Techmix: Eisenhower-era Fuel Tankers and New Drones

Here’s a subtly reported story from Wired’s Danger Room about how technologies from different eras mix in use.
“At the heart of the high-tech, wired-to-the-hilt American air war in Afghanistan is a rusting plane so old-school, it predates John F. Kennedy’s term in the White House,” writes Noah Schachtman.
That’s right, the KC-135 fuel tanker is what [...]

Techmix: Space Cargo Droid and Railroad Car

Here we see one of the Russian cargo ships that delivers cargo to the International Space Station being loaded onto a railroad car for delivery to the launch site. Check out the railroad tracks on the green construction floor.
“Russia has been sending Progress robot freighters with cargo to the International Space Station for more than [...]

Techmix: Color Photo and Old, Russian Workshop

Here we see a workshop from about 1910 in Mother Russia. What’s strange here is that most workshops of this time — complete with steam-era details like the pulleys running down from the ceiling — are photographed in black and white. Black and white photos distance us from the period in which they were taken.
Luckily, [...]

Techmix: HDTV and Old-School Control Panel

Here’s Firing Room Four at NASA’s Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral. We’ve got HD monitors sitting atop an old-school control panel. In fact, many sophisticated operations centers — nuclear power plants, electric grid hubs, etc — still contain these damn near antique, knobby set-ups.  Technologies are rarely subtracted. More are just added.

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Techmix: Horse Horsepower and Electric Horsepower

Here we see what Low Tech Magazine calls a “hybrid system combining electricity with animal and human power” that operated near Hamburg, Germany from 1912 all the way until 1950.
The trollytrucks assisted horses in climbing a steep hill from the port up to the town, but didn’t replace them.
“The trucks were used as an assisting [...]

Techmix: Airplane + Carrier Pigeon

This is another techmix inspired by David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. These “old” and “new” tech juxtapositions are intended to help us remember that the technological timeline is not actually a relentlessly upward spiral. We use things invented long ago right alongside the latest gadget and never even notice it, except in the [...]

Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper

This is the first of a new series of photographic posts that I’ll be doing based on my reading of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. In it, he describes the disorientation that people experience when their sense of “technological time” is thrown off by the juxtaposition of what they think of as old [...]