Regular readers of this blog have probably figured out that I love a good spy story.
Have you ever heard of Lionel Crabb? I had, because the story was in a collection of great spy stories I have floating around somewhere.
Lt. Commander Crabb was a British frogman. On April 19, 1956, LTC Crabb disappeared while on a mission for MI6: he was exploring Ordzhonikidze, a Soviet cruiser that was visiting Britain on a diplomatic mission (with Nikita Khrushchev on board.)
His body turned up 14 months later. Maybe.
Bonus, combining spy stories with another of my loves: “The Secret Listeners”, a 1979 BBC documentary about radio intelligence during WWI and WWII.
I always apologize when the videos I post run long, but today’s videos may require a particular apology.
Or they may not: these are really more something you can put on in the background and stream while the family is gathered for Christmas. Or while you sit alone pining for the fjords today. Either way. (That’s also why I am posting them early.)
“The World War II News and Old Time Radio Channel” has posted a series of videos, each about 12 hours long, containing vintage Christmas radio programs from various years, in chronological order.
“Part 1 – 1930 – 1942”.
If you go to the ‘Tube directly, the descriptions contain links to the start of individual programs. So, for example, you can jump to December of 1941 and listen to Jack Benny promote bonds.
“Part 2 – 1942 – 1946”.
“Part 3 – 1947 – 1950”.
This starts off with the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, so you might want to skip ahead to the one hour mark.
Techmoan is kind of a fun channel, but one that I try to avoid overusing. I’m using it today because this video popped up, and it answers a question that’s been in the back of my mind.
Whatever happened to portable televisions? Remember the Sony Watchman?
Obviously, the digital transition killed off the old analog portables. But why don’t we have portable digital televisions?
Short answer: we do, but not from any major manufacturers, and they’re pretty much crap as televisions. (Some of them may be decent portable media players, but do they do anything you can’t do with a small laptop or tablet?)
When I’m out shopping in thrift stores and other odd places, and see one of those cool looking old portable devices with a TV built in, I think about picking it up and hooking up a converter box, just for the lulz.
Bonus: “Prison Tech”. Not really the kind of thing people in prison improvise, but rather what kind of tech you’re allowed to have (and can purchase) for prison use.
My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.
So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.
First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”
Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.
Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.
Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.
Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.
The high in Austin today is estimated to be 104. I think it is time to bring out something I’ve been holding in reserve.
“Land of White Alice”. No, this isn’t a Lewis Carroll thing. “White Alice” was a communications system in Alaska that used “tropospheric scattering” for over-the-horizon communications links.
The video makes it sound like White Alice was a major communications link for civilian traffic, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, it carried mostly military communications at this time (though it was used to coordinate between military and civil air traffic). The system went into place beginning in 1955: by 1970 or thereabouts, the military considered it obsolete, and transferred it to RCA Alascom for civilian use until the late 1970s.
I’m putting this up for two reasons: in addition to my interest in cold war tech, there’s also a lot of great vintage footage of Alaska. There’s even an Alaskan bush pilot, RoadRich.
Bonus: “Seconds For Survival”, from those wonderful folks at the Bell System.
I’m drawing pretty heavily on AT&T/Bell System stuff, but they do have some of the best science videos on YouTube. Not just about phone stuff, either.
For example, lasers.
From 1969, “Lasers Unlimited”. If you want to skip the introduction, fast forward to about 2:25.
Bonus video #1, since that one was short: a 1978 interview with Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, right after their Nobel Prize was announced.
If you don’t know the story, Penzias and Wilson were Bell Labs employees working on microwave receivers, specifically ultra-sensitive and cryogenically cooled ones. Since they were trying to pick up really really weak signals (bounced off Echo balloons), they eliminated all the noise they could from their equipment. But there was still some noise that persisted and that they couldn’t find a source for. Finally, and with the help of some astronomers, they figured out that what they were hearing was the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is taken to be evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. (It was shared with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, who was awarded the prize for unrelated work on low-temperature physics.)
I know it’s talking heads, but I think the Penzias and Wilson story is a great one. You go chasing faint radio signals, you come back with one of the keys to the universe. How cool is that?
(Apparently, their receiver was quite cool. Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal and remember to tip your waitress.)
Bonus video #2: This one is equally short, and silent: “A Computer Technique For the Production of Animated Movies”. This is how computer animation was done…in 1964.
Here’s something a little different and shorter. “Coast Guard Lighthouses”, a film about…Coast Guard lighthouses, as of 1960.
Bonus: since the theme today is “something a little different”, here’s a promo film from the American Radio Relay League, also from the 1960s: “The Ham’s Wide World”. Noted: one of America’s most famous hams, Barry Goldwater (K7UGA and K3UIG), shows up at about 15:40.
Ms. Kupperman survives him, as do a son and a daughter. His son, Michael Kupperman, is an artist who wrote a graphic novel memoir of his father called All The Answers (affiliate link).
Here’s a little bit more Bell System history for you.
“Challenge of Change”, from 1961. I think this is noteworthy as a very early depiction of the first modem (among other things). That punch-card dialing system is pretty neat for 1961, too.
Bonus video #1: This goes out to all the radio people and “Mannix” fans out there: “Mobile Telephones”, or: what cell phone technology looked like in the late 1940s. Show this to your children.
Bonus video #2: “The Far Sound”, a Bell Labs history of the development of long distance service.
If you are a plane buff, I commend both the CBC links and Forsyth’s work to your attention.
(For those who may be unfamiliar with the story: young pilot is flying home for Christmas and suffers a total electrical failure over the north Atlantic. He has virtually no instruments, fog has set in, and if he bails out, he’ll probably freeze to death in the ocean. At the last possible moment, he’s led to a safe landing at an old RAF base by a Mosquito. And then the story goes in some unexpected directions from there.)
Philip McKeon, who you may remember as Alice’s son Tommy on “Alice”. I had no idea he lived in Wimberly (which is a short drive from where I live), or that he was doing a radio show. (Hattip: RoadRich.)
Leonard Goldberg, noted television producer. He collaborated with Aaron Spelling on “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels”, and went on to produce “Blue Bloods”.
I don’t watch much TV, especially network TV, but I have a feeling I should start watching “Blue Bloods”.