It’s a collection of film clips focused on all manner of inventions - not just devices, but also physical feats, like climbing skyscrapers, etc. Lots of hilariously unsuccessful flying machines.
Anyway, my question is about a clip (starting around 21:30 here) showing a secret formula “magic fluid” purported to instantly dry clean clothes while the person is wearing them.
The narrator claims that in Budapest, there was an establishment where customers could (after removing their shoes) walk through a pool filled with said fluid. It showed people walking with wet, dirty clothes into the pool, and emerging completely dry and clean.
It looks very convincing, but tellingly, you never see people entering the pool while others are exiting. This makes it clear it’s a camera trick - they filmed the emerging scene first, by choreographing people carefully walking backwards into the pool (and then ran the film backwards for this scene). They then filmed the scene where people walked into the pool in wet, dirty clothes.
My question: does anyone know where this clip came from? Was it from some movie (in which case, portrayed as fiction)? Or was it part of some hoax?
I seem to remember seeing online a black and white photo of people walking into a sheepdip pit [well, you run animals through a dip pit to cover them with liquid insecticides, or at least one used to] on Weird News? Let me attempt to hit google. Hm, all they had was that one youtube one, which is not the picture I saw - the one I saw was not a swimming pool, but a narrow dip pit, about 3 feet wide.
I for one would not want to be in a room with several thousand gallons of 1,1,1-trichloroethane, I have a touch of nerve damage from exposure to it and it is not fun. I certainly would not want to walk through a bath of it.
The problem with all the information on the internet is the sheer amount of garbage information on the internet. Filtering through it to find a single image I saw probably 10 years ago is more effort than I really want to go through.
I remember seeing a similar sequence on a 1930s-50s “popular science” type short on…I think it was AMC, though it might have been featured in TNT’s “Monstervision” as an intermission filler. One of those “imagine these wonders of the WORLD OF TOMORROW!” type deals.
I think it was a series of shorts, but I regret to say that I can’t remember the title. Sorry.