If you let an ordinary rubber balloon age long enough, it might just shatter into pieces at the slightest touch.
Old Balloons
Tag: storage
Note (Yellow)
Oh, right. Some days, you might forget that we share one of our storage spaces with the Theater & Dance department.
Alligator Clip
Sometimes you stumble across a delightful artifact. One with an unknown, perhaps unknowable history. Clearly, at one point, it was necessary to hold an object in a particular place, and none of the available clips, clamps, or clasps were up to the task.
A steel rod, an alligator clip, and some electrical tape to the rescue!
What’s fascinating about this isn’t the specifics of the object, but the way that these temporary, stopgap solutions can linger. After enough time and use, they become ordinary and unremarkable. Familiar.
Until, some indefinite period of years later, a fresh set of eyes spots them in an old drawer. Look at what’s in here!
Blue Dot
These are not flashbulbs, merely incandescent A-lamps, but check out the sweet vintage ad!
So the “blue dot” thing was a quality indicator that Sylvania used in their classic flashbulbs. A magnesium filament inside an oxygen environment within the bulb produced a bright flash of light, assuming the envelope hadn’t been compromised. A dot of anhydrous cobalt (II) chloride inside that zero-moisture bulb would remain blue. If there was a leak, atmospheric moisture would react with the cobalt chloride to turn it pink, an indicator that this bulb might not work.
What’s less clear is how, exactly, one wee flashbulb is going to effectively illuminate that whale – flash photography being not super effective at distance – but whatever.
Stamped
Lead bricks are useful things. This one – still bearing the stamp of Nuclear Associates, of Carle Place, NY – has had its fair share of scuffs and dents. (Lead’s soft stuff, you know.) These days it functions as a handy doorstop and a hands-on tool for explaining the density of matter.
Denser than water, than aluminum, than a nickel-iron meteorite. (All easy samples to acquire for demonstration.) Less dense than osmium; about half as much. (Not on hand, unfortunately.) Definitely less dense than the core of our Sun, by an order of magnitude-plus.
Also no handy samples of stellar core plasma on hand.
Do Not Touch
There are times when you want your warnings to be relatively subtle. Visible, readily noted by anyone paying attention. And then there are the ones demanding you take notice.
Do you know what’s in here? (Not specifically.) Do you think you should open and check. (Not particularly.) Are you curious? (Yes, very much so.)
When there’s an obnoxiously bright orange label warning that fingers will destroy the contents, it’s easy to recall that there are loads of other toys around here which are a wee bit less delicate.
Yo-yos also come in bright orange.
Slide Rule
At one point in time, the slide rule was an essential tool in a physics/math/engineering education. Built and etched with high precision, they enable a skilled user to perform all sorts of mathematical operations with speed and ease. It’s the power of logarithms in a hand-held device.
Which, if you’re the sort of person who can master a slide rule, means you can also fully grasp the particulars of how one works.
It’s a smidge harder to get there with an everyday calculator. The gulf between the solid-state electronics inside one and the button-pressing interface is enormous.
At one point in time, this beast was a handy demonstration device at the front of the lecture hall. Visible from way in the back, it lets an instructor illustrate proper slide rule use to an entire class at once.
Not that that happens much anymore, but this thing is awesome. If you found one back in the closet, you’d keep it handy, too.
Polystyrene
For one lab, run once each academic year, we need about a half teaspoon’s worth of tiny polystyrene pellets, the kind that get pressed together to make the cheapest, crappiest, least environmentally friendly coffee cups around. Altogether, in a busy lab year, that’s still maybe a third of a cup. And we can recover some of them, because we filter everything before pouring the liquid down the drain.
And we’ve got enough of them sitting in storage to last a couple of lifetimes at this rate. Or to fill up a bean bag chair.
But do open with caution. Those little pellets want desperately to stick to everything, to get everywhere.
Precession Globe
This odd-looking 8-inch globe occasionally comes out to illustrate the wobbly rotation of Earth’s precession, though it’s a pain to use and too small to see at a distance. Anymore, a gyroscope illustrates the concept more easily, so this old globe lives back in storage.
And when we say old, we mean it.
Okay, we jest about the “terrestrial globe” part. We have one moon globe around here, plenty of celestial sphere globes, including a big, fancy one also by W. & A.K. Johnston at the Observatory. If you want one of your own, an antiques dealer in Portland, OR is offering one just like ours for $6,500.
It does note copyright, but with no date. So how old could this be?
French West Africa existed from 1895 to 1958. Let’s begin with that range and see how much we can trim it down.
1895 | 1958
French Indochina existed from 1887 to 1954, so now we’re at:
1895 | 1954
We’re guessing that the big pinkish smear of India is the British Raj, 1858 to 1947.
1895 | 1947
Siam existed well earlier than that – argue for whatever – but changed to Thailand in 1939, so that gets us to:
1895 | 1939
Persia brings some uncertainty, at least when used by a Scottish cartographer in the window we’re assuming, but let’s put the name change from Persia to Iran in about 1935. It’s a guess, but so is the rest of this.
1895 | 1935
Arabia is also a little vague, so we’re going to assign a range of 1902 (the return of Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and the capture of Riyadh from the Ottoman Empire) until 1930, the founding of the state of Saudi Arabia. We’re more confident about the latter date, but that’s the one that matters more.
1902 | 1930
Because we can also see Transjordan, the British-drawn territory which existed from 1921 until 1946. That further narrows our window to:
1921 | 1930
At last, we have one very big clue: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sure, we remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, but we know the globe’s older than that. We also know, from high school history class, that the U.S.S.R. came about following the Russian Revolution, which trims our earliest date to 1922.
1922 | 1930
So, an eight-year window, making this little globe about a century old. Probably. A lot can happen in a hundred years.
Light Bulbs
Sure, the other side says soft white, but let’s be honest: blanco suave sounds way, way better.