? As of 2012, NASA compiled a list of all known lunar junk that originated on Earth. The list starts with material from the non-Apollo US programs like the Surveyor and Lunar Prospector missions. Next up is the Apollo stuff, which is actually quite a bit: an estimated 400,000 pounds, we’ve heard. This ranges from the entire descent stage and lunar overshoes to urine bags. There are even commemorative patches and a gold olive branch.

After that, the list shows what’s known to be on the surface from the Russian space program, along with objects of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and European origin.

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