It would be interesting to imagine the conversation when they try to decipher the future science and technology from the "commoner" from the 2019.
"You are Newton, you are famous man. You discovered gravity I think. But you were wrong and everything is relative. There are black holes that suck even light. Light has a speed and nothing can be faster than light."
"Maxwell. I have heard that name. Batteries or something. Anyways, there is this thing called quantum mechanics where everything is either particle and a wave and nobody knows how it works and its weird. Have you met Schrödinger and do you know about his experiments with cats?"
"Everything is made of atoms, and you can split them to generate enormous amounts of heat. It's very dangerous but fortunately I know all about how to design a vessel that can do it safely. We can all live like kings and make filthy coal smoke a thing of the past! All we need is some plutonium..."
"So, you can formalize the act of doing mathematics as "computation", and build machines to do it. The neat thing is that all such machines are equivalent in power! They're amazingly useful - you can, uh, well, make ballistics tables I guess? But they're so much better than that, trust me they can do anything! We just need some silicon... huh? damn. Okay, we'll use relays - I suppose it's easy enough to get a few hundred miles of extremely fine copper wire... what do you mean, "what's a volt"?
Perhaps the easiest and most likely to promote scientific progress would be the telescope and microscope: though I don't know how to grind lenses, it seems there were several centuries where people knew how to make good spectacles, but hadn't figured out that putting two lenses in front of each other is really useful.
Pasteurization is just cooking stuff. "I cooked these peas sealed in a champagne bottle last summer and they ares still edible consumes grey peas"
Penicillin was derived from mold. Once you can culture bacteria, you can demonstrate that penicillin is effective at killing it.
One could easily transplant these ideas to the Roman era. They'd likely take hold too, because of the huge impact they have on conducting war.
The mere introduction of hand washing in situations where people are intimately caring for one another has saved millions of lives.
I also think the average person now has an amazing amount of knowledge about the body and its operation compared to even a qualified doctor of 200+ years ago.
Telescopes and microscopes also provided the motivation for improvements in lensmaking in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.
Even "basic" stuff like batteries. I know the principle, but I doubt I'd manage to make a good one. I know steel is iron with some added carbon, but there's more to it than that. How about soap? I recall seeing some program as a kid about how soap is made, but without further research I couldn't even begin to make it.
There's such an amazing amount of details in engineering, chemistry, mechanics and production processes that I'm blissfully ignorant of that I depend upon in my daily life.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
I'd say, forget Newton or Maxwell, whose mathematical and physics prowess would be hard to beat but imagine the same scenario with Archimedes: finding the ratio of volumes of a sphere in a cylinder? No problem.
I've been meaning to try wet plate photography[1] because it seems very intriguing to my closeted-hipster self, but I don't trust myself with the chemicals needed.
Personally, I've been satisfied with plain old film, though I would avoid dageurrotypes, as it involved processing with mercury vapor. I have my limits.
Instead, add these steps:
6b - dry the film
6c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW colour channel.
9b - dry the film
9c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW + CYAN colour channel.
11b - dry the film
11c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW + CYAN + MAGENTA colour channel.
17b - scan it in visible light. This is the luma information.
The luma will be much higher resolution and contrast than the chroma (Yellow+Cyan+Magenta) scans, because the infrared scans are made before the film was fixed. Together though, they might be pretty decent looking.
K14 - proces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-14_process
I did, however, have a few rolls in the last batch Dwayne's processed.
It starts with the name, age, and appearance of the darkroom? As if it's a character? And then all of a sudden it's a dialogue with no introduction whatsoever, where the bold text is one character and the normal text is another?
This doesn't explain why anything at all. It's just a weirdly formatted snarky dialog. With a strange do and don't at the end.
The problem with modern life, as wonderful and amazing as they are, is that many people lack the history of how we got there. Obviously younger ones have not lived through it, but at least a basic knowledge of the progress made will help them appreciate just how wonderful and amazing our times are.
I am curious as to why? I mean, in a historical context, they might be interesting. And certainly, they will continue to exist for quite some time in certain professional and hobbyist settings, but I don't imagine they'll provide much value outside of trivia to the average person.
I used one in high school, but I can't say that it has provided me much practical knowledge outside of knowing how a negative is actually used.
+++
ath
Edit: I don't miss the Modems. The BBS era was pure magic on a stick. I loved every second of it.
The author of this piece doesn’t seem to understand the process either. The light will expose the photographic paper, which will render it useless. The developed negative film is relatively safe from light-induced damage.
The author also fails to mention that one begins developing film (at least, the way I did it years ago) by transferring it to a lightproof container in a completely black room. They tend to not show this part in Hollywood, I suppose, since black rooms don’t really translate well to the screen. (Unless there is an alternative process I’m unaware of... I was very much a noob B&W photographer.)
I think that's rather the point of the piece. At least that's what I got out of it.
There's a recurring theme every generation where the older generation thinks the younger generation is just dumb, or doesn't care about things that matter, etc. In this case it's the older generation shaming the younger generation for not knowing how photographs used to be processed. But that doesn't really matter. It's just some arbitrary piece of nostalgia. And anyway, digging further, those people doing the shaming only have a very limited understanding to begin with.
> ... oh fine, look, I don’t know.
The point is that it's amazing this question caught on before someone googled the answer effectively.
Hey, I think I know that one. The name sounds wrong but it's definitely referring to a device by which one enters virtual reality:
I'm not familiar with that term. What is an "information feather"? Google doesn't help. Also english isn't my native language, so I may miss some context here.
“When I watched someone on TV using a quill, I didn’t go on the internet and write: “What is the purpose of the information feather?””
(Once upon a time, before pens were manufactured, people would write by taking a large feather, cutting the hollow tube at its center to a point, and dipping it in ink.)
It's the retail photo lab that really distinguishes my generation from the last.
I remember I created a small camera-obscura based photo-camera with friends for a physics project from piece o aluminium, old shoe-box and photo-paper :)
Reloading it was a pain, cause you had to be in a dark-room to put in in the box :D
Exposition was minutes.
It was awesome!
Photograms-idea sound really fun as well, and probably a bit easier than trying to get the exposition time correctly.
"You mean he can make computer chips in the red room?"
"No, the chemicals are different as are some of the steps. What I am trying to say is that similar concepts are used. Things like the exposure of photosensitive materials to light and using other chemicals to change the properties of exposed areas."
"That doesn't make any sense at all. Light can't change chemicals."
"Of course it can. That is how photosynthesis works."
"What do plants have to do with this?"
"Very little. I was just using a common example to prove that chemicals can changed by light."
"Okay, but plants are different from computer chips and photographs so I still don't see how it's related."
(The conversation continues in circles for a bit.)
"Look, we used to think about things in very different ways. When your generation and my generation sees stuff coming off of factory line, we have a tendency to think of things being made in mechanical ways. So we're the same in that respect. On the other hand, you see a lot of things being created digitally so you have a greater tendency to think of things being built up from bits in computer memory. My generation saw a lot of things being made by carefully controlled chemical reactions, so it is easier for us to imagine things being created that way. Just because I have less exposure to the former doesn't mean that it does not exist. Just because you have less exposure to the latter doesn't mean that it does not exist. The world changes. Get used to it. Heck, have some fun in the process and explore the old ways as well as the up-and-coming ways. It will make your worldview much richer."
https://unblinkingeye.com/AAPG/DPlate/dplate.html
The primary difference to film is that the glass substrate is replaced with cellulose acetate.
Today my phone (far from a top of the line model) takes better pictures (both in pixel size and sensitivity) than my first digital camera (which I think had a whopping 128MB memory card)
(Having read about it a long time ago I'm a bit familiar with how film is developed - note the red light is only useful for some types of B&W film, your regular color film will get exposed even with a dim red light)
I've never developed film photographs myself and just assumed it was for the benefit of preserving low-light sensitivity in our eyes rather than anything related to exposing the paper to different wavelengths of light--just lower intensities that we can still see.
Photographic paper which is what is used to produce a 'positive' print is only reacting to black and white, so it can be made from 'orthochromatic chemicals' without problems, and it is more convenient because you can use a red safe-light while you are processing it.
Later photographic film was about as sensitive to red as the other colours, so all colors showed as shades of grey, while black was black. That's called 'panchromatic film'. You must use total darkness when transferring/developing this film. I learned to do the the entire film-processing sequence solely by feel umpteen decades ago.
An offshoot to the dim red effect, is the movies where you see submarine control rooms using dim red lighting. This is supposedly a way of preventing a loss of night-vision when looking though the periscope at night.
This is the StackExchange question that went viral: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/102266/what-is-th...
Young people with interest by photography will still know about these things because they will buy an analog camera and become what we call “hypsters” nowadays (the equivalent of “nerds” back then). And back then also not everyone knew or could go through the whole negative reveal process, as much as nowadays not everyone can format a hard disk and install an OS.
