Hello?

From the examination of William Henry Preece, electrician to the British General Post Office, before the House of Commons’ select committee on lighting by electricity, May 2, 1879:

Q: … Do you consider that the telephone will be an instrument of the future which will be largely adopted by the public?

A: I think not.

Q: It will not take the same position in this country as it has already done in America?

A: I fancy that the descriptions we get of its use in America are a little exaggerated; but there are conditions in America which necessitate the use of instruments of this kind more there than here. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.

| Technology

Managerese

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1910Ford-T.jpg

Henry Ford told a visitor to the Ford Motor Company that there were exactly 4,719 parts in a finished car.

Impressed, the visitor asked the supervising engineer if this were true.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I can’t think of a more useless piece of information.”

| Society · Technology

Safety First

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qDhwAAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

If you die in a fiery air crash, don’t blame Samuel Young. His combination pillow and crash helmet, patented in 1970, provides both comfort and safety.

“Upon being informed of the imminence of a crash landing, the passenger puts this pouch-like device over his head and ties the free ends of the strings together under his chin so that the crash helmet remains in position during the crash landing, despite the violent forces which are likely to be encountered on impact.”

| Technology

The War Ahead

H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.

The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)

This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.

If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!

| History · Literature · Technology

The Colditz Cock

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Originalglider.jpg

The guards at Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were accustomed to looking for tunnels — so they never thought to look in the attic at Colditz Castle, where, astonishingly, British prisoners had constructed a 19-foot glider from scavenged materials.

They planned to launch it from the roof, using a pulley system driven by a falling bathtub full of concrete. They hoped this would send two men soaring across the River Mulde 60 meters below.

The American army liberated the camp before the glider could be launched, and it was subsequently lost, so for 55 years its designers could only wonder whether the “Colditz Cock” would really have flown. But in 1999 a British aviation company built a full-size replica, and the POWs reunited to watch the launch. It worked.

| History · Technology

Sighs and Whispers

http://www.google.com/patents?id=PM9bAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Frustrated with the intertitles in silent films, Charles Pidgin invented a better solution in 1917: The performers would inflate balloons on which their dialogue was printed. “The blowing or inflation of the devices by the various characters of a photo-play will add to the realism of the picture by the words appearing to come from the mouth of the players,” Pidgin wrote. Even better, “the size of the speech may be increased with the increase of various emotions depicted on the screen.”

It’s not too late to implement this.

| Entertainment · Technology

Bird’s-Eye Views

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pigeoncameras.jpg

In 1903, German apothecary Julius Neubronner combined his two hobbies, pigeon fancying and amateur photography, into an innovative new undertaking. He fit a 75-gram camera to a pigeon’s breast and released it 60 miles from its cote. The bird flew home along a predictable route, and a pneumatic mechanism snapped an aerial picture.

A stunned German patent office rejected Neubronner’s first application as impossible, but by 1909 his photos were adorning postcards and winning prizes at the Paris airshow. The image below, of the Schlosshotel Kronberg, made a sensation because the photographer’s wingtips are visible at its edges.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pigeon_wingtips.jpg

| Technology

Dedicated Line

David Contorno of Lemont, Ill., has had the same mobile telephone number for 24 years.

He bought an Ameritech AC140 from Ameritech Mobile Communications on Aug. 2, 1985, and he’s kept the same mobile operator and telephone number ever since.

| Technology