In an age where our gadgets allow us to explore the cosmos, we stumbled upon sounds from a future past: an article on historical signals from Mars. The piece, written by [Paul Gilster] of Centauri Dreams, cites a Times essay published by [Becky Ferreira] of August 20. [Ferreira]’s essay sheds light on a fascinating, if peculiar, chapter in the history of the search for extraterrestrial life.
She recounts an event from August 1924 when the U.S. Navy imposed a nationwide radio silence for five minutes each hour to allow observatories to listen for signals from Mars. This initiative aimed to capitalize on the planet’s close alignment with Earth, sparking intrigue and excitement among astronomers and enthusiasts alike.
Today, you likely often authenticate or pay for things with a tap, either using a chip in your card, or with your phone, or maybe even with your watch or a Yubikey. Now, imagine doing all these things way back in 1998 with a single wearable device that you could shower or swim with. Sound crazy?
These types of transactions and authentications were more than possible then. In fact, the Java ring and its iButton brethren were poised to take over all kinds of informational handshakes, from unlocking doors and computers to paying for things, sharing medical records, making coffee according to preference, and much more. So, what happened?
It is hard to imagine that a handful of decades ago, TV wasn’t a thing. We’ve talked a few times about the birth of television. After an admittedly slow slow start, it took over like wildfire. Of course, anything that sells millions will spawn accessories. Some may be great. Then there are others.
We wanted to take a nostalgic look back at some of the strange add-ons people used to put on or in their TVs. Sure, VCRs, DVD players, and video game consoles were popular. But we were thinking a little more obscure than that.
Rabbit Ears
A state-of-the-art set of rabbit ears from the 1970s
Every once in a while, we see an ad or a box in a store touting the ability to get great TV programming for free. Invariably, it is a USB device that lets you watch free streaming channels or it is an antenna. There was a time when nearly all TVs had “rabbit ears” — so called because they made an inverted V on the top of your set.
These dipoles were telescoping and you were supposed to adjust them to fit the TV station you were watching but everyone “knew” that you wanted them as long as possible at all times. Holding one end of them gave it a ground and would give you a major improvement in picture. People also liked to wrap tin foil around the tips. Was it like a capacitive hat? We aren’t sure.
The better rabbit ears had knobs and switches along with multiple elements. If you lived close to a TV station, you probably didn’t need much. If you didn’t, no number of fancy add-ons would likely help you. Continue reading “Retro Gadgets: Things Your TV No Longer Needs”→
What is the size of a single molecule of oil? What may initially seem like a trick question – answerable only through the use of complicated, high-tech scientific equipment – is actually as easy to calculate as the circumference of planet Earth. Much like how [Eratosthenes] used a couple of sticks to achieve the latter feat back in about 240 BCE, the size of a molecule of olive oil was calculated in 1890 by [Lord Rayleigh], which is the formal title of [John William Strutt]. Using nothing but water and said olive oil, he managed to calculate the size of a single olive oil molecule as being 1.63 nanometers in length.
To achieve this feat, he took 0.81 mg of olive oil and put it on a known area of water. Following the assumption that the distributed oil across the water surface would form a monolayer, i.e. a layer of oil one molecule thick, he divided the volume of the oil by the covered area, which gave him the thickness of the oil layer. Consequently, this result would also be the dimension (diameter) of a single olive oil molecule.
Many years later we know now that olive oil is composed of triacylglycerols, with a diameter of 1.67 nm, or only about 2% off from the 1890 estimate. All of which reinforces once more just how much science one can do with only the most basic of tools, simply through logical deduction.
Long before the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there were other ways to go online, with Ohio-based CompuServe being the first to offer a consumer-oriented service on September 24, 1979. In an article by [Michael De Bonis] a listener-submitted question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus is answered, interspersed with recollections of former users of the service. So what was CompuServe’s contribution to society that was so important that the state of Ohio gave historical status to the building that once housed this company?
The history of CompuServe and the consumer-facing services which it would develop started in 1969, when it was a timesharing and remote access service for businesses who wanted to buy some time on the PDP-10s that Golden United Life Insurance as the company’s subsidiary used. CompuServe divested in 1975 to become its own, NASDAQ-listed company. As noted in the article, while selling timeshares to businesses went well, after business hours they would have these big computer systems sitting mostly idly. This was developed by 1979 into a plan to give consumers with their newfangled microcomputers like the TRS-80 access.
Originally called MicroNet and marketed by Radio Shack, the service offered the CompuServe menu to users when they logged in, giving access to features like email, weather, stock quotes, online shipping and booking of airline tickets, as well as online forums and interactive text games.
Later renamed to CompuServe Information Service (CIS), it remained competitive with competitors like AOL and Prodigy until the mid-90s, even buying one competitor called The Source. Ultimately it was the rise of Internet and the WWW that would close the door on this chapter of computing history, even as for CompuServe users this new Internet age would have felt very familiar, indeed.
You probably think of them as “Ziploc” bags, but, technically, the generic term is zipper bag. Everything from electronic components to coffee beans arrive in them. But they weren’t always everywhere, and it took a while for them to find their niche.
Image from an early Madsen patent
A Dane named Borge Madsen was actually trying to create a new kind of zipper for clothes in the 1950s and had several patents on the technology. The Madsen zipper consisted of two interlocking pieces of plastic and a tab to press them together. Unfortunately, the didn’t work very well for clothing.
A Romanian immigrant named Max Ausnit bought the rights to the patent and formed Flexigrip Inc. He used the zippers on flat vinyl pencil cases and similar items. However, these still had the little plastic tab that operated like a zipper pull. While you occasionally see these in certain applications, they aren’t what you think of when you think of zipper bags.
Zipping
Ausnit’s son, Steven, figured out how to remove the tab. That made the bags more robust, a little handier to use, and it also rendered them less expensive to produce. Even so, cost was a barrier because the way they were made was to heat seal the zipper portion to the bags.
That changed in the 1960s when the Ausnits learned of a Japanese company, Seisan Nippon Sha, that had a process to integrate the bags and zippers in one step which slashed the production cost in half. Flexigrip acquired the rights in the United States and created a new company, Minigrip, to promote this type of bag.
While some byproducts recall an idyllic piece of Americana, others remind us that the past is not always so bright and cheerful. Trinitite, created unintentionally during the development of the first atomic bomb, is arguably one of these byproducts.
Whereas Fordite kept growing back for decades, all Trinitite comes from a single event — the Trinity nuclear bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Also called ‘atomsite’ and ‘Alamogordo glass’, ‘Trinitite’ is the name that stuck.
There wasn’t much interest in the man-made mineral initially, but people began to take notice (and souvenirs) after the war ended. And yes, they made jewelry out of it.
Although there is still Trinitite at the site today, most of it was bulldozed over by the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1953, who weren’t too keen on the public sniffing around.
There was also a law passed that made it illegal to collect samples from the area, although it is still legal to trade Trinitite that was already on the market. As you might expect, Trinitite is rare, but it’s still out there today, and can even be bought from reputable sources such as United Nuclear. Continue reading “Boss Byproducts: The Terrible Beauty Of Trinitite”→
