Magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes published illustrations of motion picture films that show a number of successive frames. In most cases, there was no expectation that readers would try to set the images in motion, regardless of whether they had originally been captured with that purpose in mind; they were…
I’ve been exploring the possibilities of historical face-averaging here for some time now—that is, “averaging” groups of facial images from successive periods and then arranging them into timelines so that we can compare them side by side or, better yet, watch historical trends unfolding before our eyes as video animations. The reason it’s been a…
Two hundred years ago, “Santa Claus” was a woman. At least, that’s the assumption we find being made in a group of writings published in the New-York Evening Post near the close of December 1815, back at a time when the Santa Claus mythos as we know it today was still largely unfixed and unformed. …
The wavy lines of time-based graphs can easily be converted into audio, as I explained in an earlier post. But we can also convert them into video, and in fact sound recordings were being played back as moving pictures in the 1860s, long before anyone had played one back as sound—another notable difference being that…
On August 2, 1948, listeners to WTHT in Hartford, Connecticut, got to hear a conversation carried out by mobile telephone between the radio studio and a car speeding down a highway. I’m now pleased to share the audio of that historic broadcast, which might be the oldest recording of a real mobile phone conversation—one that…
You’ll need red-cyan glasses to experience the 3D effects in this post. Don’t let that deter you if you don’t have any. I just ordered ten pairs for $4.89 (shipping included) on eBay and got them in three days. I’d like to think that’s a small price to pay and a short time to wait…
A few weeks ago, I blogged about using historical images of reflections in people’s eyes as a source for accidental stereoscopic images (although not very detailed ones). Now I’d like to consider a similar kind of source that could have a lot more potential: images of reflections in water. I’m interested mainly in bringing older…
The eyes, it’s said, are the mirror of the soul. But they also serve as mirrors more literally: we can see things reflected in them. And when we’re looking at two eyes side by side, we can often see the same things reflected in both at once, from slightly different vantage points—nature’s own stereoviews! With…
I’m pleased herewith to publish the first new literary manuscript by Cal Stewart to come out since 1924. It’s a full-length stage play called “Hoosier Hollow,” copyrighted in 1902 but never put into print. You can download a pdf transcription of the full text here. Cal Stewart was the most celebrated phonographic storyteller in the…
Alexander Graham Bell’s contributions loom large in histories of the telephone and phonograph, but his brief flirtation with motion pictures back in 1882 seems to have escaped the notice of media historians. Granted, it never developed into anything beyond a few notes and drawings, but those notes and drawings were pretty darn innovative, including one…
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