In some fairly respectable venue, I read that this or a similar feat (it might have been the converse task of making a piece of bar stock into a sphere) was part of the long and difficult process of attaining the "artificer" rating in the Royal Navy in the between-the-wars years. I'll follow up if I get any traction on a reference. ... View more

Sounds like a trip as wonderful as the car itself. Although he'd long since left cars of this vintage behind in a cloud of Chicago road salt and rust—and our destinations were mostly heavy-industry work related, so the trips were seldom so relaxed (or Instagram-ready)—a chance to get into Dad's car with a suitcase was always a highlight of my childhood. Learned a lot about machinery (cars and otherwise), driving, life, and our region of a big country that way... ... View more

My guess: somebody who got it for pennies on the dollar, blew an engine mid-flight, discovered that fixing it was logistically and financially daunting... Maybe that first kid or the needs of the family farm or somesuch also helped bring home the cost of blasting around the sky for amusement on a rather stonking amount of high-octane gas. Today we think of them as rare and precious things, and important artifacts of history, and display them in museums or have restoration shops "zero-time" them at great expense, but once upon a time, a vast aerial armada went begging. Planes that were war weary, excess to drastically reduced needs, or simply obsolete at the dawn of the jet age (pick one or more) went quite cheaply, and in fact most were recycled as scrap. Reminds me of a story a Canadian friend told about how Lancasters could be had for about the value of the fuel in their tanks and the glycol in their engines, whereupon farmers converted the fuselages into chicken houses or other outbuildings. See also http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNews/Stories/tabid/116/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/455/Last-Call-for-Lancasters.aspx ... View more

Adorable top picture, but if that's where I think it is (White Sands National Monument), that little Falcon was sure earning its living and must have been a real barrel of monkeys if the wind was blowing! I'm guessing was an I6 model, which in those days meant 144 cubes standard, 170 optional, and four main bearings—more a future legend than a fully realized one. I can't tell if the car has Sprint badging, indicating the laat-half-year option of a 260 V8. I once drove up San Augustin Pass in a Comet with the 144 and a two-speed Slush-o-Matic, which admittedly is sandbagging the problem, but even without a trailer on, it was... an exercise in patience. ... View more

Hey, people may invite me to parties just to make the other guests go home at the end, but it beats not getting invited at all. 🙂 ... View more

>Did we even know what pixels were in 1957? I sure didn't... Well, there's an interesting question that resonates with my interest in the history of technology! (a/k/a fair warning to flee! 🙂 To briefly summarize: the word probably wasn't around in '57, though the concept was (and if you knew much about computer science at the time, you were pretty far out on the frontier to say the least). The origins of the word are somewhat ambiguous. The first cite is often considered to be Billingsley at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ca. 1965, but he is supposed to have said that the word wasn't his invention and he didn't remember where it came from. The concept (without the word that doth fall trippingly from the tongue) goes back much further. After all, a sort of adjacent idea is how they reproduced photos in print, right? -- with greater or lesser density of ink dots. But I think of that as only an adjacency, as is the difference between black and white and color CRTs that are working with an analog signal via analog circuitry. A milestone digital manifestation was in 1957 at what was then called the National Bureau of Standards. Kirsch would much later be eulogized in popular media as the father of the pixel, though it isn't at all clear to me that he actually used that word. https://petapixel.com/2020/08/13/russell-kirsch-inventor-of-the-pixel-passed-away-this-week/ https://hackaday.com/2020/08/20/russell-kirsch-pixel-pioneer-and-the-father-of-digital-imaging/ Here's the deepest part of the rabbit hole that I can readily find: http://dicklyon.com/tech/Photography/Pixel-SPIE06-Lyon.pdf The author thinks that "pixel" didn't escape the technical literature of computing until the 1970s. Certainly the general public didn't have much reason to think of such things before the democratization of computers. ... View more

Was it subsidized by the Atoms for P90s program? The rendering is as smart as the article. Raymond Loewy, who has doubtless been turning in his grave at the front-end solutions of a lot of actual EVs), is probably going, "Hmm..." ... View more

The fins on that '59 Bonneville might not have been the most extravagant in town, but getting that missile-evoking tight V right has been praised as one of the most difficult bits of die stamping ever done on a mass market car.  (How the magic happened on the metal-bashing side of the industry, with a then-and-now contrast, would make a good article, if anybody is looking for ideas...)   Thanks for this piece, incidentally.  Great ads for cars that were among the most stylish of their day and can still have pride of place in a collector's garage. ... View more