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Three Inventions & a Funeral

18/5/2014

Today is Tom Midgley Day, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Midgley Jnr, the American engineer and chemist, on 18th May 1889.

Who Tom Midgley you ask? He is the man who, despite always having the best intentions, unwittingly unleashed two major health hazards on an unsuspecting world. J. R. McNeill, the environmental historian, said that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history,” while Bill Bryson has commented that Midgley possessed “an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny.”

You can find his full story on Wikipedia however it all began in 1921, when he discovered that adding lead to petrol, (the original brand name was Ethyl) could prevent knocking in internal combustion engines. Midgley himself subsequently suffered severe lead poisoning however this did not deter the motor industry from shifting to leaded petrol. Not content with this, a few years later, Midgley headed the team that developed Freon and other CFC gases as refrigerants and aerosol propellants.

Having contributed lead pollution and ozone depletion to the atmosphere, in 1940 Midgley contracted polio and was left disabled. He therefore devised his third and final invention: a system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from his bed. Unfortunately, in early November 1944, he became entangled in his own contraption’s ropes and died of strangulation.

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Pulham Pigs Ahoy!

11/5/2014

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So I've been indulging my inner geek today by visiting an exhibition, at the Pannoyer Centre in the nearby village of Pulham St Mary, about the airship base that was located there during the First World War. The airships, which were both built and flown from the base, were used for patrolling the North Sea and there were some exceptional photos on show, taken by George Hamilton Wakefield who was with the service from 1916 onwards - follow link for more about the photos at bbc.co.uk

The early airships were very basic - with the gondolas slung beneath the gas containers being little more than open-cockpit aircraft bodies. In fact things used to get so cold that the crews' flying suits would freeze solid and they'd have to be lifted out of their seats at the end of a patrol. Later models had enclosed cockpits and the ability to prepare hot food and drinks on a stove heated by engine exhaust fumes.

The base was also the location for some early experiments with parachuting - parachuting in this context involving jumping off high flying things and hoping for the best. What I also found fascinating is the fact that at its peak, there were 5000 people stationed on the base. Today, nearly 100 years later, the two largest towns to where we live in this part of East Anglia still have populations of less then 5000.

As for the Pulham base itself, from Google Maps etc you can see the concrete pads, on which the main hangars and fuel tanks were located, are still in existence however there are chicken sheds covering the site of the accommodation blocks and the two hangars were taken down after the war and reused in the construction of the Cardington Airship Sheds near Bedford. These are still in existence and can be visited whereas the Pulham site is now private property (there is a box factory and a car breakers yard there) and inaccessible.

In case you were wondering, the "pigs" on the poster comes from the local nickname for the airships, flying pigs and all that!

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Something for Steampunksters

9/5/2014

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Short notice but I only spotted the poster myself an hour ago - and in case you were wondering, the airships operated out of Pulham Market in Norfolk and were known as Pulham Pigs.

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Shop at the House of Ry'leh

7/5/2014

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Looks like Lady Gaga is now shopping at the House of Ry'leh! OK, that's an in-joke which will only be appreciated by fans of Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft and Mythos Fiction.

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Picture du Jour - Meanwhile in Westeros

6/5/2014

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Meanwhile in the latest episode of the epic TV series A Game of Drones, the court of King Obama meet in the Westeros Wing of the White House.

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Will this be London in the year 2025?

2/5/2014

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Great piece of concept art doing the rounds here from architect David Edwards. Will this be the London skyline in the year 2025 - note the flooding! The illustration comes from the new British indie sci-fi movie The Machine, written and directed by Caradog James and starring Toby Stephens, Caity Lotz and Denis Lawson. Robots and AI, what more could you want. It has already picked up a couple of awards, including a Raindance, went out on release in March and is available on Amazon as a DvD/Blu-Ray. The website is themachinemovie and here's the official trailer..

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Rome 2014 - or Fellini's 'Roma' 1972 ?

2/5/2014

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The recent activities on Sunday 27 April at the Vatican City in Rome - when the Pope and the ex-Pope were present to canonise two other recent Popes - reminded me of this scene from Fellini's 1972 movie Roma. Incidentally, the original poster for Roma was banned at the time the movie was first released.

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Weird Tales, Folklore, Urban Myths, History & Geek Culture

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