I didn’t know Little Tikes had been going so long.
Wow and flutter, indeed.
Hubbadahubbadahubba
Loving these, I think this what became Lovejoy’s, a purveyor of magazine and videos for gentlemen. No ideas why I know that apart from travelling past it every weekday.
Up Town Top Rankin’
Crikey
The Miami Zoo put 30 flamingos in the bathroom during hurricane Andrew, to ride out the storm. 1992
Innit
Clarke didn’t quite invent the geosynchronous satellite, but he was a very early proponent and popularizer of them. Smart guy.
LOVE the whelk-stall shots; one of my favourite phrases. Nostalgia’d, hard, despite very misty memories of the 60s.
From Wiki:
He also envisioned a “personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one”. He wrote: “the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number.” Such a device would also, in Clarke’s vision, include means for global positioning so “no one need ever again be lost.”
That was 1959.
A nice touch re the satellites was that he saw astronauts having to visit them every so often to replace the burnt out valves.
Now if he’d envisioned valves with no envelope never burning-out 'cos no oxygen, I’d have been impressed…
Haha I went down a wiki rabbit hole from the Clarke’s page earlier and weirdly was looking at early comms satellites and it wasn’t until 1978 that they started investigating using open tubes in space, the conclusion was they could work for up to 15 years as long as the heaters were brought up slowly.
I might have mentioned before the very large laser that the Russians had worked on where all the high-voltage electrics were insulated by vacuum rather than transformer oil. Probably not a coincidence that it was cylindrical and about 20cm smaller diameter than the inside of their Proton heavy-lift launch vehicle. They certainly got as far as building one. As for launching one, well, who knows …
They also built a single-shot laser pumped by a nuclear weapon and there were photographs of that, so one imagines they tried it.
'Kinell!
x2.
Got to love a spot of Mad Science!
I had the misfortune to be giving the talk after the guy who revealed the pics of the bomb-pumped laser. You really couldn’t have made him up. Talll, thin, cadaverous, very slowly spoken. Based in Sverdlovsk I think. It was the first half of the 1990’s, so their research funding was at rock bottom and they were in the market to sell anything they could. We were at an open meeting and he was prepared to talk about this. Let’s just say it attracted some attention.
At another meeting around then (Vienna maybe ?) a guy from a heavy engineering facility somewhere on the former Soviet coast showed a compression set-up which could deliver a multi-tonne piston travelling at 200mph or so into whatever you might fancy standing in front of it. He reckoned you could drive a xenon fluoride C-A laser with that - again only once, of course. And you might want to be standing quite a way away.