Source: Wikimedia Commons
The television repairman was one of the most familiar tradesmen in mid-century America, because a television of that era was a machine with dozens of components that wore…
The thing modern listeners find hardest to accept is that this was not a cheap tier of service for people who could not afford better. In enormous areas of the…
No screen, no undo, a bell that rang early, and no number one. Here are twelve.
1. There Was No Screen, So the Paper Was the Only Record
This is…
The Light Is Not Being Carried, It Is Trapped
The intuitive picture of a fibre optic cable is a pipe with light shining down it, kept on course by a…
There Is No Lens, and There Cannot Be
Every camera works by bending light. A lens collects rays arriving from a point on an object and bends them back together…
The Stripe Was a Cassette Tape
The brown band on the back of the old cards was magnetic tape, in the same sense that a cassette was magnetic tape, and…