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Consumer Reports From Ages Past
Lust sent us a link to
a really sweet little subdirectory on the Consumer Reports Website.
It contains assorted pictures of
long gone products. Check out the
Agent Zero M Sonic
Blaster 5530 from Mattel. Apparently childrens toys shouldn't be allowed to produce
a 157dB sound wave. Waste some time in there- you'll be glad you did.
My favorite has to be the under dash record player for 45 RPMs. The article complained about the lack of a changer--the more things change, the more they stay the same.
slashdot broke my sig
Amazing how their focus has gone from psychofreak levels of detail like the consistancy of toothpaste to more big ticket items like car safety today. Makes you wonder how much people 50 years from now are going to care about what license the source code for their camcorder is under.
I like the Ecology Kit:
Ecology kits, 1973
This Mr. Wizard kit, as its name implies, consists entirely of culturing molds and bacteria. That should be done only under professional supervision--even if you don't follow the kit's suggestion that you culture matter from dirty garbage cans. We rate it Not Acceptable.
Basically it works by spraying fuel into the body of the motor and igniting it with a spark plug. The air inlet at the front consists of reeds arranged like louvres which close when the air/fuel mixture detonates. As the presure wave subsides, they open again admitting more air from the forward air flow (or the fan if you're running this statically on the deck). Think of it as a internal combustion cylinder with an open end instead of a piston and a capacity of several thousand litres.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
My understanding is this:
95 dB can cause hearing damage if over a long enough period (IIRC, 4 hours or somesuch)
There is some sort of curve (db over time) approaching 120 dB which will cause instant hearing damage. (and pain)
157 dB (which would mean sticking your ear directly on the end of the toy, I expect) would probably drop you to the ground writhing in pain.
I was really laughing at the 157dB *OVER* the level that would cause hearing damage.
That would make the noise roughly 32 times as loud as a saturn rocket. You could probably explode large cement structures with it. And if it could do that, I'd already have 10 of them.
The U.S. Military has increased their R&D efforts in non-lethal weapons. One reason for this increase is because of the new role of peacekeeper/policeman that the military has been forced to undertake by the politicans. I'll skip any further political discussion about the actions of the UN, NATO, or the US.
As a M-16 does not have a stun setting, the military requires effective non-lethal weapons as killing all the local inhabitants is generally regarded as poor PR. The debacle in Somalia clearly illustrates what happens when troops are deployed without the proper equipment. So weapons such as sticky foam, super lubricants, high intensity lasers, bean bag bullets, directed radio frequency, and acoustic pulses have/are being developed.
A M-16 is designed to kill. These weapons are supposed to be designed to be a little more gentle. Maybe someone will come up with a 1st person shoot-em-up using only non-lethal weapons.
Especially since the average 45 only contained one song per side, no wonder they never caught on.
It amazes me how shock resistant that thing was, since the technology in those days tended to be rather big and clunky
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Check out 197801.htm. I wonder how much pressure that exerts?
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Cheers,
Joshua `I wanted to see the review of the Grid portable computer' Rodd
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
A easier link for navigating is http://www.consumerrepor ts.org/Functions/More/photgal.html and it allows much freer and easier browsing. And now, back to laziness.
Geez, CU really are a bunch of wimps, aren't they. First they get upset over a mere 157 dB, and now this.
:)
I was culturing bacteria in my basement lab when I was in high school. Bought prepared, disposable petri dishes from a hospital supply dealer, the Mr. Wizard stuff not being on the market yet.
Anyway, the really nasty germs need something like blood agar or an anaeroboic environment...
(Now, who has a schematic for the sonic cannon?
-- Alastair
If the thing is mounted and not flying, it's unlikely a V1 (more specifically, a pulse-jet engine) unless they've got some way of feeding pressurized air into it.
The original V1s were launched from a catapult-like launcher (may have used solid rocket jatos) to get up to operating speed. The movement through the air forces air into the forward end of the engine, fuel is sprayed in, lighted, BOOM! - shutters (flutter valves) at the front end close and the hot gases push out the back, internal pressure drops, ram air forces open the shutters and enters the engine. Repeat until fuel == 0.
-- Alastair
I think this may have been one of the examples of non-lethal weaponry under consideration by our (U.S) armed forces a few years back, as listed by Popular Mechanics. That and something that would put out nauseating sound tones.
"Sure, you're sick and deaf, but hey, at least you're still alive" just doesn't do it for me.
For a while when I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a tester for Consumer Reports. It just seemed like such a cool job -- playing with stuff in weird ways and trying to figure out ways to break it. Now I look at the technician picking food off of frozen pizzas and realize that at least some aspects of the job might have been pretty darned tedious.
It's an awful lot like software testing, though, isn't it?
Some of these products were interesting ideas, if flawed. Those paper dresses -- how flammable were they? And the car record player (by Norelco!) -- what a neat idea! If 45s were longer the players might have caught on, but changing the disc every 2.5 minutes (remember, hit records were shorter then) had to be annoying.
That Pocket Totalizer was a blast from the past. I remember seeing my mom use a similar product when I was a kid in the early '70s, pre-pocket calculators. It's also kind of like the things baseball umpires use to keep track of the count.
Another thing that strikes me are some of the Rube Goldbergesque contraptions that CR built to test products -- like the soap tester which sprayed soap bars with streams of water while rubbing them with identical pressure.
Wouldn't you just love to be allowed to dig through their archives for a while?
//
...should require a background check. :)
LOL. Thanks.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Believe it or not, I had one of those Sonic Blasters when I was a kid. It was, indeed, incredibly loud. The best use I remember is to pump it up (way past the recommended 10 pumps) and then shoot it from close range at a tent containing a sleeping camper.
--- question = 0xFF;