J's Dad bought up a bunch of old Radio Enthusiast, TV Repair and Popular Science type magazines at an auction that are from the late 1930s up to the late 60s. Reading through them has been great...just seeing the whole attitudes towards science and technology back then...It was so completely different. And reading about the wondrous technology of radio tubes and the future coming of satellites is marvellous. I feel like I should wear a flapper dress and be smoking a cigarello or something...
The most interesting article so far was from a 1956 article talking about something I'd never heard of. At a time, a few months before sputnik went up in to the air, there was an article about the US's upcoming planned first satellite: the MOUSE (m-something orbital unmanned satellite earth) .The article had spec drawings and wild speculations about the future use of satellites in our lives. Some were spot on, like weather mapping and communications...but there was a whole sense of mild disbelief and wonder about it all...as though it was just too futuristic. I'm a bit disappointed I can't find references to it online. It was the first mention I'd ever seen about it...I've looked online and I can't find anything about it...I guess Sputnik really put an end to it.
There's also interesting things to read about that time in history. President Eisenhower made a lot of comments about the possible errors of the future that are coming true...comments about being wary of feeding too much power to the Industrial Military Complex and how the US should not make it their policy to inflict peace about the world...that it was not their role.
How times have changed.
I am thinking about all this as I'm stuck working this weekend to finish up an overdue project. It's behind from being on strike, and the extra $$ will perhaps go towards buying my very own satellite that I've always wanted. I believe I will have to come up with some catchy name for it before I launch it off...any suggestions?
6 comments:
Fascinating. Just last night D and I watched Destination Moon (1950), a movie which tries to imagine a scientifically plausible trip to the Moon -- and it was made 7 years before Sputnik, 18 years before the first photos of the Earth were taken from lunar orbit, and 19 years before the first actual landing. We love stuff like this. We also have Disney's Tomorrowland DVD set, which includes episodes of the 1950s TV show that imagine what it might be like to visit Mars, etc. One fascinating detail is how all these shows casually assume that we'll be using atomic power to get to the moon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we have, yet.
Oh, one other film you should see -- if you can find a copy anywhere -- is a 1936 film from Russia called Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella, released in English as Space Voyage or Cosmic Journey. I don't know if it's available on DVD, but D and I saw it at the Cinematheque a year or two ago, and it's fantastic: it imagines a flight to the Moon in the 1940s or 1950s, and it uses stop-motion animation to show people leaping around the moonscape under low-gravity conditions, etc.
Cool...I'll have to check that...
Name for your satellite...hmm...that's a thinker...
...how about...nah...
...maybe...erm...no...
...I know! Geosomin's Orbital And Telescopic Partical Inducing Stellar Satellite.
(I could do better, but I haven't had any coffee)
How about Geosomin's Excellent Exploration Pod?
A GEEP of my very own.
how the US should not make it their policy to inflict peace about the world
Wait a minute. Wasn't it Eisenhower who got us into Vietnam?
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