Chris Schaie just e-mailed me this picture of a recent commission. It’s a custom Nautilus-style submarine door that incorporates Chris’s familiar irising peephole as well as a new multiple bolt mechanism that locks and unlocks by turning the handwheel. Beautiful work, Chris!
I love this Helix Chemica scanned from a 1944 edition of Hackh’s Chemical Dictionary. Besides the usual information about atomic structure and periodicity of properties, this variant on the familiar table displays the natural abundance of each element in living organisms, the sun, the sky, the ocean, and terrestrial and extraterrestrial rocks.
Those interested in mechanisms and horology will probably enjoy watching the hypnotic action of this single-pin escapement executed in Lego by YouTuber horolophile. An “escapement,” FYI, is the mechanism in a timepiece that converts continuous rotational motion into oscillating “back and forth” motion and makes it go tick-tock.
San Francisco, as many of our regular readers will know from experience, is hilly, and can be windy. It has many narrow, winding roads and lots of low-hanging power lines. Which is why the SFFD is the only major US fire department still using wooden ladders–they don’t conduct electricity, and won’t fault a power line to ground in the event of an accident. The SFFD ladder shop made its first wooden ladder in 1917, and they’re still crankin’ em out today, using Douglas Fir timbers that are first aged 15 years in the shop itself. Very cool maker story and an excellently produced video from Adam Kaplan of ASK Media Productions. [via Gizmodo]
Check out the original Super Soaker, the world’s first push-button and cellular telephones, the Moog synthesizer prototype, and the first Atari and Apple computers in this annotated photo gallery over at Wired. [via Boing Boing]
Apparently if you wrote to the BBC in the late 1970s or early 1980s wanting to know how to build your own Dalek, they sent you this fantastic set of official plans, which are now preserved for posterity in the cloud-mind at Tom Rathborne’s site. [via Neatorama]
Check out this cool street side knife sharpener setup. I’ve been told this used to be a common occurrence back in the first half of the twentieth century.
