What’s New at the Internet Archive

The history of gas and wind-powered air travel is steeped in myth and legend, inspiring many a writer to create a story around the idea. The archive holds several text and moving image items related to airship travel, dirigibles, and hot air balloons:

Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, a story of 2000 AD (1905): Many don’t consider Kipling one of the progenitors of science fiction writing, but writers like John W. Campbell have stated that he was “the first modern science fiction writer,” in that he began the science fiction literature tradition of exposition through the characters’ eyes. In Night Mail and in As Easy as ABC (1912), Kipling writes of a world controlled by the Aerial Board of Control, a massive Big Brother-esque organization that controls the world’s air travel and usurps the power of individual nation-states.

Jules Verne’s A Voyage in a Balloon (1852): Verne’s better-known balloon story was 1863’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, but Voyage was written more than 10 years before, and marks Verne’s first English-language publication.

Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad (c1910): This novel by Mark Twain was published in 1894. It features Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in a parody of Jules Verne-esque adventure stories. In the story, Tom, Huck, and Jim set sail to Africa in a futuristic hot air balloon, where they survive encounters with lions, robbers, and fleas to see some of the world’s greatest wonders, including the Pyramids and the Sphinx (info lifted from Wikipedia article)

Flying Machines past, present and future: A popular account of flying machines, dirigible balloons and aeroplanes (c1914):
Early accounts of the development of aerial travel technology in the early 20th century. If the text seems dry, keep flipping for incredible archival photos of early machines. Chapters include “Dirigible Balloons”, “Flying Machines”, “The Art of Flying,” and “Flying Machines of the Future.”

The romance of modern invention, containing interesting descriptions in non-technical language of wireless telegraphy, liquid air, modern artillery, submarines, dirigible torpedoes, solar motors, airships, etc., etc (1907) : Wow. The title pretty much sums this one up. Contains 25 illustrations (with index)

Journal of my forty-fifth ascension, being the first performed in America, on the ninth of January, 1793 (1918): Jean-Pierre Blanchard was a pioneer of aviation and ballooning, admired by many who followed his many balloon ascensions (including George Washington, from whom there is a transcribed letter in this book). Luckily he kept a journal (an early blog, if you will) so his followers could read about his exploits and adventures.

Castle and Pathe coverage of the Hindenberg explosion (1937): A popular item from the Prelinger Collection, the archive also contains an excerpt of this tragic moment composited with the infamous and highly emotional real time radio commentary by Herb Morrison.

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

Anyone who has explored the archive’s Animation and Cartoons section knows that we have an extensive collection of animated titles. So extensive, in fact, that one can get lost trying to find certain types of films. In order to showcase some of our holdings that feature one specific style of animation – Stop Motion Animation – this blog will produce a series with some of the collection’s highlights.

This week – animation with toys! Here are four artists who have this technique down pat:

Spite Your Face Productions: Tony Mines and Tim Drage

LEGO’s are among the most popular toys used in stop-motion animation. Just do a moving image search for LEGOs on the website and you’ll see the massive breadth of entries in this area. Not that there isn’t charm to some of the amateur attempts, but after wading through a number of these, its nice to see the work of some LEGO pros like Mines and Drage. They have a budget behind them, impressive collections of blocks and even digital animation for the facial expressions of some characters. The archive contains the following films from these two filmmakers:

The Perils of Doc Ock (Spiderman II parody)

(Alternate Special Ending of Perils of Doc Ock)

One: A Space Odyssey

(Redux/Improved version of One: A Space Odyssey)

The Han Solo Affair

(Behind the Scenes of Han Solo Affair)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail in LEGO

All of the Dead

JamesFM Productions: James Maduzia

Another entry in the LEGO category, Maduzia’s film The Letter is smoothly animated and clever with its gags – we are anxiously awaiting more films from James in the future!

Svencentral: Sven van der Hart

Former comic book illustrator Van der Hart is another pro, who uses Playmobil toys in his films. In The Viking Five, two sets of Vikings argue about who gets to rob an inebriated monk. In the very short Santa’s New Ride, Santa gets tempted by a vehicle upgrade (and Sir Mixalot), and in the ultra-professional Bloody Snow, toys turn violent in a Western-style showdown.

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

The Internet Archive is located in San Francisco, and so to celebrate our proximity to some of the most renowned wine regions in the world, we bring you this entry about our favorite ferment. This entry contains aromas of cedar, apple and gunsmoke …

Virtual Wine video blogs
Ben Llewelyn and James Booth started Virtual Wine as a way for people to learn and chat online about wine and wine culture. The Internet Archive holds many of their short video blog tutorials and discussions, including Wine Storage, Buying a Wine Glass, Ordering and Returning Restaurant Wine, Matching Food and Wine, How Long to Keep Opened Wine, and How to Decant Old Wine.

Tasting Vlog from The Wine Vibe, featuring four wines (Verdejo, Viognier, Tempranillo and Zinfandel) in the $10 price range that were made from organically-grown grapes. Featured wineries are Casamaro Winery from the Rueda region of Spain, and Cline Winery from Sonoma. *NOTE* The actual tasting begins two minutes into the clip.

Wine Country Live! Episode – Stupid Wine Questions
Why can’t you make red wine from white grapes? Why do wineries grow rose bushes near the road? What exactly do corks DO for wine? This episode of Wine Country Live! is devoted to people’s stupid questions that they’ve been afraid to ask. Wine Country Live! is produced in Sonoma County, hosted by Michael DeLoach, and featuring Daryl Roberts, publisher of WineX Magazine and Robinson Olmstead with current wine-related news.
*NOTE* To play the Real Media file, right click on the link (hold down option + click for Macs) and click on “Copy Link Location,” then open Real Player, go to File, Open Location and paste in the link.

Wine and the wine trade (1921)
Andre L. Simon wrote this book in 1921, dedicated to the history and making of wine. Includes 21 vintage photos of wine ephemera like corking machines, bottle testing and various vineyards and varietals.

The WineMaster freeware helps you keep track of your favorite wines and make tasting notes on your handheld device.

For fun:

Prison Wine! This vlogger teaches us how to make wine with a plastic bag, moldy bread stuffed into a sock (to replace yeast, which is highly contraband in prison), fruit juice, sugar and raisins. *NOTE* The Internet Archive advocates this as entertainment only – try at home only at your own risk …

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

It’s been a hot summer already, with massive fires springing up in Lake Tahoe and Neola, Utah in the past two weeks alone. Some researchers and fire safety organizations are trying to start warning us how to spot potential problem areas, especially if we own property nearby, or plan to camp in those areas. The Internet Archive would like to contribute to this discourse with a blog entry about fire prevention and safety. Our collections contain several newsreels and informational films related to historic fires, as well as narrative and animated films:

Your Fire Department (in two parts – Part I and Part II): Excellent and detailed 1949 documentary about the workings of the Los Angeles Fire Department, with several firefighting sequences. Shot in Kodachrome.

Stillman Fires Collection – Typical Fire: This is one example from the archive’s 40+ collection of Stillman Fires Films, one of the largest collections of fire safety and prevention films taken in different U.S. cities in the 1920’s through the 1960’s.

Vision in the Forest: Country singer Vaughn Monroe and his family learn a bit from Smokey the Bear during a camping trip in this musical educational short film from 1957.

Patti Learns what to do: Educational fire safety film showing a policeman giving a demonstration to grade school children about fire prevention. He follows an anecdotal precautional tale about a real life fire, the Chatsworth fire of 1947. Lots of archival footage of the fire, shot on film.

Story of a Forest Ranger: 1954 vocational informational film from the US Department of Agriculture, about the work of a forest ranger. About 19:30 into the film is a lengthy firefighting sequence.

Bark Out, Fire Ecology: The grassroots organizatino BARK leads a tour through the forests near the Clackamas River in Northwest Oregon on a fire ecology trip.

1923 Berkeley Fire Newsreel: Silent 1923 news coverage of the Berkeley fire that spread through the area north of the UC Berkeley campus, destroying almost 600 homes and leaving 1000 students homeless.

1906 San Francisco Fire: Scenes from the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent four days of rampant fires that destroyed massive sections of the city. This is the first major natural disaster covered by moving images.

The Last Alarm (1940): Feature-length film about a bored retired firefighter whose sense of purpose gets renewed when he is called back to duty by a rogue arsonist.

A Fireman’s Life (1933): And now for something completely different – very early animated comedy short by Frank Tashlin and Vernon Stallings about a night in the life of two firefighters (also called Hook & Ladder Hokum).

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza