Nuclear Powered Bomber Engine.

Early in the Cold War, before rocket power and ICBMs, both the US and Russia experimented with nuclear powered bombers. The idea was the aircraft could stay aloft for days or weeks to deliver a counter-strike should airfields be knocked out early in a war.

Above is a video of portions an American nuclear propulsion system, s well as an early breeder reactor, located in rural Idaho.

Mechanical/Biological

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Regulars will know I appreciate old scientific illustrations (some are here, here, here and here). As reflected in his work, the Paris based artist Steeven Salvat must appreciate their aesthetics as well. Here is some of his work from his series Mechanical/Biological where he combines the style of 19th century naturalist's drawing of crustaceans exteriors with a mechanic's innards of gears and clockwork.

There are more after the page jump, and much more of his work at his link.

The Clayton Disinfector

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When I was young they scared us to death with atomic war. Fallout shelters, mutants, duck-and-cover and all that. Now I've noticed they scare people to death with pandemics. AIDS, bird flu, Ebola -- even a cholera outbreak in Haiti.

Neither world-wide devastation fear has come true yet. In the present epidemics have been largely localized,  but in the past epidemics and plagues were a sad part of life. People of my parents' age spoke of the horrors of polio -- the Saulk vaccine was a miracle to them.

By the end of the 19th century they knew rats and fleas carried disease. They also knew fumigation could help clear contaminated buildings and ships.

A machine used on large spaces was the Clayton Disinfector. It burned sulfur to create fumes, cooled them and then pumped them into the space needed fumigation. It was used on hospitals and other large infected buildings. It was also mounted on tugs to fumigate ships entering harbor (shown in the drawing below).

Inside an Abandoned Copper Mine

The YouTube channel Exploring Abandoned Mines is the creation of a group of fellows who explore old, abandoned mines in the west. It features a lot of videos of various mines. The only knowledge I had of mine interiors was from Hollywood movies, and seeing the real thing was quite surprising.  There are more videos at the link.

African Ceremonial Masks

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"Drums were beating, horns blowing, and people were seen all running in one direction;—the cause was a funeral dance, and I joined the crowd, and soon found myself in the midst of the entertainment. The dancers were most grotesquely got up. About a dozen huge ostrich feathers adorned their helmets; either leopard or the black and white monkey skins were suspended from their shoulders, and a leather tied round the waist covered a large iron bell which was strapped upon the loins of each dancer, like a woman's old-fashioned bustle: this they rung to the time of the dance by jerking their posteriors in the most absurd manner. 

A large crowd got up in this style created an indescribable hubbub, heightened by the blowing of horns and the beating of seven nogaras of various notes. Every dancer wore an antelope's horn suspended round the neck, which he blew occasionally in the height of his excitement. These instruments produced a sound partaking of the braying of a donkey and the screech of an owl. Crowds of men rushed round and round in a sort of "galop infernel," brandishing their lances and iron-headed maces, and keeping tolerably in line five or six deep, following the leader who headed them, dancing backwards. 

The women kept outside the line, dancing a slow stupid step, and screaming a wild and most inharmonious chant; while a long string of young girls and small children, their heads and necks rubbed with red ochre and grease, and prettily ornamented with strings of beads around their loins, kept a very good line, beating the time with their feet, and jingling the numerous iron rings which adorned their ankles to keep time with the drums. One woman attended upon the men, running through the crowd with a gourd full of wood-ashes, handfuls of which she showered over their heads, powdering them like millers; the object of the operation I could not understand. 

The "premiere danseuse" was immensely fat; she had passed the bloom of youth, but, "malgre" her unwieldy state, she kept up the pace to the last, quite unconscious of her general appearance, and absorbed with the excitement of the dance.

These festivities were to be continued in honour of the dead; and as many friends had recently been killed, music and dancing would be in fashion for some weeks."

From The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile by Sir Samuel White Baker (paragraph breaks added). More images after the fold.

A Liberty Ship Sets Sail

In 2012 the U.S. Battleship Iowa set sail for San Pedro to become a museum ship. Accompanying her on departure was the WWII Liberty ship, the SS Jeremiah O'Brien. This is a short feature of the O'Brien getting underway, with a lot of shots taken inside the engine and boilers rooms showing the O'Brien's old triple-expansion steam engine in operation.
  

Conspiracy Theory Kits

Roswell Crash Site

 The Ogilvy & Mather ad agency put together a clever campaign for Tamya, a company that sells plastic models and radio control kits, that featured ads for model kits of popular conspiracy theories. Here, and after the fold, are those kits. You can click any image to enlarge it.

JFK and the Grassy Knoll

The Wonders of Vacuum Tubes

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Although they've been replaced by transistors and integrated circuits, there was a time when vacuum tubes were a fundamental component of modern electronics. Now exotic, they were common during the first electronic revolution.

Today you can buy hard drives, graphics cards and the like in stores, in the old-timey days vacuum tube testers were readily found in hardware and grocery stores. You could test vacuum tubes and buy their replacements easily, and it was a skill any do-it-yourselfer was expected to have.

Where there are products there is advertising. The problem is they were, like an oil filter in an engine, just a part of a machine, and not a very sexy or graphically interesting part at all. So how to sway consumer dollars?

The vacuum tube ads were pretty straight forward -- either a picture of a tube with copy extolling their virtues, or a their place in the wonders of radio emphasized. Here, and after a the fold, are some old ads that tried to sell what was then a mundane part of electronics.

Source: Duke University Libraries Digital Repository.

So Long. That's All. Goodbye.

With tomorrow's inauguration looming Bill Haley & Comets' See You Later Alligator springs to mind. Catchy and cheerful tune that fits my mood at the moment.

As an aside, I saw the Comets, I think it was the bassist Al Rapppa's version of the Comets, play in a slightly sketchy local bar. They put on a good show. During the break -- since they were one of the founders of Rock N' Roll I bought them a beer.

Whoo-boy, what a mistake. Talk about best friends forever! There was no getting rid of them and one drink led to another until my wallet was pretty much empty. Still, a good time was had by all and they were nice guys with good stories. In hindsight, I guess it was well worth the money.

I suspect Obama is another guy we'll be unable to get rid of, but our time with him at the table talking about the old days, betwixt lecturing us on what scum we are, will be much less enjoyable.

 
  

The National Joy Smoke

Morgan, in the comments to the previous post, pointed me towards Language Log's post "Just let some joy smoke sift into your system". It is a 1919 ad for Prince Albert tobacco, and the ad copy is absolutely hilarious, featuring such gems as " two-fisted-man-tobacco", "breezing up the pike with your smokethrottle wide open" and "put pep-in-your-smokemotor".

There are several other old Prince Albert ads at the link, and they are equally as entertaining.

The blog itself is a language-centric blog, with a lot of discussion of Chinese, and a lot of entertaining articles on other topics as well. I'll be adding it to our blog roll.

Canadians Control American UFO Technology!

Above is a video of the VZ-9 Avrocar prototype VTOL aircraft, which resembled a UFO, being built and test flown. The Avrocar was a joint venture between Canada's Avro Aircraft and the U.S. military. Originally it was supposed to be a high speed, high altitude interceptor, but -- as you can see in the video -- it fell far short of that goal.

The video is long, with the test flight portion starting at the 18 minute mark. However, the earlier part is an interesting look at 1950s technology, engineers, machinists, geek styles and so forth.

By the way, the project was finally abandoned in 1961 -- or was it? (Dum-de-dum-dum!)
 

Happy New Year and Sweet Dreams

I'm not sure what this video has to do with the end of 2016 and/or the start of 2017; but it strikes me you can't go wrong with banjo music for either occasion. So, Happy New Year wishes delivered with the accompaniment of Banjo Guy Ollie covering Sweet Dream (Are Made Of This).

Photos From the Age of Sail

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 The end of the Age of Sail and the beginnings of photography overlap. These pictures, and those after the fold, are a sampling of photos of those old sailing ships. I hope to dig up more pictures of the crews for a following post, but for now these wiill have to do.

An Old Flares Contributer Needs Some Help

Charles Martin, one of  the original founders of Flares Into Darkness, who now posts to PJ Media, has had some health and employment issues. He has ended up broke as a result.

He has started a gofundme campaign to raise a bit of money to help him get back on his feet. If you have a bit of spare money laying about please contribute, he's a good guy.

Wicked Game

Wicked Game performed by Vektormusic.

Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah

A Different Christmas Song

Above is a video by Mbuvi, a Kenyan gospel singer. It is a Christmas song.  It revolves around the Kenyan tradition of returning home to family and friends to celebrate Christmas. I figure that, after a month of Jingle Bells in the background, it is a change. Enjoy.

Ghosts of Christmases Past

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“Who, and what are you?” Scrooge demanded. 

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”  

“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.  

“No. Your past.”  

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.  

“What!” exclaimed the Ghost, “would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!”  

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or any knowledge of having wilfully “bonneted” the Spirit at any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there. 

“Your welfare!” said the Ghost.

-from The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

We all have our past Christmases with their own ghosts. Here, and after the fold, are some ghosts of unknown people's Christmases. Whether these ghosts bring welfare or not is another matter altogether.

Flowers Inside of Light Bulbs

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 From the 1930s through the 1970s the Aerolux Light Corporation made a series of novelty light bulbs that featured filaments in the form of tiny sculptures. Along with animals and other subjects, flowers were popular.

View more of these bulbs, including some videos of them, at Colossal.

The Next Nefarious Rooskie Plot

My CIA sources tell me -- and yes, I have unimpeachable spy agency sources so this aint fake news -- they tell me that, after hacking the US election to make Trump President, they now plan on moving on to step two of their Eeeeevil scheme: brainwashing American tweener girls via commie boy bands.

Above is a sample of one of their highly polished and professional boy bands Steklovata, singing their smash hit Novi God. Parents, don't leave your daughters fall under the hypnotic spell of these lads. It's a trap I tells ya, a trap.