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Post by clarencebunsen on Jul 1, 2012 14:32:48 GMT -5
This doesn't really fit into the "Boyhood Memories" thread but Dave's balloon flight tale sent me looking for another balloon story I remembered reading. www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/gsr/hpfaall.htmIf Poe had published this a few decades later, it would have been considered science fiction. I think most of his contemporaries just thought it weird. There had been some hoaxes published about balloon flights across the Atlantic prior to this including one by Poe. |
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Post by dave on Jul 1, 2012 16:05:04 GMT -5
I think I read that long ago in a Poe reader. I'll have to re-read it again later this evening.
I was also thinking of Jules Verne "Around The World In 80 Days," although a balloon ride figures mostly in the movie, I guess, because I don't think it took up much of the novel. But I can't remember if I read the novel.
Here's a youtube of a balloon flight. There are many on youtube, but this is quite high resolution. The photography is beautiful and you can enlarge it to full screen. Don't let the title fool you. Neither event is damaging. There are indeed a number of balloon-crash tapes on youtube that are serious.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Jul 1, 2012 22:26:04 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Jul 2, 2012 6:50:01 GMT -5
CB, Popsci must have removed the stories?
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Post by clarencebunsen on Jul 2, 2012 9:55:55 GMT -5
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Post by dave on Jul 2, 2012 16:06:37 GMT -5
Broken links seem to happen more often lately. But maybe I'm just sensitive because of my experience on Lunarticks.
Maybe we'll see Pasternak, the blimp buy, on the Shark Tank in the near future asking for $40 million. If so, "I'm out." Indeed, people have been attracted to this idea for years, and with no results. And I don't think his compressed helium idea is new.
Pasternak's I-am-not-blimp blimp is reminiscent of the ship that will be a city and never dock, an immense sea-going vessel you can live on when you get tired of terra firma. I don't think that has been built yet, either.
Cool ideas, though. Causes me to think about the real expense of transportation. A blimp certainly saves on fuel, but in today's world I wonder whether time or expense is more important.
I just received a computer cable from an eBay-er in Hong Kong. What Best Buy wanted $39.95 for, Xiuping Wu sold to me for $5.99 plus one dollar shipping. From Hong Kong! I don't know how he does it, but if he's still in business next week, he understands something about business that I don't. Wu is probably selling them to Best Buy for $20 each.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Jul 2, 2012 17:04:46 GMT -5
Lighter than air craft are fun to read about but as you say nothing ever happens.
Cable pricing is crazy. When I worked at Radio Shack they were some of the highest margin items in the store and that was at $3-6 per cable. I toured the Tandy cable factory (back when the corporation was named after the man rather than the store). It was in a converted warehouse in Ft. Worth, no air conditioning just some windows up near the ceiling, working over solder pots. Talk about a sweatshop.
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