Joly sez, “Jim Henson made this film in 1963 for The Bell System. Specifically, it was made for an elite seminar given for business owners, on the then-brand-new topic Data Communications. The seminar itself involved a lot of films and multimedia presentations, and took place in Chicago. A lengthy description of the planning of the Bell Data Communications Seminar sans a mention of the Henson involvement is on the blog of Inpro co-founder Jack Byrne. It later was renamed the Bell Business Communications Seminar. The organizers of the seminar, Inpro, actually set the tone for the film in a three-page memo from one of Inpro’s principals, Ted Mills to Henson. Mills outlined the nascent, but growing relationship between man and machine: a relationship not without tension and resentment: “He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses if he can do it better.” (Mills also later designed the ride for the Bell System at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Henson’s execution is not only true to Mills’ vision, but he also puts his own unique, irreverent spin on the material. The robot narrator used in this film had previously starred in a skit for a food fair in Germany (video is silent), in 1961. It also may be the same robot that appeared on the Mike Douglas Show in 1966. Henson created a different but similar robot for the SKF Industries pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. This film was found in the AT&T Archives. Thanks go to Karen Falk of the Henson Archives for providing help and supporting documentation to prove that it was, indeed, a Henson production..” ( Thanks, Joly! )

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Jim Henson short explains "Data Communications" for Bell execs, 1963

That’s the problem: people don’t wait until they have something WORTH posting. This is the first video ever uploaded to Youtube by one of the website’s co-founders on April 23, 1955 2005. It…is a giant turd . I really think it set a precedent for the 99.9% of videos on Youtube that suck ass and never should have been uploaded in the first place. *banging head on keyboard* WHY COULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN A CAT VIDEO?! Hit the jump for why elephants are so interesting. SPOILER: It’s their trunks!

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Wow, That Sucked: First Video Uploaded To Youtube

Note: Full-res version of the entire looooooooong thing HERE . This is a comprehensive guide to the history of the Doctor Who television franchise in timeline slash infographical format (saying slash is the new / FYI). For those of you not familiar with Doctor Who , it’s the show the band The who took their name from. Just kidding, but feel free to spread that if you wanna sound like a total TA– “Don’t even say it!” Say what? ” TARDIS .” I wasn’t gonna! “Then what were you gonna say?” Nooooo, it’s too late now. If you wanna hear what I was gonna say you’re gonna have to Time Lord your ass back a minute or suffer the wrath. *brandishing Sonic Screwrdriver * “That’s an electric toothbrush.” I don’t care what it is, it’s about to be brushing your colon! Doctor Who Timeline [cabletv] Thanks to James, who actually made the graphic and clearly has some impressive organizational skills.

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Comprehensive Timeline/Infographic To Doctor Who

Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as The Big Con (the sociological study of con artists that was the basis for the movie The Sting ). The first edition of “Yellow Kid” Weil , the as-told-by autobiography of the cheerful crook, was published in 1948. It was long out of print, but it was reprinted in 2010 by AK Press, and it’s one of the most entertaining memoirs of the era. Students of con games will know the basic mechanics — many of which Weil claims to have invented — and will know that some legitimate contemporary business practices, such as giving away high-priced premiums to sell commodity goods and stocking department stores with flashy, cheap goods that are priced as though they were being sold at a great discount, came to prominence as part of elaborate con-games and only later were institutionalized as normal business. But the real, serious, high-octane cons were practiced with a cast from two to 200, using elaborate sets, timing and staging, and usually involved a faked-up plan to cheat on horse races, real estate or the stock market. This plan always went awry somehow, and ended with all the participants losing their shirts (as far as the mark knew, anyway — in reality, his “pal” the con-man lost nothing and would split the take with the inside man). Weil’s autobiography is really more of a memoir — it doesn’t provide much of a coherent narrative of the man and his life. Rather, it is a series of unconnected — but hugely entertaining — anaecdotes about the various scams he ran and the venal fools he took for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Weil is a virtuoso exploiter of human foibles, and each story serves as a miniature morality play in which someone who thinks he’s getting something for nothing (usually at some innocent’s expense) instead loses everything as payback for his venality. One glaring blindspot in Weil’s narrative is Weil himself. He has practically no self-awareness, and there’s virtually no sense of what’s going on in his own head as he bilks and cons his way around the world. This omission is as striking as anything else in the book, and speaks volumes about how disassociated Weil was from his own ethics and morality. The final two chapters are the most poignant, as they are where Weil, now gone straight, accounts for himself and his deeds. He repeats the con-artist’s shibboleth that he only cheated crooks who thought they were cheating others (though the book has plenty of contradictory examples he neglects to mention), but there is a glimmer of self-knowledge there that is all the more remarkable due to its absence elsewhere in the narrative. This is one of the most entertaining memoirs I’ve ever read. Its episodic nature makes it a natural for quick reads — a more perfect toilet-tank book there never was — and the detailed descriptions of Depression-era cons are priceless, especially for anyone interested in gadgets and improvisation. The scam fortuneteller whose turban disguised a telephone clamped to his head, which was wired down his collar and trouser-leg to an electrical contact on the bottom of his shoe, which would be mated to a telephone circuit when the “swami” reclined on an “oriental lounger” to “commune with the spirit world” is one of the best things I’ve ever read. “Yellow Kid” Weil

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Yellow Kid Weil: Autobiography of the greatest con man in American history

Behold, the fearsome Japanese War Tubas, used as “acoustic locators” by the Imperial Army. War Tubas

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Imperial Japanese Army acoustic locators: Let loose the tubas of war

Swiss luxury watch company Hublot has announced a version of the Antikythera mechanism , an ancient Greek astronomical calculator, that is incorporated into a wristwatch. The mechanism is to be displayed at the 2012 Baselworld expo before moving to a permanent exhibit at Muse des arts et mtiers in Paris. Hublot painstakingly recreates a mysterious, 2,100-year-old clockwork relic - but why? ( Thanks, Richard! )

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Antikythera mechanism in a wristwatch

Julia Suits’s The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines - from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels is a history of those long-gone, much lamented days when Americans joined fraternal lodges in great numbers, and when those lodges attracted and retained members by subjecting new initiates to horrible, dangerous, violent pranks that often involved some combination of 35 cal blanks and high-voltage electricity. You know, the good old days. The Demoulin Brothers were the top of the fraternal order prank-gadget food-chain, publishing a secretive (but wildly popular) catalog that was distributed to lodge presidents and other mucky-mucks. The catalog featured inventions that could be used to terrorize (and delight) the members by simulating their executions, making them think they were to be horribly burned, and other delights of the simpler era when TV wasn’t yet invented and radio was newfangled and untrustworthy. Suits is a real scholar of those days, and she livens up the many reproductions from the various catalogs with great context-giving notes about the nature of these lodges, reprints from newspapers and magazine articles of the day that give a sense of their prominence and significance, and biographies of the mad geniuses who sold these gadgets for so many years. From the demented copywriting in the catalogs to the fan-letters written to the company by excited lodge leaders who were delighted with the performance of the prank items, The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions is a time machine that transports readers to that gilded age and its highly specialized notions of fun and fraternity. The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines - from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels [amazon.com]

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Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges

From the Aug, 1956 issue of Scientific American , this sweet advertisement for the Univac: “Leading companies throughout the country have learned that Univac has become synonymous with enlightened management. And Univac savings more than justify its use for electronic control of management problems. Find out how typical users have put Univac to work in virtually all types of commercial data-processing. Well be happy to send EL135an informative, 24-page, 4-color book on the Univac System to business executives requesting it on their company letterhead.”

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Univac ad, 1956

From the Netherlands’ National Archive, a 1938 photo taken in New York City of a Colt revolver that has been modified to shoot a picture with every trigger pull. Presumably most of those photos are of people looking horrified and about to say something like, “Oh Christ, you turned your gun into a camera? No, don’t point it at me! Ahh!” ( via Super Punch )

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Revolver takes a picture every time you pull the trigger

Blogto’s Derek Flack went spelunking in the Toronto Archives for photos of old computers in situ, from the days when installing a monsterscale computing engine was cause for bringing in the photographer for a bit of posterity. I remember my dad taking me to some computer rooms in this era, though his facial hair was far more glorious than this gentleman’s. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best parts of digging around the Toronto Archives is the stuff you find that you were never looking for. I’d guess that at least a third of the ideas I’ve had for historical posts about the city have come via some serendipitous discovery or another. Today’s installment is certainly fits this bill. When I was putting together a post about what banks used to look like in Toronto, I happened to stumble upon some spectacular, Kubrick-esque shots of an unidentified computer room that got me wondering if there were any more like them in the City’s digitized collection. As it turns out, there are though not as many as I’d like. Vintage computers and technology in Toronto ( via Super Punch )

Link:
Hulking computing engines of Torontos yesteryear