Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “metal”
In 1962, Berlin astronomer Johann Dunkeldorf, a 15-year-old Wunderkind and Nobel laureate, made a shocking discovery: our sun will expire one day and then Earth will be shrouded in eternal darkness. Dunkeldorf was a unique product of the Cold War, as he had been conceived and later born in the no-man’s land between the American and Soviet zones of Berlin. …
When iron was first discovered, back in the Bronze Age, it didn’t seem much of an improvement over the then-traditional copper-tin alloy. Iron was twice as hard, but this benefit quickly vanished once it started to corrode -which it did a lot faster than bronze. Iron has a not-so-secret boner for oxygen, and that feeling is mutual, so the two …
The Philips HK 4250 Multi Blower was invented in the late 1960s, when consumerism had hit its first ceiling: every household in the First World had bought every variety of appliance they could ever possibly need. With World War II and its hardships still fresh in people’s minds, nobody was willing to replace things before they broke down. Sure, the …
The device we call a labeller or label maker today, was initially presented to the Swiss patent office in Bern as a ‘travel typewriter’ -and variations of this name in French, German, Italian and Rhaeto-Romance- from 1961 to 1963. Its inventor, Giancarlo di Saronno Originale, was a creative genius, but not a very practical one. And it was precisely the …
When the first blue metal canisters -some filled with gas, others punctured and empty- were discovered near Marseille in 1971, paleontologists were baffled. The mysterious objects were found deep underground, in layers that had to be at least 30 million years old. And what’s more, in that same layer were found fossils of dinosaurs -which were thought to have been …
Killing is complicated business, when you consider all the rules. It’s not allowed to bring a knife to a gunfight. Unless the knife can be attached to a gun, as a bayonet. There is a certain right to bear arms and to bare arms, but only the latter is allowed in hand to hand combat, though in some cultures it’s …
Binoculars are as old as humanity, and possibly even older. But these particular ones, the BPC4 8×30 produced in the Soviet Union in 1980, are quite special. They are probably the most unique model since the very first pair (the identity of which has been lost in the darkest and deepest creepy crypts of time), and certainly by far the …
Electro Boy was a little known superhero sidekick in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reason he’s so little known is as obvious, in retrospect, as it is tragic: Electro Boy was not a real boy. He was ‘just’ a machine. A plastic box with a bunch of gears thrown in, incapable of intelligence or emotion on a human …
The Venusberg Drill was developed in the final year of World War II in Germany, as a training weapon for the Hitlerjugend. It was a so-called Militärjugendausbildungswaffe (Maw for short). Other Maws included potatoes for grenades, dishes for mines and knives for knives. The idea was to familiarize future soldiers with military skills at an early age, to save time …
