History is full of revolutionary and innovative engineering projects, from the world’s most powerful locomotives to a little SUV that became a global sensation. Many of these vehicles and projects eventually end up erased.
David wrote about how the original administrative building at American Bantam burned to the ground, taking tons of history with it. It’s just one part of Jeep history that’s fading away. Max Headbolts gives us a sad dose of reality for the first COTD win:
One person’s priceless is another person’s garbage. While I understand the sentiment, we as a society would go mad if we tried to save EVERYTHING.
I’m currently struggling with this on a personal level. I have a decade of drawings, clippings and schoolwork for my two kids. How much of that is just trash that needs to be returned to the earth, and how much should I keep as precious? I’m still struggling to sort that and for now, they hide in boxes in a closet. I’m not ready to archive that stuff just yet.
ChefCJ has a great outlook:
The past gives way to the future. Old buildings that once housed great things become the caskets of those ideas and passions. As sad as it is, this is simply the way of the world
I say this as someone who just cleaned out my uncle’s disgusting and dilapidated house after his passing and found paintings and drawings my aunt created that haven’t seen the light of day in more than 30 years. I’m taking these things and trying to give her a second life, to keep her from being forgotten, but I also know that time is undefeated in it’s erasure of precious things. It’s terrible that so much is lost and thrown away and forgotten, but forward progress forces so many of us to forget the past so we can keep moving, and it’s usually only when it’s too late that we realize its importance.
Finally, on Friday, Matt wrote a Members Only Tales From The Slack about my patent-pending insanity. Kevin Rhodes made me smile:
If you go fast enough, what’s behind you no longer matters, right?
Mercedes is a treasure. Though I feel she is merely mid-pack of the inmates running this particular asylum.
See also, Grey alien in a beige sedan:
I, for one, adore Mercedes (the person).
She helps the site maintain an entirely appropriate level of bonkers… above and beyond Torch’s own oddball proclivities.
Have a great evening, everyone!
Top graphic: Library of Congress
I can generally tell just by the headline if Mercedes wrote an article. I mean this in the best way possible.
The lede photo of the Jeep and cannon trailer fully launched always cracks me up.
And ChefCJ’s comment you highlighted is pretty profound.
Great commentariat at this site.
I was doing an art project with the Brooklyn public library a few years ago
https://hughcrawford.com/memory-palace/
and they have a research library that is basically things like programs for Brooklyn Dodgers games or menus from restaurants 100 years ago. Check out the Jay Ward party invite and the coney Island Hotel register at the link above.
One of the things they particularly treasure are snapshots of people, but what turns out to be really valuable is what’s going on in the background.
The rule of thumb is that the stuff that everybody throws away will in 100 years become extraordinarily valuable because everybody threw it away. That is why the original first issue of Superman is worth millions, but all of the collectors edition comics from the 90s aren’t worth shit.
By the way, if you’ve got a box of receipts from local businesses 100 years ago, your local historical Society will probably kill for it.
My hobby is digging a hole. Useless. Expensive. Laborious. Dangerous. But dammit, one day someone is gonna walk by and say “wtf did someone dig a 20 deep hole into the hard earth for?” And I’ll know.
“Time is undefeated in it’s erasure of precious thing.” Damn. Too true.
Yes indeed. On a positive note, all of the paintings, sketches, prints and other art that I pulled from that mold filled basement is now sitting next door in the art department of the school where I work, bringing an amazing amount of joy and wonder to the staff and the students who are reveling in this finding of ‘lost treasure’. I think my aunt would have loved that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Croz1_USr3U
Well it is hard to say what might be remarkable in 50 years from now. Like so many others here I too had to go through my mother’s homes. She had two, both fairly disgusting, right down to desiccated rats all over. She didn’t die, just became a vacant husk with nobody home upstairs. I literally offered anything anybody wanted to come and take some. I still ended up with three two car garages loads of junk, papers not very attractive “Antiques.”
Kind of made me re-evaluate my own mound of stuff. I really didn’t want to have my kids have to go through it. My son once said, “Dad you have a lot of cool stuff which we no idea what it is or what it’s worth.” I have let a lot of my stuff dribble out though eBay and Craigslist. Pays for a trip or two. I also got rid, much to my wife’s relief, my “Collectable” cars. You know, I really don’t miss constantly fixing them. Then you think, “what is collectable?” I just remember being in Winnemucca, NV, getting some fuel to go back to Burning Man with the plane (gave lots of rides) and there was a Chevy Vega. My friend and I were amazed. It was remarkable to see one working when they were nearly new, much less 50 years later. Surprising what people will put a ton of effort in. I just don’t see: “Restored a Chevy Vega,” on my tombstone.
My parents have a house full of antiques, and they are nearing their 80s. I asked them to make a spreadsheet of what each item is and its value so my brother and I can figure out what to do with it.
Some of it is crap and some of it is super valuable and I have no idea which is which.
My grandparents sat me and my siblings down, went through some of the family heirlooms, let us pick favorites, and stuck labels onto the bottom of everything – including who should get said item upon their passing (then my druncle sold off almost everything to some antique shop vultures for $300 – the silverplated samovar that I was to get was for sale for $6K a few days later, and that was one of hundreds upon hundreds of things).
I have a family photograph from 1891, and if my grandmother hadnt spelled out the fifteen individuals’ names/relations/birth dates on the back of it, it would be kind of worthless to me.
> druncle
Priceless.
Regarding nostalgia media: I’ve been wrestling over this idea with my photo albums. (I’m old, okay!!)
Any place I visited in the past has better pictures on the internet than what I photographed back in the day. And no one cares about my friends or girlfriends I no longer talk to. These were comforting when I was single, but I don’t need that reassurance now, and my character building has already happened.
Aside from various “This is how I aged” photos, nothing before my marriage is terribly monumental. I’ve been slowly pulling out and disposing photos, with my pre-college days being given more priority. Someday I’ll condense them to four albums, or perhaps just scan the important ones.
FYI: My octogenarian parents have a 6′ long shelf of photo albums, pre-digital, with date ranges indicating exact dates when things occurred. An interesting pictoral diary, but to what end?
I recently disposed of stacks of photos that came from my Mom’s house that were from her parents’ house. They were pictures of their friends and people they knew in life and when doing ‘campers on mission’ work when they retired. We dont’ know who any of these people are.
Still, feels weird to throw those photos away.
Check with your state’s historical society. It may be interested in these photos, or perhaps not if there are no captions or other contextual materials. Doesn’t hurt to ask.
I also have seen vintage pictures donated to a materials reuse store in my town. Scraps from construction and mass packaging products are donated from businesses to there. Odd punches and stuff that would end up in the landfill anyway. An interesting place for crafters.
My family took almost exclusively 35mm slides; my mother bought a machine and digitized thousands of photos two years ago, dating back to the 1940s. We all got one external hard drive for Christmas and it is great – although I wish there was a good way to add notes and descriptions to them.
I’m young (?) enough that my personal photo collection is a mix of print and digital; I only have a couple of albums though. My mom has a cabinet full of albums, along with all of her mother’s albums; they’ve been through multiple moves, and are no longer in any sort of chronological order. Both of them were good about labeling the pictures, but unfortunately almost all of Mom’s are in those sticky-paged Hallmark albums, so digitizing them is a pain.
For those battling the ‘should I save this crap’ battle – Just take a picture of said crap and throw it away. This way you have the memory of it but no longer have the thing taking up any real space.
This is The Way.
My wife is 100% into this strategy, even with our only kid’s art projects. Some of that stuff is just too bulky to hang onto.
Also along this topic, if anyone wants some inspiration for streamlining their belongings, my wife’s “clear the crap crusade” started with this book, Swedish Death Cleaning. Makes a good gift for pack rat parents when they hit retirement.
My problem is: Wife will agree to get rid of stuff, but you cant just throw it away…see if anyone else we know wants it, try selling on Marketplace, recycle, etc. So, still have a pile of stuff on back porch that won’t go away!
When we emptied her parents house, I would have rented a couple of dumpsters and had it empty over the weekend. No. Took probably 6 mo. min. There was absolutely nothing of any value in that house, including the house. The land was only thing of value.
Last relative’s house I helped clean out, I found: roughly 500lbs of resistors, capacitors, and various other electrical odds and ends you’d expect a retired-but-tinkering electrical engineer/hoarder to have. 78oz of gold, in 1/4oz, 1/2oz, and 1oz bars. A half-finished rifle, hand-made with no serial number or anything similar. A South-Bend 9″ lathe from the 40s, in incredible condition.
Also, so much trash.
Did you get to keep the lathe, and how big was the fight over the gold?
Kept everything. Brother was executor of the estate, the other 12 relatives (mostly first cousins, with a couple second cousins where their parents had passed) washed their hands of everything (in a legally binding manner) when he and I asked them for help going through everything to find stuff related to family (old pictures, a few items we knew he had borrowed from various family over the years, nothing really worth a damn except to family.) It was a hoarder’s house. It fucking took work.
He and I split the gold, never even told the rest of ’em.
Gotta cross those i’s and dot those t’s
That’s like $300,000 worth of gold, yeah? Holy crap.
Yeah, spot price currently is approx $4000/oz. However back when we found it it was about $1200/oz.
I paid for a couple of semesters of school, and have stashed… some of it.
Note: If you ever are in a place to sell gold ounces, don’t go to pawn shops, they will try and rip you off. Had one shop try and give me 50% of the value, and they’d have to hold it for 30 days before giving me a check.
Find a coin shop, or maybe an independent jewelry shop. Both are usually the easiest ways to sell it. You should get spot price of the day, some shops might try to charge a $20-40 processing fee. Up to you if you want to deal with that or find another shop. Do not feel bad about them having to charge that fee, they will instantly resell the gold to one of the dozens of folks they have on speed-dial that have standing orders with them.
Uninformed question: won’t a bank take the gold and give you spot prices?
I dunno, I doubt it? I would think they wouldn’t have anything setup to process that.
Maybe a larger bank, in a big city? Your average place in a small-to-medium city? I don’t think they would, always worth calling though.
Oooo, I’m sending this to my boss and taking the day off, she needs to know how much of a celebrity I am on the internet!
I’ll write your letter to your boss if you write mine
Deal!
Oh no, I got called down to the principal’s office again.
There is actually a lot to unpack here, history, relevance as well as preserved and what is chosen to be preserved. What needs to be saved, kept safe or worthy of preservation?
I work at a school and a good friend just retired. When she left, her classroom was full of her life’s work- books, notes, boxes and boxed of materials, but to the rest of the teaching team, so much of that was old, out dated or didn’t fit in with the currents styles or trends of teaching. As the grade level leader it was up to me to go through it all, and while it pained me, except for a few boxes of books for a classroom library I threw out one teacher’s entire life’s work. Would any of it have any historical significance or be museum quality? Worthy of study in the future?
Time marches on. When I’m done teaching, I might fill one box full of mementos to take with me. The rest can be tossed. It’s fine. I’ve thrown away a lot of retired teacher’s stuff over the years. Man oh man can shop teachers hoard! I’ve always prefered to make my own materials that suit my teaching style anyways. I’ve never once visited teachers pay teachers, if that’s even still a thing.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and experience!
That also reminds me of when my grandfather went into assistive living about 15 years ago. He was a mechanic from the 60’s- 80’s and had a garage full of home made tools, like a specific wrench to get the oil filter off some model of cars, and boxes of NOS parts from that era. I was overseas when my uncles emptied the garage and can only imagine the interesting stuff that was let go, but at the same time, it was only useful for him in that time and place. All those objects just become artifacts after their usefulness is left in the past.
“All those objects just become artifacts after their usefulness is left in the past.”
So true. I’ve tossed out really well made jigs, but I didn’t have any idea what they were jigs FOR. So to me, they were just objects taking up space. I’ve made a bunch of jigs too, but unless whoever replaces me someday both has the chance to ask me about them and gives a turkey enough to do so, they’ll be useless after I’m gone. That’s OK, I’ll be done with them, and whoever is here then can do their own thing.
Last year I actually met the guy who was the first teacher in my shop, and spent his whole career here. I didn’t replace him directly, there was another guy in between us for 7 or 8 years. I was nervous to show him around the shop, as I had thrown away so many of what were clearly his things. Fortunately he was really happy with what I’ve done with the place. I work hard to keep it organized, clean, and utterly usable. He was delighted to see that the shop is in good hands, even if our hands do things different ways.
To make this vaguely car related (not that it matters), when I took over here, there was so much stuff in the finishing room that you couldn’t even walk into it, let alone use it. By the time I got down to the workbenches, the newspapers covering it were from January of 1984! I saved a Pontiac 6000E ad from those 🙂
As someone whose hobbies all involve the generating of (what feels like) increasingly larger physical systems, this question has plagued me frequently since the beginning. I literally can’t keep everything I make or work on, right? With each project being the end result of my heart and soul, I always need to think about what the disposition and memorialization will be like.
One thing that makes it easier for me is the fact that I’ve had for the longest time a habit of documenting and pictorializing my work. Whether it’s long form on my own website or just an album of photos and videos that hasn’t made it online, or literal paper sketches in a notebook. It’s fairly easy for me to stroll back through the archives – usually to figure out what the hell I did 5, 10 years ago and now need to decypher. But it lessens the need to keep everything around drastically. At some point, every project runs out of its useful life and becomes dead weight or something I keep moving or tripping over. If I got all the information I wanted out of it, I feel, it’s easier to let go.
The corollary to that is I’ve also, for the most part, been the judge jury and executioner of my own work. The whole of the system or object is its metaphysical representation to me, less so the individual parts. I personally dismantle the old and wrecked robot carcasses and cut them up and scatter the remaining useful parts in my collection. I personally went through my academic archives, which spanned back to middle school, and decided what to keep as representatives of each era or timeframe. The rest I made a bonfire out of: No takesies backsies, no languishing in a dump. Being a positive end to my own thoughts is worth the extra trouble.
Personally, I vibe with the theme in the original thread about the factory buildings: If it’s not architecturally significant or economically viable to keep using, document its history well and knock it down. A lot of “Historically significant building collapses/burns down, having been neglected and abandoned for 40 years” stories make me ask why the corporate owner was doing the equivalent of me tripping over the husk of a robot I built in high school over and over.
Likewise, I have a lot of my automotive history wrapped up in the Mitsu van. If I ever wreck it, or something happens to damage it beyond repair, it has to go out by my hands only. No ending up in a pick and pull yard after an insurance sale. I’m thinking Lemons…
Are you aware most of the advanced technology from the 60s and 70s has already been lost, especially related to NASA?
I knew an artist that was successful, started an art academy and affected the lives of thousands of people.
He told me he wondered if any of his art would survive in the distant future.
I suggested distributing his art openly might do that.
He always had a special quality.
You don’t meet many people that are commonly called saintly.
I think this speaks to Chorl’s point specifically While it was a marvel of it’s time, we no longer need it to accomplish a moon landing, even if we were to completely about face tomorrow and deicide the Moon was THE PLACE TO BE RIGHT NOW, none of the old space program would be useful to un-mothball and use again.
We could do it much faster and easier today with modern materials, computers, and communications techniques. I am a technologist at heart, and have lived though almost the entire “Personal Computing” era (too young for the original homebrew computing type stuff). While I’m nostalgic for the computers of my youth, there is literally nothing they could do better than my phone at this point. Part of me wants a giant warehouse full of old stuff to smell and touch, but the reality is I need to live in the now, and that stuff is my past. Knowing how they work got me here, and is a comfort when I need to use some of that knowledge, but lugging around every computer I’ve built for my whole life would prevent me from having a livable useable space today.
There’s a YouTube video by “Fran” the covers how the NASA Control center worked for 40 years, It’s fascinating and amazing how they literally scaled up overhead transparencies to make those giant mission control screens, but we don’t need them today. Those millions of dollars could, and should be spent elsewhere.
Rocketry and chemistry are not like computers.
Imagine if they stopped building computers for fifty years, then suddenly cgi or esri suddenly became essential?
You would still need the old science just to begin again and update to any new ideas.
That is literally where we are, with scientific archeology an active profession, and Elon Musk and others buying up every rocket valve and engine part in obscure specialty yards, and not to put in glass cases.
Even the companies and special tooling to. make minor parts is gone.
It is all being replicated at huge cost.
Look at fogbank and the cost to replicate it.
Worst thing is, we may never know if we rediscover the original science, or missed that genius that appeared out of the hothouse.
Complicated by secrecy, limiting recovery more than normal science.
“The material is classified.
Its composition is classified.
Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.”
from a press conference on fogbank, which suddenly had to be reproduced.
Somehow.
The cost may have reached billions of dollars just to approximate 1960s level science.
And that is just one narrow area lost.
I think we’re talking about two different levels of data/thing preservation here. WRT rocketry, while WE can’t find them, and the Govt won’t release the information, that does not equal lost. It just means you and I cannot go get it. What Chorls and I are talking about is curating your personal stuff in a way that keeps the memory of it useful without burdening yourself unduly in a sense of if I don’t keep this it is lost forever!
These are different problems to solve.
Deciding what will be important is the heart of library science, but it’s an issue for personal things and big things.
We know NASA technology was lost.
We only know about fogbank because the search became so costly it couldn’t be hidden and they had to appeal to the outside as darpa does.
We know one deadend approach cost hundreds of millions and failed.
It was supposedly solved, but cost is unknown as are the results.
I had one of the outliers in cgi and monitor science a friend was saving for a museum.
As so often happens, we have the less optimal science in all computer monitors now.
The original computers were too costly for most people, but the tech died with that company.
How many are left and how much will it matter?
I know people that worked on some classified aerospace tech, but they will all be gone eventually.
Have to admit ignorance here, I don’t know what Fogbank is, and I don’t need another rabbit hole to dive down today.
A critical but inactive component in nuclear warheads, if guesses are accurate.
No bets on that.
When it became time to maintain warheads, it seems the local Acme Fogbank store was long gone, the company was gone, and everyone that understood the processes was gone.
And the records were gone.
There are deep communication tunnels that run across the country.
No one will admit they exist, whether they are active, how they were built and by who, but they are tagged as do NOT disturb!
They connect to military bases.
James Bamford has some books and dockos on declassified history.
Some good stuff on super computers.
Blank Spots on the Map is interesting also.
I actually run into brand new technology vanishing abruptly when larger companies buy them.
Common to box everything up, shove it in a warehouse, then do nothing with it.
Some of the screens were overhead transparencies and slides, but the animated/video ones were Eidophor projections (Eidophor – Wikipedia), which used an elaborate electro-mechanical system to convert analog video into an image that could be projected onto a screen that was bright enough to be seen in reasonably normal lighting.
And some of us thought early conventional video and computer monitor projectors were big, cumbersome, and relatively low-res and dim!
It’s even more complicated than an old Ampex Quad VTR…
Yeah, the projection system was an entire second building behind Mission Control.
Hey, that’s a picture of the flying car the government has been keeping from us!
Oh… Hugh, you didn’t get yours? I did and everyone on my street did, for free too. Unlimited power means no boring fill ups at the petrol station. I love mine! So, umm, what did you DO to not get one Hugh? Huh? Upto hijinks or ne’er do well – Again?
I think it’s actually the invention of the mandatory safety all-call.