Is anyone else struggling with the format of the article?
It starts with the name, age, and appearance of the darkroom? As if it's a character? And then all of a sudden it's a dialogue with no introduction whatsoever, where the bold text is one character and the normal text is another?
This doesn't explain why anything at all. It's just a weirdly formatted snarky dialog. With a strange do and don't at the end.
This appears to be a regular column in the Guardian called “Pass Notes”, which takes this format to discuss... anything, really; the previous installment is about the emerging practice of stopping teens from congregating in places by installing lights that highlight their pimples.
On a tangent here but seriously, lights that highlight pimples? That is so cruel. I still remember having pimples like 25 years ago and how humiliating it felt. Now there's a light that teens need to run away from?
I like The Guardian but hate this format. It's neither informative nor, as I'm guessing it's supposed to be, humorous. Often it's just confusing. Yet they use it for everything.
Imagine some average non-technical young person in his or her mid 20s who time travels and appears naked before someone like Newton or Maxwell.
It would be interesting to imagine the conversation when they try to decipher the future science and technology from the "commoner" from the 2019.
"You are Newton, you are famous man. You discovered gravity I think. But you were wrong and everything is relative. There are black holes that suck even light. Light has a speed and nothing can be faster than light."
"Maxwell. I have heard that name. Batteries or something. Anyways, there is this thing called quantum mechanics where everything is either particle and a wave and nobody knows how it works and its weird. Have you met Schrödinger and do you know about his experiments with cats?"
"Like Connecticut Yankee except that none of us actually know enough to do much with the knowledge back in Ye Olden Times, so it wouldn't work out quite like that" has been done. Doubt this is the only example.
In one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books, Arthur ends up on a planet of people with Neolithic technology and is very excited to recreate civilization, until he realizes that the only modern artifact he understands how to make from scratch is a sandwich. Luckily, everyone loves sandwiches.
Even a highly technical person would likely be useless, unless one were very lucky.
"Everything is made of atoms, and you can split them to generate enormous amounts of heat. It's very dangerous but fortunately I know all about how to design a vessel that can do it safely. We can all live like kings and make filthy coal smoke a thing of the past! All we need is some plutonium..."
"So, you can formalize the act of doing mathematics as "computation", and build machines to do it. The neat thing is that all such machines are equivalent in power! They're amazingly useful - you can, uh, well, make ballistics tables I guess? But they're so much better than that, trust me they can do anything! We just need some silicon... huh? damn. Okay, we'll use relays - I suppose it's easy enough to get a few hundred miles of extremely fine copper wire... what do you mean, "what's a volt"?
The ability to describe petroleum distillation column would be nice. Distillation was already known technolgy. The ability to produce kerosene for lamps would have been big invention.
It's a fun thought experiment to consider what you would be able to rediscover or reinvent from scratch millennia years ago.
Perhaps the easiest and most likely to promote scientific progress would be the telescope and microscope: though I don't know how to grind lenses, it seems there were several centuries where people knew how to make good spectacles, but hadn't figured out that putting two lenses in front of each other is really useful.
You could also promote Germ Theory, but the world would think you a nutcase you're entire life. Creating bacterial cultures using 1700s tech should be easy, especially since you know what the outcome should be.
Pasteurization is just cooking stuff. "I cooked these peas sealed in a champagne bottle last summer and they ares still edible consumes grey peas"
Penicillin was derived from mold. Once you can culture bacteria, you can demonstrate that penicillin is effective at killing it.
One could easily transplant these ideas to the Roman era. They'd likely take hold too, because of the huge impact they have on conducting war.
If someone with power would listen to you, I think the biggest advancements the average person could take back 500+ years would be related to hygiene and medicine.
The mere introduction of hand washing in situations where people are intimately caring for one another has saved millions of lives.
I also think the average person now has an amazing amount of knowledge about the body and its operation compared to even a qualified doctor of 200+ years ago.
They weren't too far apart for their times, it took forever for techniques to spread back then, the big issue is the level of accuracy they could get in lens grinding. When you start stacking optical elements and defects in the primary element get compounded by all the elements after it so you need very good lenses to build a usable telescope.
You're right, and I didn't mean to imply that a few centuries was a particularly long time (just that this is the time in which my scant knowledge is useful).
Telescopes and microscopes also provided the motivation for improvements in lensmaking in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.
> but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.
The answer I've always found has been it's a bit of both. Motivation drives technological development but motivation is also very heavily driven by the available technology. You have to conceive that a thing is possible before you can think about what tech can be developed to do it for example.
My favorite for this one is Whitworth's 3 plate method and the technique of scraping iron for precision and bearing. That and/or gauge blocks and lapping for standardized measurement would get you a long ways into guns if you were past the puddling furnace already.
If I could identify what the hell saltpeter was, gunpowder would be an option. Of course, without better metallurgy it’s not that useful by itself. Likewise for steam engines.
The Michael Crichton novel Timeline is basically about this. It’s good. Spoiler: saltpeter makes an appearance, as suggested by someone elsewhere in this thread.
I think about this frequently during idle moments, what if I had been transported back in time? I mean, I know so much... yet so little.
Even "basic" stuff like batteries. I know the principle, but I doubt I'd manage to make a good one. I know steel is iron with some added carbon, but there's more to it than that. How about soap? I recall seeing some program as a kid about how soap is made, but without further research I couldn't even begin to make it.
There's such an amazing amount of details in engineering, chemistry, mechanics and production processes that I'm blissfully ignorant of that I depend upon in my daily life.
"The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."
1632[0] is the first in a series of entertaining alternate history novels, where an entire West Virginian town is transported to the middle of the Thirty Years war. It touches on some of these problems in having to translate modern knowledge to people in the past.
This is a great premise for a hard-SF short story, most probably someone has written one along these lines.
I'd say, forget Newton or Maxwell, whose mathematical and physics prowess would be hard to beat but imagine the same scenario with Archimedes: finding the ratio of volumes of a sphere in a cylinder? No problem.
> It has to be dark, because too much light will destroy the negatives.
The author of this piece doesn’t seem to understand the process either. The light will expose the photographic paper, which will render it useless. The developed negative film is relatively safe from light-induced damage.
The author also fails to mention that one begins developing film (at least, the way I did it years ago) by transferring it to a lightproof container in a completely black room. They tend to not show this part in Hollywood, I suppose, since black rooms don’t really translate well to the screen. (Unless there is an alternative process I’m unaware of... I was very much a noob B&W photographer.)
> The author of this piece doesn’t seem to understand the process either.
I think that's rather the point of the piece. At least that's what I got out of it.
There's a recurring theme every generation where the older generation thinks the younger generation is just dumb, or doesn't care about things that matter, etc. In this case it's the older generation shaming the younger generation for not knowing how photographs used to be processed. But that doesn't really matter. It's just some arbitrary piece of nostalgia. And anyway, digging further, those people doing the shaming only have a very limited understanding to begin with.
To be fair to the younger fans, I feel like most older fans have never been in a darkroom, and are only familiar with them as a movie trope. I certainly would have recognized this scene before I ever developed my own pictures.
It's the retail photo lab that really distinguishes my generation from the last.
Ah, it's the darkroom. From the headline I thought there'd been a reference to the Red Room from Twin Peaks in Stranger Things S2 that'd slipped by me. Which would be kinda weird since the show takes place before Twin Peaks was made, but people love referencing that show, so who knows.
I'm not familiar with that term. What is an "information feather"? Google doesn't help. Also english isn't my native language, so I may miss some context here.
“When I watched someone on TV using a quill, I didn’t go on the internet and write: “What is the purpose of the information feather?””
(Once upon a time, before pens were manufactured, people would write by taking a large feather, cutting the hollow tube at its center to a point, and dipping it in ink.)
"Information feather" isn't a typical expression in the English language. The author is using that as a hypothetical phrase that someone who had never heard of a quill might think up in order to describe a quill in the same way that people who have never heard of a darkroom are calling it a "red room," not understanding its purpose. This is mostly intended as a joke.
When the older voice in the article says the dark red light protects the fragile negatives, it perpetuates a common misunderstanding about film darkrooms. Most undeveloped film would be destroyed by the red light, except very uncommon orthochromatic film. Once developed (or technically, once fixed) the negative is fine in bright light. Maybe that’s the point—older people know what a darkroom is, but few know the details.
I still have a red room, though I have to admit it doesn't get used as much as in the past. The cost of paper these day is nuts (though it was never really cheap).
Yeah, it's always cheaper to just take pictures with your phone, but using old and more difficult methods makes the photos seem more important even when they are objectively worse.
I've been meaning to try wet plate photography[1] because it seems very intriguing to my closeted-hipster self, but I don't trust myself with the chemicals needed.
Personally, I've been satisfied with plain old film, though I would avoid dageurrotypes, as it involved processing with mercury vapor. I have my limits.
My father in law has a number of pinhole cameras he built at home. Every iteration becomes fancier and closer to that of a real camera. The development process is not difficult to take on it home. The results are fun, but the art, craft, and process are even more so.
I have this hare-brained idea to rescue Kodachrome colours from undeveloped film. Develop it according to the K14 process, but without any dye couplers. (The dye couplers are problematic to find today.)
Instead, add these steps:
6b - dry the film
6c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW colour channel.
9b - dry the film
9c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW + CYAN colour channel.
11b - dry the film
11c - scan it in infrared. This is the YELLOW + CYAN + MAGENTA colour channel.
17b - scan it in visible light. This is the luma information.
The luma will be much higher resolution and contrast than the chroma (Yellow+Cyan+Magenta) scans, because the infrared scans are made before the film was fixed. Together though, they might be pretty decent looking.
Kodachrome was great but the process was horrible. Usage was declining well before digital became a thing, because C-41 and E-6 films got good enough to replace it.
I did, however, have a few rolls in the last batch Dwayne's processed.
I remember I created a small camera-obscura based photo-camera with friends for a physics project from piece o aluminium, old shoe-box and photo-paper :)
Reloading it was a pain, cause you had to be in a dark-room to put in in the box :D
There are several photographic processes that are UV-sensitive, most notably cyanotypy, so you can work inside with the curtains closed with hardly any fogging, and then make photograms or contact prints outside. I've never tried taking photographs with it, but it could be fun too: exposure times in a pinhole camera are probably on the order of an hour, though.
To be honest, I don't really remember how long the exposistion times were. I assume we used less than hour, more than minute and I wonder if I can found our old lab-notes :)
Photograms-idea sound really fun as well, and probably a bit easier than trying to get the exposition time correctly.
If you really want to blow the minds of younger fans, tell them about photolithography.
"You mean he can make computer chips in the red room?"
"No, the chemicals are different as are some of the steps. What I am trying to say is that similar concepts are used. Things like the exposure of photosensitive materials to light and using other chemicals to change the properties of exposed areas."
"That doesn't make any sense at all. Light can't change chemicals."
"Of course it can. That is how photosynthesis works."
"What do plants have to do with this?"
"Very little. I was just using a common example to prove that chemicals can changed by light."
"Okay, but plants are different from computer chips and photographs so I still don't see how it's related."
(The conversation continues in circles for a bit.)
"Look, we used to think about things in very different ways. When your generation and my generation sees stuff coming off of factory line, we have a tendency to think of things being made in mechanical ways. So we're the same in that respect. On the other hand, you see a lot of things being created digitally so you have a greater tendency to think of things being built up from bits in computer memory. My generation saw a lot of things being made by carefully controlled chemical reactions, so it is easier for us to imagine things being created that way. Just because I have less exposure to the former doesn't mean that it does not exist. Just because you have less exposure to the latter doesn't mean that it does not exist. The world changes. Get used to it. Heck, have some fun in the process and explore the old ways as well as the up-and-coming ways. It will make your worldview much richer."
Once upon a time, the mad scientist cliché was surrounded with beakers filled bubbling fluids. I haven't seen that cliché in a movie in a long time. Now we have the "mad hacker" cliché where the hacker does similar things, but with hacked up computers with a thousand wires to servos and cameras and other mystery devices.
The article is bad. Really bad.
The point made though is something I took for granted. I know what a darkroom is. My parents had one in the house. My dad had one at his work. Not sure my kids will have any idea what it is though. I have an urge to make sure they do. The now know about Rotary phones and audio tapes and vinyl - they should be aware of darkrooms.
The problem with modern life, as wonderful and amazing as they are, is that many people lack the history of how we got there. Obviously younger ones have not lived through it, but at least a basic knowledge of the progress made will help them appreciate just how wonderful and amazing our times are.
> I have an urge to make sure they do. The now know about Rotary phones and audio tapes and vinyl - they should be aware of darkrooms.
I am curious as to why? I mean, in a historical context, they might be interesting. And certainly, they will continue to exist for quite some time in certain professional and hobbyist settings, but I don't imagine they'll provide much value outside of trivia to the average person.
I used one in high school, but I can't say that it has provided me much practical knowledge outside of knowing how a negative is actually used.
Maybe "urge" is too harsh of a word. I find the history of technology fascinating and when my boys encountered old tech they were interested by it. We spent some time playing C64 games and it was good fun (in moderation). The rotary phone and seeing if they can figure it out was funny, vinyl is having a renaissance anyway and audio tapes were just cool when they were a thing.
I look forward to trying the rotary phone thing on my still young children. Hell, they might have an issue with a touch tone phone by the time they're old enough :)
It's a neat exercise - figuring how that rotary thing works without prior knowledge. When I think of it in today's context it's a strange interface. Numbers with zeros and nines took forever to dial :)
Have you thought about adding old school modems to that list? We've come a long way from telephone couplers, BBSes and Compuserve in terms of how we get online and communicate.
I like how not once does the author of this explain that the room is dark and red because you actually have red lights in a darkroom; the photo-reactive paper you’re printing images onto does not react to red light.
The whole thing is made up by the blogger who wrote this post at the guardian.com and wants to promote himself at HN, and the format of the article my suspicion even more clear to me.
Young people with interest by photography will still know about these things because they will buy an analog camera and become what we call “hypsters” nowadays (the equivalent of “nerds” back then). And back then also not everyone knew or could go through the whole negative reveal process, as much as nowadays not everyone can format a hard disk and install an OS.
Now that I remember, the last time I had photographic film developed was in 2003 or 2004. I was a bit late to the digital photography game.
Today my phone (far from a top of the line model) takes better pictures (both in pixel size and sensitivity) than my first digital camera (which I think had a whopping 128MB memory card)
(Having read about it a long time ago I'm a bit familiar with how film is developed - note the red light is only useful for some types of B&W film, your regular color film will get exposed even with a dim red light)
Hey while we're all poking and having fun, has anyone mentioned here why 'red'?
I've never developed film photographs myself and just assumed it was for the benefit of preserving low-light sensitivity in our eyes rather than anything related to exposing the paper to different wavelengths of light--just lower intensities that we can still see.
Early photographic films were not very sensitive to red. (It showed up as black on the resulting photo.) That's called 'orthochromatic film'. And it's relatively safe to use a dim red light (often called a 'safe light') with that.
Photographic paper which is what is used to produce a 'positive' print is only reacting to black and white, so it can be made from 'orthochromatic chemicals' without problems, and it is more convenient because you can use a red safe-light while you are processing it.
Later photographic film was about as sensitive to red as the other colours, so all colors showed as shades of grey, while black was black. That's called 'panchromatic film'. You must use total darkness when transferring/developing this film. I learned to do the the entire film-processing sequence solely by feel umpteen decades ago.
An offshoot to the dim red effect, is the movies where you see submarine control rooms using dim red lighting. This is supposedly a way of preventing a loss of night-vision when looking though the periscope at night.
Is it confusing anyone? Google trend for "red room" shows only a few brief spikes, the most recent from February. That seems to be because of the book "The Haunting of Hill House".
It starts with the name, age, and appearance of the darkroom? As if it's a character? And then all of a sudden it's a dialogue with no introduction whatsoever, where the bold text is one character and the normal text is another?
This doesn't explain why anything at all. It's just a weirdly formatted snarky dialog. With a strange do and don't at the end.