Jokes aside, it's a fascinating study into a world riding the wave of the industrial revolution; a strong sense of pride and optimism seemed to exist.
It's saddening to think that basically all of the people filmed were affected in some way by the Second World War. It also brings mortality into focus to also think that the children pictured so carefree here are now either very old or dead.
How will the future look back on us? Will they dig up early 3D scanning attempts and think the same? Will they attempt to 'restore' their findings to modern standards? "Oh, it's missing smells, humidity, air pressure and breeze so we used environmental cues during 'restoration'"
> a world riding the wave of the industrial revolution
> all of the people filmed were affected in some way by the Second World War
I can't agree with you more. But what makes me more sad is that it all seems to be slowly repeating itself right now. I mean we're currently riding the first ripple of the digital revolution... and war, fascism, and social unrest is back once again in the west - just under a less recognizable form.
The words from this song might be familiar to you. What's scary is that the speech makes so much sense in a present day context:
It struck me that the two women and a child at the Cenotaph at about 2'20" were quite possibly remembering husbands and fathers killed in the First World War (9 years earlier).
That's fantastic, the very first shot is of my street, filmed next to the building I live in. I can't quite make out the sign on the building corner - but I'm pretty sure it's the exact same pub that's there now.
jacko0 and ksrm [EDIT: and icecreampain], you seem to be under some kind of ban - what you write appears gray, and is invisible when I log out - despite them appearing to be perfectly valid contributions.
I really hate this whole banning on HN - the fact that people get banned and continue posting without knowing it (sometimes for months) - seems to me like the elementary school bullying technique of putting a post-it on someone's back and letting them walk around with it.
Thank you for letting me know, I have no idea why that has happened. Apart from me describing someone's idea of Clojure as the next-gen Lisp as 'cute', which was maybe a bit rude, I don't think I've done anything to deserve being banned. I was never a fan of this hellbanning idea and now it seems I've become a victim of it. What do I do now?
I also thought it might have been just 0 points, but his other comment in the thread still appears as [dead] for me. jacko0's comment now appears as normal, although earlier I clearly remember it was [dead]. icecreampain's still appears as [dead]. Anyway, it could be some glitch in the software, but the system is a bit strange anyway.
a bit strange anyway is the best description I can muster too. however it does not send me emails nor try to get my kids to buy upgrades of dubious worth. so on balance it beats out most other things on an iPhone :-)
(sorry very annoyed by kids games that chuck in upgrades and unlocks fr cash - really really unacceptable)
While I'm ok w/ the general principle of hellbanning (done properly, it can be a very effective way of tarpitting trolls/spammers) I don't think HN's implementation is very good.
New accounts start w/ 0 karma and posts seem to go dead when you go negative, so it's pretty common for perfectly normal accounts to be hellbanned just because of one or two initial downvotes.
It'd be pretty trivial to improve the algorithm, the most simple being a karma buffer (a purposely bad actor is sure to accrue plenty of downvotes) or some new account/unique post discounts/allowances. You can of course go pretty deep down the rabbit hole once you start with these things, but I bet even the simplest fix would solve most of these problems.
thats really cool. i have an old pic of my house here in portland oregon - built in 1924. im the 3rd owner which is kindof cool. every time i fix something i try to imagine the others who touched it before me - and built it to last from 1924.
when we renovated the kitchen we actually found scraps of a kids homework in ceiling/floor and some old match books from when the roof was replaced 30ish years ago.
we left a couple magazines and a kids toy in the new walls :)
The article says the film was bicolour, but wikipedia [1] states Friese-Greene invented the biocolour, where red and green frames are alternated (hence the flickering that had to be removed).
Here's another article on the same subject [2], which seems to be the source for OP.
I wish hats would come back like in the video. Almost everybody wore a hat in 1927.
I bought a hat a few weeks back. It's so great to wear, it's safe and warm.
However, everybody looks at me as if I am some crazed hipster with my "fedora". If everybody would wear a hat like in the video, life would be so much nicer.
I don't think people liked hats back then. There was a specific season in the early 1960s where most American men wore hats before that season and after that season almost none did. Tipping point dynamics indicate most wearers strongly wanted to stop wearing hats but couldn't for social pressure, until a tipping point hit and instantly almost everyone stopped, permanently.
"nicer" is debatable, but it certainly was expensive and annoying. I'm hoping the necktie and business suit experience the same collapse.
Deserved or not, fedoras and similar hats have become associated with hipsters today. The public at large generally does not like to deal with hipsters, for a variety of reasons (their typical attitude is a big one).
It's really no different than how many people distrust others who wear extremely baggy clothing. Clothing like that has become, rightly or wrongly, associated with gang culture. Most everyday people do not want to deal with others who dress in such a way.
Had fedoras become associated with a more respected culture or group of people today, then they very well could have become more popular.
Personally when I think of the kind of dude who wears a fedora I think of a husky ("big boned") pale white guy with a lot of opinions about My Little Pony and / or men's rights.
Honest question: how do hipsters behave? Wthey have appeared in mass just the last year here in Spain(just very unusual before ). So I've had no oportunity to interact with them (just with some friends that are in a rock group, they have to keep an "attitude", but I think is mostly to keep the artist behaviour that people expect)
The hipster attitude I've experienced (and not all the ones I've known behave this way, but it's typical) is a contempt for anything "mainstream". Their coolness lies in the fact that they have secrets, like their "favorite" artist that no one else knows about (and therefore, no one is as cool as them).
It manifests in a holier-than-thou, I'm better than you because you're not cool, you're part of the unwashed masses that just don't know any better.
It's a counterculture sub-culture that's built on the physical manifestation of low-grade oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) (as opposed to the punk movement which would be a high-grade ODD sub-culture and for which there is lots of cross pollination). It's almost entirely centered around having secret or obscure knowledge from the mainstream which they purposely conflate with "taste" and how those tastes makes them special snowflakes.
Groups of hipsters will "share secrets", which they think keeps that taste special and unique, until some perceived critical mass adopts those same tastes (it makes no different if it comes from within the sub-culture or is coincidentally adopted from without), then they think it dilutes the special uniqueness of those things.
Oftentimes, hipsters will purposely cling onto tastes that might be described as anti-tastes for the purpose of optimizing the search for obscurity - they know the majority of people won't like it if they were exposed to it, therefore it's automatically obscure. This hack also works for producers of hipster geared content, make something tasteless and hipsters are likely to gravitate towards it because of the perceived obscurity.
Tastelessness is not always a hallmark of hipsterism, and is sometimes confused for it. Hipsters rely on obscurity before tastleness. Sometimes virtuoso skills in certain trades of skill sets are also obscure enough, and defiant enough of mainstream tastes, that hipsters may adopt and perfect those skills. For example, ultra high-end foods, in very specific categories, are a hipster staple.
What do normal people care or not care about? Viewing the normal masses as an oppressive authority, their ODD will compel them to adopt the opposite. e.g.
- Normal people don't care where their ketchup is made? Hipsters will hand make ketchup from locally grown organic ingredients of the highest possible quality.
- Normal people want music with a beat and a catchy tune? Hipsters will find music genres composed of random, unmemorable noise.
- Normal people want clothes that fit and go well together? Hipsters will find clothes that don't fit and don't go well together.
etc.
The psychology of special uniqueness gives many hipsters a feeling of power or dominion over other people and can give them an attitude of aloof standoffishness, a "I'm better than you because of the rare things I know about". It can appear a bit like the attitude of "cool". It's also important that the secret knowledge they have is generally not about anything of actual importance. Hipsters won't gravitate towards obscure fields of intellectual study in general -- unless mainstream society expected them not to, then ODD would compel them to.
Hipsters are different from "cool" in that "cool" usually means adoption and mastery of a culture confirming sub-culture and the styles associated with that sub-culture. While hipsterism is focused on adoption and mastery of obscurity.
In some ways, hipsterism is also confused in some cases with nerd culture (and there are some overlaps), except nerd culture cares about topics which lend themselves to obsessive pedant-ism and escapist fiction and may coincidentally appear out-of-the mainstream in similar ways to hipsterism. I'd say it's more likely that hipsterism purposely adopts the appearances of nerdism in some cases because of the obscure non-mainstream guarantees of nerdism (which is often a manifestation of OCD, SPD and ASD, but not ODD).
Obscurity, in the hipster subculture, is also local, rather than global -- which is partially what makes it hard to define. Does the hipster live in a highly urban environment? Then they might adopt rural clothing and fashion tastes. Do they live in a rural environment? Then they might adopt urban wear. Combined with the large long tail of obscurity available to the modern consumer, they have near infinite things to adopt and consume.
Most vexing, hipsterism has difficulty describing itself. It uses words like "authentic" or "rare", but is largely not introspective. A hipster that might care deeply about the authenticity of the 4 pieces 1950s 3-piece jazz band they belong to, cares nothing about the authenticity of the lens-less glasses frames he's wearing. You can bet, however, that his band is the only 1950s 3-piece jazz band in his immediate area. It's the obscurity of the items, the social references, and the assurance that it is not accepted by the authority of the mainstream, to satisfy the ODD urges, that he actually cares about.
Hipsters, in many cases even profess a dislike for each other, possibly because hipsterism takes skill. Anything that takes skill means that somebody can become an authority in it, triggering an ODD reflex against that person. The stereotypical hipster argument of who likes the more obscure band is merely a reflection of this phenomenon.
Fedoras haven't been trendy among anyone but neckbeards for the last 3 years. Wearing a fedora identifies you as being essentially socially and stylistically oblivious.
It's been obvious for decades (centuries?), but it really is true that engineers are disproportionately befuddled by contemporary fashion and style.
how is the fit? it seems a lot of people are trying to look fashionable by wearing a fedora without even considering its fit and size.
and further, does it go with the rest of your outfit? most everyday/streetwear would look awful with a fancy hat. If you'll notice in the video, most people are wearing proper coats or suits.
I am a boring dresser because I visit many clients. A nice button down shirt, a black jacket, none-casual-pants. People say the hat goes really well with it.
Current slang aside, an ‘Indiana Jones’ (front-pinched snap-brim fur felt dome hat) is a fedora, and a hipster ‘fedora’ (cloth panel tapered bucket) isn't. It's like calling Crocs ‘Monkstraps’ because they buckle on the feet.
I think the most interesting thing I took away from this video was the look of surprise and curiosity on the faces of people looking directly at the camera, specifically during the bit on Petticoat Lane. It may just have been the (for the time) large vehicle coming at them in the middle of the street, but I prefer to think that they'd yet to have seen a camera like this one, and didn't know what to make of it. I can't imagine seeing anything that would take me so by surprise these days - maybe one of the downsides to how small the world has become.
If I remember rightly there's a photo of their setup - a bulky camera on a tripod with a man operating it on the roof of a car. I think that would still draw attention these days. I'll look for the link (on the BFI site somewhere probably).
To me they seemed more annoyed that the camera vehicle was coming through. I couldn't help but think that more than one of the turned heads mentally cursed the cameraman.
Spooky to think that, of some of them, this one annoyed look is all there remains.
Maybe in just being too idealist, but I don't want to think of that look as frustration with a car driving through, but I get that's probably it. Yeah, though, what a bummer that your only pictured self is that look.
I find this interesting. Even though we think our lives did change a lot with Technology; in appearance the change is minimal.
This is almost 100 years old. 100 years ago, there were cars, roads and buildings. After 100 years, there is cars, roads, and also buildings. There are certainly changes: The cars are more comfortable, there is traffic lights, the buildings are higher... But they didn't change the way our lives look completely.
I suspect the next 100 years will be quite similar. We'll have better cars (and maybe automated ones), faster trains, more glass buildings, but essentially, the landscape is staying the same.
Well we're still using liquid fuel rockets to get to space and those were invented in the 20s. We're still using coal, gas, and hydro as our main energy sources. They were all around then. Radio, Airplanes, Cars, etc all were around.
I think the two biggest difference are no plastics and no electronics in these pictures. The other difference is that people are more individualistic in their appearances. They don't all wear the same clothes.
That doesn't matter when you are inside the city. Also I already mentioned in my comment that things are getting indeed fast (I mean trains, planes, cars, the Internet...)
I was wondering the same thing! Wikipedia says: [1]
> In the United States, the first documented use of a painted center line was in 1911... According to the state of Michigan, the idea of using a painted center line was conceived in 1911 by Edward N. Hine...
> In the UK, the first "white line" road markings appeared on a number of dangerous bends on the London-Folkeston road at Ashford, Kent, in 1914, and during the 1920s the rise of painted lines on UK roads grew dramatically. In 1926 official guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Transport that defined where and how white lines on roads should be used.
I think the lack of lines in the road stood out to me the most. It seems this was a time of trying to figure out how to share the road with pedestrians, bicycles, vehicles, and other modes of transportation.
We are still working on this, but seeing all those people in the streets with nothing but a traffic cop there to direct things made me very happy to have the rules of the road we have now. They aren't perfect, but they look a lot better than what those people had to deal with.
I've seen it argued that a road without those markings is much safer - it makes explicit that people are sharing the road and need to watch out for each other, rather than assuming that as long as they're in "their" part of the road they don't need to check.
That's definitely the case for me too - mostly, London looked incredibly similar. The skyline has obviously changed, but it's obviously recognisable.
Interestingly, they're continuing to play around with sharing the road - Exhibition Road (which probably also looks very similar to how it looked then) being the leading example. No lines down the middle, no obvious pavement. As an experiment it seems to be going pretty well - it seems like we've figured out the main problem isn't segmenting by size, but ensuring most users move at similar speeds.
There weren't even speed limits at that time. It was pretty much a free for all subject merely to the same customs surrounding horses and carriages :-)
I'm more surprised by the frame rate than the color. It seems to have been enhanced. Everything looks smooth, but there's something peculiar about the way people walk, for example, notice the pedestrians' feet at 1:54. Either way it's beautiful.
From the original article: The British Film Institute have used computer enhancement to minimise the flickering and low quality of the original bicolour film.
He made this film so people could travel to the city of London without being there. I bet he did not expect it would be used by people 100 years in the future to travel back in time.
The thing that stood out the most for me is the complete absense of bicycles, I even went out to check when was its invention (apparently around one century before this footage).
Something else I noticed is how much cared after is Hyde Park right now, although it doesn't look bad at all on the footage. I can't say I was surprise as the Central Park in New York City also changed a lot (probably even more than Hyde Park), mainly during the 80s if I'm not mistaken.
What gets to me is that while most of the roads and building you see endure today, every single person in this film are likely dead. Even the little children.
I think I just saw first color footage of a test match (if the caption is to be believed). That had more resonance with me than anything else in the video -- which is fantastic nonetheless.
PS. And oh yeah, England beat Australia here... strange ;-)
The people of that era were closer in time to the moon landing than I am now. With the exception of that horrible war around the corner they seem to have much more interesting stuff in their futures.
I love London, it's one of my favorite cities in the world. There's an energy there like nowhere else. And it looks like that same energy was there in 1927. So amazing.
Gasometers have largely passed as a result of high pressure distribution systems.
Ours are disused or removed in St. Louis. Wikipedia explains that they are rare in the U.S. and those were some of the only ones.
The UK gasometers are largely disused, but the sites are expensive to decontaminate and reuse since they were frequently used to produce "town gas" from coal.
Jokes aside, it's a fascinating study into a world riding the wave of the industrial revolution; a strong sense of pride and optimism seemed to exist.
It's saddening to think that basically all of the people filmed were affected in some way by the Second World War. It also brings mortality into focus to also think that the children pictured so carefree here are now either very old or dead.
How will the future look back on us? Will they dig up early 3D scanning attempts and think the same? Will they attempt to 'restore' their findings to modern standards? "Oh, it's missing smells, humidity, air pressure and breeze so we used environmental cues during 'restoration'"
A lovely piece of footage.