Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 10, 2012 -
19 comments
Atomage Magazine, possibly the first fetish magazine, produced by clothing designer turned photographer
John Sutcliffe, who clearly had a special place reserved in his heart for head-to-toe rubberwear.
posted by serazin
on May 31, 2007 -
6 comments
If you know monster makeup, you already know the name
Jack Pierce, who created the makeup for
Frankenstein's monster,
The Wolf Man,
The Mummy, and
many others. But Pierce's career with Universal Studios, for whom he created these masterpieces, came to a sudden, and unexpected, end when, in 1945, he and his entire staff were fired.
The trouble? Pierce's methods were time-consuming and painstaking, involving, among other things, building up his creatures features with cotton and
collodion, a process that took many hours. Universal had
fallen on hard times, with mergers, sales of its catalogue, and the loss of its 1,500-screen theater chain bringing the bean counters to the fore. They wanted to cut back on Universal's grand-spending ways, and out with the bathwater went the baby.
The sorts of makeup men the bean-counters like were
George and
Gordon Bau, two brothers from Minnesota who had worked at
Rubbercraft and brought with them a knowledge of how to make reusable appliances from cheap, lightweight
foam latex. Their major accomplishment was
House of Wax (1953) and they revolutionized the industry (Dick Smith's work in
Little Big Man would be unthinkable without it, as would the entire career of
Rick Baker. Best still, it's now possible to buy
monstrous and
gruesome rubber appliances right off the shelf.
posted by Astro Zombie
on Jun 18, 2006 -
27 comments
