For those who have no way to play their records - amazon sells several different turntables. There’s one by Sony that’s about $100.
The main thing to modern turntables is they have a phono preamplifier to work with modern receivers. Old turntables won’t work with new receivers unless you buy a seperate preamp.
Interesting note:
Wycliffe Bible Translators uses what is essentially a gramophone to play records for people with language dialects that the missionary doesn’t speak yet. You put the needle on the record, and just turn the record with your finger. With some practice, you can get steady enough for spoken word.
Yay! Noone mentioned my thing! Embossing Label makers! you know, you spin the dial and the letters press up through plastic tape. They are common as heck, but completely not useful. I mean, just use a pen! I just love the way the labels look, and how someone found a way to use the phenomenon of “white plastic”, which is how plastic, no matter what color it was to start with, will turn white if bent or pressed to far.
I love lots of the stuff already mentioned, especially turntables. I had an awesome one- really clear sound, sharp needle, but we gave it to my SO’s grandmother for christmas, thinking the two we had in the closet worked, which they didn’t. Right now the one I have sucks, I got it for a buck and it shows, but I have my eye out for a good one.
I love Zoetropes… I’ve made a coupla ugly-assed ones for my own amusement, turning a semi-obsolete item (a turntable) into something even more impractical in these days & times.
What I really want for Christmas is a nice hand-tooled one of the more elaborate designs that use angled mirrors instead of vertical slits to break up the frames. Mahogany, if possible. I’d love to put the little looping animations I amuse myself with on my coffee table, in a player that looks nice just sitting there. (I also like the anachrony of computer animation transferred to such archaic technology.)
Similarly, I love stereography and want to replace my crap plastic stereogram viewer with a nice Victorian one.
Anyone mentioned magic lanterns, yet? I didn’t think to check on page one. I have a number of magic lantern “performances” which were transferred to film c. 1910-1920, and they are much more compelling and interesting than you’d think they could possibly be, knowing how they were made.
Also, synchronized-disk driven analog television is something I’ve been wanting to pick up as a hobby for a few years. I really need more money in the budget for trivial pursuits if I’m ever going to find inner peach.
(That last word is a typo which I’ve decided to let stand because it pleases me to do so.)
I’ve read that before the arrival of steam power, in England and Ireland they built a system of elevated canals across the countryside to carry goods across the countryside via barges. Looked kinda like aqueducts, but with deeper, wider channels at the top to accomodate heavily laden barges. Worked really well until steam power came along. I understand some parts of the system are still working and you can actually take excursions on them for a price. Sounds absolutely cool as hell, floating OVER the countryside on a slowly drifting barge.
Any Euro dopers up on this?
Count me in on pneumo tubes and dirigibles. I also like the look of those old brass cash registers with the rounded keys that did all their calculating mechanically.
In computers, the Amiga Video Toaster. Always wanted one, never got around to getting one.
gotpasswords, thanks for the link. That is one of the companies I used in the past. I collect old cameras, in case you didn’t know. I purchased some respooled film years ago for an old Kodak Autograph vintage circa 1917 and tray developed it.
Those old cameras were pretty darn good.
Which leads me to another dead end: Autograph cameras. Like a modern data back, yet what you did was scribe info onto the edge of the film (out side the picture area) with a stylus through a little window in the camera back.
Data backs got popular for 35m SLRs in the 70s and 80s, but they superimposed the data on the image. The newest ones sold today imprint between or below the film frames, thus bringing to full circle the old autograph system.
Cool, no?
How about PINBALL MACHINES? The last US makers (Bally and Williams) stopped their manufacture years ago-I expect that once these machines break down,there won’t be any spare parts to fix them. Anybody know how much a vintage pinball machine is worth?
Also, odd “quack” medicaldevices…like the electroshock machine seen in the movie “THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE”…cool!
Telegraphs. A technology that changed the world but now Morse code is all but unknown.
Telegrams. Formerly THE way to deliver important messages, you can still do it but they are cost prohibitive.
Quadraphonic sound. At one time, the up and coming must-have sound system.
Reel to reel tape players. Used to be a status symbol.
Lever voting machines. A simple and reliable technology that served well for many years. Replaced largely by unreliable punchcards with the infamous hanging chads.
I miss hot air pop corn poppers. With the advent of microwave popcorn the need for having a separate appliance just for popping popcorn has gone, but I loved those things.
View-Master. Hours of fun when I was a kid. I had totally forgotten what these things were called until today. Thanks, Google!
Fluidics – there was a big deal about these in the 1960s and maybe into the 1970s. You inject fluid into a variety of weirdly-shaped compartmnents and tubes, and they act like switches, transistors, and other electronic components. People thought that they could build networks and circuits out of these. There were entire books devoted to the subject.
Of course, it couldn’t compete with electronics. You couldn’t shrink it down anywhere near as much, and the speed is hopelessly slow by computer standards. Still, it was a neat technology. There was until recently a pretty good hands-on display of some fluidic devices at the Boston Museum of Science, but it’s been taken down, or moved. There’s a book on the subject here where I work.
Nomographs – those “mileage calculators” you find on the backs of Rand McNally Maps – the ones that tell you how many miles to the gallon you’re getting, not the distances between cities – were probably the only commonly-seen nomographs around. But it’s only one example of the infinite number and variety of these very clever graphic calculators.
One of my favorites: draw three lines radiating from a single point and measure off “rulers” with equal spacing along all three lines. Call the outer ones A and C and the middle one B. If you place a ruler across points “a” on A and “c” on C, then it’ll cross linbe B at a point “b” such that (1/a) + (1/c) = (1/b). You can use it to calculate the resistance of resistors in parallel or capacitance of capacitors in series, or calculate the relationships between image location, object location, and focal length for a lens. (You can extend the lines through the origin for negative values, too).
Again, there arre entire books devoted to this, and visualizing such Nomograms gives you intuitive insight into how systems behave. But they’ve been done in by small portable calculators and fast personal computers. Who needs a quick result limited to the three-place accuracy of graphs when you could get as much accuracy just as fast from a programmable portable hand calculator or computer?
The canal network was mostly surface canals, not elevated. The elevated sections (aqueducts) were only used to carry a canal across a valley. The longest aqueduct was the the 1007-ft long Pontcysyllte Aqueduct on the Llangollen canal. It’s still in service.
When my family (my parents and I) lived in England we rented a narrowboat for a week and took a trip on the Llangollen canal. It was by far the most memorable trip we’ve ever taken, and it is absolutely cool to cross the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct on a boat. You a lot of fun to operate drawbridges and locks, of which there are many on this canal. The rental boats are diesel powered, though the canals were originally built for horse-drawn cargo barges.
Another vote for pneumatic tubes, of course…
No one has yet mentioned the Optical Telegraph, which most famously figures in the plot of The Count of Monte Christo.
There are even more ancient examples of the optical telegraph concept. GMs of fantasy role-playing games and would-be authors of fantasy literature would do well to remember these concepts if they find it useful to have a mode of high-speed communication in their low-tech environment.
Of course, as Rooves implied, arguably no technology is truly “dead end”, just as no idea is completely new. Does James Burke ever visit here?
I remember reading that the Ford Taurus used fluidics in its windshield washer system; the water went through a little gizmo that oscillated the stream back and forth across the windshield. No moving parts.
Apparently it was prone to clogging :rolleyes:
Geez you guys, its not as if they stopped making them.
You can even get half decent cheapo turntables at places like Rex or Radio Shack for around a hundred bucks. BTW…they still make records too. 
Jon
Another vote for the Curta calculator. I have wanted one for years but they have started going up in price so I think I’m out of luck 
I actually want to get one for my son as he loves mechanical adding things so much, guess I’ll keep looking at garage sales.
Take a gander at these phones at www.oldphones.com
My wife mentioned just the same longing for dial phones awhile back so I ordered the traditional desk phone in black plastic (new in box!). Not only do we love the tactile pleasure of dialing numbers, but the bell sounds so nice that we have turned down the ringers on other nearby phones to allow it to ring alone.
Old? All of my desk phones are older than that. 
I’ve got a 302 in the bedroom, a 3504 (a rather uncommon hybrid of the 302 and 500 - it was Western Electric’s way of using up the stock of 302 receivers and dials in the 500 body) and a 302-era Spacesaver is mounted to my desk at home.
I believe that fluidics was referenced in Rollerball as the technology of the super “repository of all knowledge” computer (Zeno?) that Jonathan E asks about the past, only to have it refuse to answer. Perhaps that’s why the technology was abandoned… 
Be sure to monitor eBay. You’d be amazed at the bargains that sometimes crop up. I definitely want to add one to my calculator collection.