Internet, I have a question.
Yes?
When did sound film start?
Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923.
Thank you, Internet.
Now I'm sad.
All those people are dead.
All those whippersnappers had children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, the youngsters became oldsters and died, and they left behind themselves far more people than they lived with and a much more complex society. These people cross the street wherever they wish, stand there right on the tracks and now that kind of behavior is impossible. Our natural Taoist flow is structured more intensely, channelled more strictly because it must.
18 comments:
The year my aunt got married.
It's not speed corrected, just shown at the correct speed. The frame rate was shot slower for silent films, so they replay fast if you don't flip the projector speed to "silent."
My thoughts went to how advanced we were...trollies, elevated trains, delivery wagons, and beautiful buildings. The Flatiron building has stood there all this time while change flowed around it.
deborah, the article you wanted (I think) is linked at the Korea post.
Something that always gets me about a lot of these old newsreels and photos.
Look how clean everything is. Look how everybody tries to look their best.
The difference of 100+ years? Lefties.
My thoughts went to how advanced we were...trollies, elevated trains, delivery wagons, and beautiful buildings. The Flatiron building has stood there all this time while change flowed around it.
A year later, Titanic sank trying to get there. Then, WW I happened. You know the rest.
Two years ago I posted Slowing Down The Past. Rhhardin gave some useful info regarding the film speed which I see he repeated here.
The side by side use and acceptance of mechanized life with the ancient horse drawn world is striking to me. That historical dividing line at the end of reliance on animals is a bright line separating the entire course of human history before it. It seems to have been a quick and relatively unopposed change for such a disruptive adaptation to everything they knew.
Very few women walking about compared to today's street. Also, nearly every single person is wearing a hat, even the children. Hats hardly exists anymore. Everyone then was better dressed than the average New Yorker today.
@bags: I noticed a few horse apples in the streets and also the toxic cloud from one motor car. There were trade offs. Another was that large tracts of arable land previously devoted to feeding draft animals was freed up for human consumption. That and the discovery of artificial fertilizers by the dreaded Germans led to faster population increases.
The sound track sounds like one of those NPR docudramas - overly loud, somewhat in tune with the pictures, and very annoying. Show a picture of a boat? Cue the steam whistle.
My thoughts went to how advanced we were...trollies, elevated trains, delivery wagons, and beautiful buildings. The Flatiron building has stood there all this time while change flowed around it.
Wow, did I ever rain on that beautiful thought last night. I'm sorry, deborah.
A two handed reality, chicklit. "We" were no more or less advanced then than now--different focus, different priorities, different skills and tools, different material to work with while continuing to pass on our capability for creativity, invention, compassion, and connection along with foolishness and destruction.
My dad was born in 1914, and today marks the date of his death at 80 twenty four years ago. Among the items I've found cleaning out the house to move, was a Red Cross field flag on a wooden stick, a sealed army-issued metal tin holding folded gauze and safety pins, and another rusted tin holding the iris blanks on pins that he used in making glass eyes for returning soldiers whose eyes were destroyed while fighting in WW2.
The men all wore hats, and the women wore hats and a half......I don't think this was necessarily a fashion choice. Horseshit was all over, and no one wants horseshit in their hair. Dried horseshit was airborne and pervasive........You could only cross those streets a certain number of times before your number came up. The good old days weren't.
All that coal burning, the skies look hazy as hell. Plus people wore a ton of layers of clothes( the women wore bloomers and corsets and God knows what else) and probably bathed once a week. It must have smelled to high heaven of cigars, farts and B.O.
No worries, chick! I didn't realize how advanced we were then. For example I recently read East of Eden, where telephone usage was mentioned. It made me wonder, so I looked up when the telephone became prevalent.
"Prior to the invention of the telephone switchboard [predicated on telegraphy], pairs of telephones were connected directly with each other, which was primarily useful for connecting a home to the owner's business.[11] A telephone exchange provides telephone service for a small area. Either manually by operators, or automatically by machine switching equipment, it interconnects individual subscriber lines for calls made between them. This made it possible for subscribers to call each other at homes, businesses, or public spaces. These made telephony an available and comfortable communication tool for many purposes, and it gave the impetus for the creation of a new industrial sector.
...In Bell's lecture, during which a three-way telephone connection with Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut, was demonstrated, he first discussed the idea of a telephone exchange for the conduct of business and trade. On 3 November 1877, Coy applied for and received a franchise from the Bell Telephone Company for New Haven and Middlesex Counties. Coy, along with Herrick P. Frost and Walter Lewis, who provided the capital, established the District Telephone Company of New Haven on 15 January 1878.[17]
...The District Telephone Company of New Haven went into operation with only twenty-one subscribers, who paid $1.50 per month. By 21 February 1878, however, when the first telephone directory was published by the company, fifty subscribers were listed. Most of these were businesses and listings such as physicians, the police, and the post office; only eleven residences were listed, four of which were for persons associated with the company.[17]
The New Haven District Telephone Company grew quickly and was reorganized several times in its first years. By 1880, the company had the right from the Bell Telephone Company to service all of Connecticut and western Massachusetts. As it expanded, the company was first renamed Connecticut Telephone, and then Southern New England Telephone in 1882.[17] The site of the first telephone exchange was granted a designation as a National Historic Landmark on 23 April 1965. However it was withdrawn in 1973 in order to demolish the building and construct a parking garage.[17]" [my bolding]
-Wiki
East of Eden also has a humorous treatment of people dealing with new-fangled autos and the trouble it took to learn how to start them, and other issues such as resistance to them.
PS the spread of the telephone speaks to your gas-in-a-container analogy. Yes, the rich are first adopters, but tech quickly spreads throughout society.
Ed, thanks, but I wanted to specifically find info about the Nork nuke labs being destroyed and scientists killed.
@deborah: If you didn’t watch “Downton Abbey,” you should because it pretty skillfully dealt with how technology reached the very rich beginning around 1912. In the very first scene in episode 1, news is shown to travel across a telegraph wire. The camera literally tracks the wire from point A to point B. Later on, home electricity is introduced, and then telephones, and motor cars, etc.
I watched all of Downton. Quite a nice show. Have seen a lot of the old Upstairs, Downstairs, but had no interest in the re-make.
Although my daughter loves the Jane Austen movies, Jane Eyre, Little Women, she was not interested in either of those.
Post a Comment