the good old days

American Road Builder’s Association brought you Knights on the Highway, an odd combination of praising truckers and advice on night driving.

Sponsored by Chevrolet, it has a very mild approach (hardly surprising — would you want your brand name tied to mutilated bodies and catastrophic vehicle failure?). It is introduced by the man with the worst screen presence ever. Seriously. He can’t even find the camera half the time.

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It’s quite dated (have you ever used hand signals?), and some advice is a bit odd (like blinking your lights). Overall, it’s a forgettable and useless addition to the genre.

(Sorry, Buzz, the knights don’t joust. In fact, they don’t really seem to be a critical part of the film at all. And the whole analogy starts to fall apart when you realize that medieval knights didn’t have blinking lights on their horses, and typically didn’t drive them at night anyway.)

Let’s start off with some film: the 1960 promotional film, The Corvair In Action. Did you know a Corvair could drive twenty miles through a (shallow) river? I didn’t!

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Today, the Corvair is best known as the car targeted by Ralph Nader in his 1965 book, Unsafe At Any Speed. Both Nader and the book have their flaws; however, those problems were used to attempt to completely dismiss the criticisms of the automotive industry. It’s especially amusing to hear the response, “The Corvair was just as safe as many other cars on the market at the same time!” Uh, true, but all you’ve proved is that more than one model of unsafe car was on the road.

Nader’s central thesis was that the automotive industry concentrated on design instead of safety, lagging behind and ignoring evidence instead of leading the drive for safe, clean cars. And they still do… The Ford/Firestone tire under-inflation fiasco was a remarkable echo of the Corvair’s under-inflation problems from four decades earlier. CAFE standards are whined about endlessly.

But watch some of those old auto safety films… on the whole, cars are better than they used to be. Drivers are about the same

Get Rich Slowly, a blog about personal finance that “makes cents” (hehe!) recently posted some thoughts on Newsweek’s A Penny Saved Is a Penny Spent.

Conant’s article in Newsweek basically boils down to this:

As talk of recession and belt-tightening makes headlines, I wonder where and how I lost my grandfather’s sense of thrift. Like many young professionals (I’m 36), I embraced the lessons of my seniors about hard work. Yet my generation racks up debt the way our grandparents used to squirrel away pennies…. My generation grew up just as home-economics classes were being phased out and credit cards were being ushered in.

I’ve condensed it a lot, obviously. Please do go read the whole thing, it’s good stuff.

In his analysis, J. D. Roth points out that griping about the wastefulness of modern society is hardly new.

For decades — centuries, even — people have complained that younger generations haven’t inherited the financial wisdom of their elders. During the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin bemoaned the lack of money skills among the American colonists.

However, the current state of affairs does indeed go far beyond that. J. D. includes a scary graph to demonstrate that: between 1940 and today, consumer debt rose from around zero to OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS. That is trillion. With a “tr”. The one with twelve, yes, count ‘em, twelve zeros. 3,000,000,000,000.

The thrift of the good old days wins hands down over the spending glut of today. Seriously, people, THREE TRILLION? Do you REALLY need that much CRAP?

I’d also like to add, however, that advocacy of thrift should not translate to being a stingy bastard. Buy good quality — it will be less expensive in the long run, since you don’t have to replace the cheap crap that keeps breaking. Tip people — if you can afford to fly on a plane, you can afford a few bucks for the nice skycap who’s helped your wife and two small children struggle to check in with four suitcases (YES, Buzz, I’m talking to you). Thrift isn’t about only spending as little as possible, it’s also about spending your money wisely and well.

Please, people, spend wisely and well. Three trillion is just batshit insane.

Cars are vital to mid-century America: they allows new industries, and opportunities “undreamed of only yesterday”. This message is poorly cloaked in the “driver’s safety” film Your Permit to Drive from 1951 — I say poorly, because the only thing the driving-permit-narrator mentions about actual automobile operation is being polite to other drivers. (Oh, and “staying off the white line”.)

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In 1951 idiom, dangerous driving is synonymous with “poor sportsmanship”. General Motors wants you to become a considerate participant in the new world, in which “our whole way of living has become geared to the automobile”. (In an interesting editing choice, that line was closely followed by a shot of a pedestrian being killed by a car. Not really a way of living, hmm?)

During the inspiring monologue, the driver’s permit idly wonders whether bad drivers on the road are his fault, whether he could have convinced his owner(s?) to be more responsible and thoughtful when they’re driving. It would be nice to blame it on him, but it’s more likely the fault of General Motors* for gearing our way of life to the automobile.

* Well, Ford certainly helped. But they didn’t make this movie.

Jim Dunn blogged about an advertisement for your very own personal “light bath”. I somehow doubt that this was found in lots of bathrooms, even in 1909 when it would have being advertised.

At first I thought this might be a weird way to get more Vitamin D (something which is easier to accomplish by standing in sunlight for a few minutes). Turns out it was a wacky invention to help rid the body of toxins and improve overall health through light therapy — not due to a bit of Vitamin D (though that surely helped), but basically baking yourself.

Such fripperies were more usually found at sanitariums than your personal bathroom. The “Electrotherapy Museum” has scans of a chapter of Medical Electricity, Röntgen Rays, And Radium (by Dr. Sinclair Tousey) which delves into phototherapy. It has great drawings of a wide range of “light bath” designs, from the cabinet for full-body exposure to models which curved around your arm or torso for more localized treatment.

An 1895 collection of Medical Review (page 195) indicates that John Kellogg (yes, the health nut satirized in The Road to Wellville) claimed its invention:

The author claims to be the first to construct a bath of this kind. It is made in the form of a cabinet with fifty or sixty incandescent lamps arraned in rows inside… It has already been demonstrated by Siemens and others that the electric light promotes growth in plants, encourages development of chlorophyll, and the setting and ripening of fruits.

I will cheerfully admit that radiant heat (such as you get from an incandescent bulb) would heat up a person more quickly than convective heat (such as you get in a sauna or “hot air bath”). That’s about the only advantage I can see. There’s nothing in light that’s going to drastically improve your health, at least not more than you’d get having a nice stroll outside. It certainly won’t improve development of chlorophyll in humans, nor result in extensive “detoxification.”

An excerpt from Kellogg’s 1927 “study” on his electric light bath is today used as evidence of the detoxifying effect of saunas. Even odder, a branch of light therapy apparently evolved from “a great way to warm somebody up” to “light rays make you feel better”. There’s a modern-day version which uses LEDs. (It’s patent pending, so you know it must be good.)

Piffle. In May 2006, the US Department of Energy said gas prices weren’t all that bad, if you adjusted previous prices for inflation. Of course, even adjusting for inflation the current national average price of $3.16 is getting a wee bit high; also, people drive a lot further in 2008 than they did seventy or eighty years ago.

But adjusting for inflation is complicated math, so it’s a lot easier to just say, “My goodness, $0.19 for gasoline, those folks in 1936 sure were lucky! Why were they getting suckered by fuel-additive scams?” (The modern world gets its share of these as well, including things like magnets to “align” the fuel molecules and other worthless baloney.)

My favorite:

An even greater hoax was the tablets that seemed to change water into gasoline. In this case the “slicker” would drive into a service station and calmly fill his fuel tank with water from a hose. Then, to the amazement of the attendant, he would drop a couple of pills into the tank and drive off, his engine running as well as ever. Naturally, after this happened a few times, the attendant would give almost anything for some of the pellets. The motorist would explain that ordinarily he didn’t sell any pills but finally would part with several packages he had in the car, getting $15 or $20 for enough to “convert 500 gallons of water.” That was the last the service-station man ever saw of his money or the motorist. The answer, of course, was that the motorist had a hidden fuel tank and the rear tank into which he poured the water was just a dummy.

Oddly, average vehicle mileage has remained consistent (without the need to adjust for inflation) over the years at 20 mpg plus or minus a bit. I don’t care whether you’re a believer in global warming or not — it is simply less expensive to have more fuel-efficient cars!

Cheers to Modern Mechanix for making this 1936 article available.

The infamous Signal 30 filmed by Richard Wayman adds some insult to injury, opening with the scrolling text:

Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.

More recent “safety” films featuring people smeared on the pavement will obscure the victims’ faces, a bit more respectful.

I’m a bit glad Signal 30 was considered a bit too much for my driver’s ed class. I did see gore films, but the people weren’t in the process of dying while being filmed. Don’t watch the clip if you don’t like watching people dying.

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By 1970, most homes were equipped with wonderful labor-saving machines that made housework, if not easy, at least less time-consuming. So what did ladies do?

I count over 20 embroidered items in that picture, and that’s just one corner of her home. Imagine the bedroom, the nursery, the bathrooms… I’m in favor of making your own stuff, but, um, this is kinda scary.

Tip o’ the hat to Found in Mom’s Basement for… well, finding this in her Mom’s basement.

We watched The Shelter last night. One of the classic Twilight Zone episodes, it’s a revealing glimpse over the thin line between perfection and panic that was the Cold War.

No moral, no message, no prophetic tract: Just a simple statement of fact. For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic, from the Twilight Zone.

Thank G-d that my area of the world is civilized on the surface. I don’t relish the idea of dealing with gut-wrenching fear for the lives of one’s children. And maybe someday nobody will have to.

Enough philosophizing, I need to get some sleep!

The ever-interesting blog Modern Mechanix recently transcribed the 1932 article How Much Longer Will Our Big Cities Last?

One part I found amusing was the idea that cities would have lots of small planes flying its workers in and out every day. Instead of lots of commuter planes, America instead turned to even more plentiful (and probably more sensible!) commuter automobiles. Turned with quite a vengeance — the next time you’re on a ten-lane highway around a large (or even medium) city, stuck in a traffic jam during rush hour, do a little bit of math to try and guess just how many cars are in gridlock with you. Then, imagine they’re all airplanes. Then, picture “air rage.”

But the most interesting part of the Modern Mechanix article was the doom-filled predictions which completely failed to come true. There’s plenty of infrastructure problems which continue to plague cities. This morning I was listening to the woes of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board as they struggle to maintain a century-old system which is regularly rusting and breaking (but manages to outperform FEMA’s expectations nonetheless). They’re apparently half a billion dollars in debt, and since they’re not selling as much water as they used to (less residents in the city), the number is not likely to get better soon. When I lived in Boston, tales of more than two hundred year old lead pipes and wood pipes was easily enough to make me buy a water filter (and pray a lot).

Every day the city dweller reads headlines of minor disasters resulting from defects in the complex supply system…. Gas mains explode, blotting out lives and sometimes asphyxiating hundreds. Water pipes burst and flood whole blocks, effecting a serious interruption of traffic….

However gloomy a picture these catastrophes may present, engineers believe that the scene will be far more dismal twenty or thirty years from now. The network of gas and water pipes, power supply and telephone lines, and the subway tunnels and vaults … are still comparatively young and substantial. When they begin to age and weaken from fatigue, however, disasters will be blazed across the headlines far more frequently than they are at present.

Sub-standard water infrastructure is just one example of cities crumbling around their residents. The recent I-35 bridge collapse is a far more serious one. But if all this didn’t make people emigrate from urban areas in 1930, why should it do so now? Cities have been around since just after the dawn of civilization, and they’ll be around until it ends. Stuart Chase (the author on whose theories the article is apparently based) was just yet another doom-sayer whose prophecies of widespread death and destruction never came to pass.