Tag: defensible times
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Captive regulars
Nice self-explanatory picture. A downtown cafe, facing the alley, making no attempt to look attractive to walkbys. The background explains why. Downtowns were full of upstairs apartments and rooms. Most downtown apartments lacked kitchens. Residents used hotplates or simply ate in cafes. This cafe had a captive audience of reliable regulars.
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The magic lantern oscilloscope
I bumped into this item sideways. I was looking at a peculiar early typewriter designed by Wheatstone. Since I’m addicted to Wheatstone I tried to animate it, but it was poorly described and pictured. The article noted that it was built by a Mr Pickler, so I started looking in that direction for more info.…
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The Hughes Typograph
Found in Tangible Typography, or how the blind read, published in England in 1853. The Typograph was invented in 1851 by William Hughes, head of the Blind Institution at Manchester. It was demonstrated at one of the Crystal Palace exhibitions of new inventions, and was produced and used in small quantities. Several of the earliest…
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Bootstrapping a language
Okie blogger K. Latham posted an interesting brief feature on the Cherokee Advocate, a weekly paper in Tahlequah that was first founded in 1844. I had noticed several early tribal newspapers in the Ayer newspaper lists but hadn’t stopped to think about the alphabet and fonts. I asked some questions about the source of the…
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Bachelor stoves
Ran across this while reading up on the Pratt typewriter. This is described as a bachelor’s stove. It was supposedly invented by James Watt himself. One specimen was donated to a museum by a Watt descendant in 1863. The relative claimed this was the same teapot Watt was using when he was inspired to make…
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Would it help?
Seen in the same 1895 magazine that I cited for the bloodbathing Countess. Wilson’s Ear Drum. Deafness and head noises relieved. Would it help? Hard to tell from the picture. If it provided a resonant chamber, it could emphasize some frequencies to compensate for noise-induced loss. I’m more certain that it would help suppress rumbling…
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The father of boilerplate
Previously I covered the Army Press, a simple manual press that could handle newspaper-size stock. The Army Press helped country weeklies to survive until they could afford more automatic presses. Reviewing the Army Press: It looked like a proof press. On the proof press, the paper is clamped to the roller, which rolls and slides…
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Party LAN
Thinking about Wincharger and rural electricity, it occurred to me that phones were common on farms LONG before electricity and automobiles and mail service. Started looking through old sources, easily verified the proportion: The rural free delivery carrier’s route rarely exceeds 24 miles in length and serves on an average about 70 farms. A rural…
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Demodernizing
Curtis at EnidBuzz shows a downtown business expanding into a second storefront. For most of the last 100 years, downtown stores, when they weren’t simply abandoning the district, were modernizing old artistic facades, replacing them with plain aluminum or fake mansards. Now a business is increasing its downtown space by demodernizing an uninteresting facade.
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Were most parodies?
Responding to a Substack item about old state songs, I cited my earlier discussion of Okla’s horrible song, which was blessedly replaced by Rogers and Hammerstein. Got me thinking. Were those horrible songs meant as parodies? My father used to sing the song in parodic style, imitating a warbly offkey church soprano. Home on the…
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When Sailer writes what he knows
Sailer writes best when he writes about California. He lives there and PAYS ATTENTION to both current events and local history. He doesn’t blow up verb aspect by conflating permanent with temporary or vice versa. = = = = = START SAILER: In Los Angeles, Hurricane Hilary, the first since 1939, has been a summer…
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The Exeter clock
This is a quickie, just a graphics project to pull my mind through the recent hot spell. The Exeter Cathedral clock was built in the 1300s and remodeled around 1890. It’s a geocentric orrery with a 24-hour dial, numbered as two sequences of 12. It’s not a freestanding clock. I’ve mounted it on a flat…
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Canadian radios
I’ve often discussed Canadian auto manufacturing and the standard myths. I hadn’t noticed the equivalent in radios before. The American Radio Library has added a few issues of a Canadian trade journal for radio and appliance dealers from the early ’50s. Canadian carmakers started out semi-independent and quickly converged to fully owned divisions of US…
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Stages
Doomberg, a prolific and pseudonymous bitcoiner, reveals how Twitter worked and how Xlon changed it. Summary: Like all social media, Twitter had Lurkers, Participants and Creators. Twitter was different from other media like Youtube or Facebook or old-fashioned publishers, because Twitter didn’t pay its creators. Instead, the Creators were meant to use Twitter as a…
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Zenith animism
Zenith always added life to its products. The fancier radios had ‘entertainment on all sides’, with active dials and Magic Eye tubes and lively controls. Their fanciest record changer in the ’50s had one uniquely analog feature. The speed was smoothly controllable. Other phonos selected 16, 33, 45 and 78. The Cobra-Matic could be set…
Polistra's Mill 