Now, most obsolete tech is obsolete for a reason. Either it was too complex, too expensive, or just plain ol’ not as good as the newer stuff. So the only criterion here is that it must be cool.
Now the Germans (not sure if it was that ghastly Nazi bunch or if it was a bit later) experimented with rocket mail.
“I’d like to post this to Berlin, please”
“Certainly sir. Surface, Air, or Rocket?”
How cool is that? Needless to say, it didn’t last.
Pneumatic message delivery tubes are also utterly cool in my book. I first saw them as a kid watching Bugs bunny cartoons, and I was hooked on the idea. As an adult, I’ve seen a small-scale return of these things in supermarkets as a means of clearing cash from the checkouts to the strong room. But the idea of a city-wide network such as Paris had is just mindblowing.
Telegrams! How civilised. Absolutely no way they could ever make a return, but they were cool.
Newsreels. Wonderful stuff. When big news stories broke interstate, the film would be processed in-flight to save time, and get the reels to the evening commuters before they left the city.
I have an old black manual typewriter in my study at home. I don’t do anything with it. I just think it looks nice, kind of stirs up romantic images of the 1930s.
When the Soviet Union’s SST (the Tupolev Tu-144) proved too dangerous even for the Soviets, they had it flying air mail for a while. Maybe not as fast as a German rocket, but still pretty damn fast.
The first generation of spy satellites that the U.S. developed took pictures on film, and there was no way to transmit the pictures back to the ground. The film canisters would eject from the satellite, re-enter the atmosphere and deploy a parachute. For fairly obvious reasons, the government didn’t want these picures floating around in the ocean where just anybody might find them, so they had planes and pilots who could catch the falling canisters in mid-air! How cool is that?
I’ll probably think of a few more.
(I just started a new job a couple weeks ago. The office is in a building that used to be Sears warehouse for the entire northeastern U.S. There are some pipes along the ceiling and walls that have network cables running through them, but they look like they might have been for one of those old, pneumatic message systems. I’m trying to find someone who knows the history of the building so I can ask.)
(And Spurious George, someday I may have to stay at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City, just for the phone number.)
What’s that? Bike hubs are pretty standardized these days.
Some of my favorite obsolete technologies are:
[ul]
[li]Propeller powered trains, e.g. the Schienenzeppelin (“Rail Zeppelin”) and the Bennie Railplane.[/li][li]Airships (dirigibles)[/li][li]Ocean liners (not cruise ships or ferries, but real passenger liners)[/li][li]Hovercraft ferry[/li][/ul]
By the way, I think the satellite recovery technique mentioned by Robot Arm was used to rescue James Bond in one of the movies. A large metal hook mounted in front of an airplane captures the parachute cord.
yes. There is a river rafting guided tour (I can’t recall the name right now, dinkon, ya know?) somewhere out West (CO, CA, UT?) that uses them for film delivery.
The guide/photog sends back rolls of film and by the time the tourists/rafters get back to base, their pics are ready.
I still use a Pickett 803 when doing calculations in the classroom, (I’m a teacher,) and carry a Pickett 600 with me most of the time. For some calculations in nuclear chemistry, I find them superior to the scientific calculators the students all have. Of course I’ve just come back to slide rules in the past few years, having been seduced by calculators, of which I also have a few. Its worth remembering that all of the Apollo astronauts carried Pickett 600s as standard gear, and we haven’t been to the moon since calcuators were invented. . .
Candlestick telephones, telegrams and especially record players all died the miserable deaths they deserved, but nixie tubes and pneumatic message tube systems absolutely rock!
Hit up an online auction site. Old record players are dirt cheap there.
My nomination: Laserdiscs. No, the picture quality isn’t as good as DVD, but it’s the highest quality analog video that ever hit the consumer market. Plus, it uses 12-inch discs. They look like LP-sized CDs. I bought a Laserdisc player online recently - $30. $12 for the player and $18 to ship the giant monster.
I really do miss record players.