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You and the history guy are two of my favorite creators. Well done friend, well done indeed.

You forgot to add that on those new crystal.Sets with that earphone.You could actually talk into the earphone and it would actually transmit to a local receiver

Imagine pumping acetylene gas through your home for lighting. What could go wrong? 🤣

You put in too much carbide, which is why you got a soft >Foomp< rather than a bang. A tiny speck of carbide would have worked better, giving a proper fuel/air ratio for a loud explosion.

To be honest the unfunny short opening sequences are getting a little tiresome.

Really need this to spy on my neighbours

If Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard lived to see their heritage devolve via a shitty clone hawker to a shittier consumer fraud house with their “ink subscription” printers, they would’ve invented a better flamethrower

Hand tool restoration did a bird cannon a few days ago that used this same principle. Also there's a pawn stars episode where they had one of these.

My goodness! I never thought I would ever see one of these again. I bought one off a school friend for $1 when I was 12. Unfortunately it broke after a while and decided to make something that basically worked the same way. I made it out of knitting counters. You know the ones you put on knitting needles to count the number of rows that you knit. What I did was buy 4 of them, they were 2 digits each, and glued them onto a short length of knitting needle. With a bit of practice I could use it to add and subtract up to 8 digits almost as quickly as with your little device.

We had one of these growing up in Washington D.C. and was the only .device that was legal to make loud noises on the 4th of July since firecrackers and cherry bombs were outlawed. I can still hear the sound and smell the calcium carbide as it hit the water and then...BOOM! Since he was not using Bangsite nor metered correctly you get a dud and flash rather than ...BOOM!

As a Mechanical Engineering student 40 years ago, I took a couple of courses in acoustics. For a room, one of the important things to know about it is its "acoustic decay time." (Which is the time it takes a sound's reverberation to decay 60 dB,) One day, we brought our "Nagra" (high end) tape recorder to the University's largest auditorium (to later playback an "impulse" sound). Yep, we used one of these cannons to make the sound.

I never really ran across any of the HP scope cameras, but was very familiar with the Tektronix C50 series in the mid 70's. I use to work in a calibration Lab and we had to issue them out to Lab tech's , keep them clean and loaded with fresh Polaroid film. Thanks for being able to see another side to capturing O scope screen data. 👍

I never used a camera on an O scope, but remember some old ones, I think they were tube based from when I was in the USAF 1969-1973. When I got into repairing early computers we had solid state Tektronic scopes.

One would put those rations on a tray……

Back in the 1970's we used a similar Polaroid camera system to record CT scans.

In the mid 80s, as an EE student, we used similar but simpler polaroids with the lab's oscilloscopes. Even then it struck me what a wonderfully kludgy solution that was. I recently saw on Adriene's Digital Basement that you can now get an amazingly powerful digital oscilloscope for under $100 that fits in a pocket. Wonderful time to be alive.

Ah yes, the days when HP was known not for consumer laptops but for high quality test equipment, which weighed a ton and cost a lot, and was worth every penny. The general rule for electronics labs back then was "Tektronix for oscilloscopes, HP for everything else. And don't forget your Simson 260 multimeter."

Well done, kudos!

Ypu can make calcium carbide with sunlight under a magnifying lens

Recalling many oscilloscope images in instruction texts or hobby magazine articles, it never occurred to me how they captured the images. As a nav equipment tech in the USAF, I used a variety of hp test equipment. I admired & frankly lusted after such finely & cleverly manufactured equipment. Quote from blood sucking Jarrasic Park lawyer, "Is it heavy? Then it's expensive."

A logical continuation of this approach was to draw and photograph animation frames on the kind of high resolution storage tube CRTs (basically CRT-based etch-a-sketches operating at well below 1fps) that were available on terminals like the Tektronix 4010 series in the second half of the 1970s. Various early CGI was created in this manner.

Great video!

Great as usual, just wondering if this is a Canadian thing? I hear you say oh-sill-a-scope. Always understood it to be ahh-sill-a-scope just like ahh-sill-late. Scopes will start following you home. Their like chips, can't have just one. Tektronix 400 and 500 series are my faves, but Apollo era HP gear is always the best. Open them up and sit in awe of the engineering and workmanship. Something as simple as a 3310a function generator has 4 boards with gold traces in a box smaller than a toaster.

My grandfather was vice-president and secretary of COTC at the time the cable was laid, and was at the inaugural ceremonies in London. Afterwards he was presented with a souvenir length of cable not unlike the one in this video, except it's a desk set, it only has one length of cable in the centre, a pen one side, pencile on the other, an inkwells in front of the own, and a cigarette lighter in front of the pencil (because of course it did, everybody smoked back then), an between them a little plauqe engraved metal plaque with the whole "presented to blah blah" on clear acrylic (im assuming?) base. In addition to that, he was also given a short, flat piece of the raw cable, itself, lopped off from the main spool before before it was all spliced in and hooked up on the Newfie side (I'm sure they lopped off a huge length and cut it into hundreds of such souvenirs), which my grandmother gave to me as a gift shortly before she passed. And, absolutely coolest of all, he was given *the* actual phone (or at least one of *the* actual phones) that Her Majesty used to place one of Her first transatlantic telephone calls, and that phone is sitting right here right on front of me right now. It's one of most prized possession, because it's family heirloom and a link to my family's history, and it's also a piece of and link to world history. Plus, Her Majesty the Queen used, I'm a staunch monarchist and, to me, having the phone that She, personally, used on an historic occasion is just *really* effin' cool.

We had a simpler HP Polaroid camera in a lab I worked in during my grad school days in the late 1970s. I suspect it dated from much earlier. That one had a pistol grip and was simply held against the scope face.

I remember a photography trying out a 30,000 ASA film from this era.

Very interesting, i have a load of Oscilloscopes in my collection including a couple designed to go with this camera and some of the HP scopes that came out after with early Flash type memory and at least one that takes a 3.5inc floppy disk. I collect old test gear so have about 30 scopes in total and plenty of other test gear like VTVM and sig gens and counters. so really enjoy seeing things like this that i will need to add to the collection at some point if i can.

what a BLAST! 💥

Wait.... was that intro swell from the movie Heavy Metal?

I used to have one of those scopes - I always wondered what that function was for.

I used the simpler Tektronix camera in EE Lab in 1969. I also used a Visicorder oscillograph that had miniature galvanometers and wrote with UV light on sensitized paper rolls.

Aw dang Gilles, you have the best toys.

Phasenwinkel-Messgerät Now thats interesting, with a name like that a must have for any chaps cave.

yaknow. I thought your channel's mission was to present us with inventions and devices that the majority of the population would have never dreamed were necessary or even wanted, but were made anyways...

4 cm/ns? Holy crap, that's like 10% the speed of light!

The vestigial timer is there because it's a "clockwork" Copal shutter. The last Copal shutters were made as recently as 2013. You'll find them on big 4x5 and bigger cameras where the lens is also made by another of many companies. BTW, HP is now Keysight. They still make oscilloscopes and have nothing to do with the HP brand that was sold +20 years ago. Keysight still has offices in silicon valley. Also, the last time I saw a Polaroid CRT camera, in the 1980s, if memory serves, it looked to be manufactured by Polaroid and looked like one of their cheap black plastic cameras but with a long (pre-focused?) nose.

When I worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in the late 70s, they used a camera setup like this to take data from their optical experiments. I would then take the photos and digitize them on a very early manual digitizer, pressing the pen onto successive points along the trace in the photo. The digitizer would output the coordinates directly onto punch cards! How times have changed...

Sooooo here's a funny story. A few Christmases ago, for no other reason than I just fancied doing it, a got an empty ice cream tub, made a wee hole in the side stuck 2 wires thru and hot glued them. I then I connected one of those 'Taser' units that you can get from Amazon and eBay, and connected it to the wires. I then put some calcium carbide in the tub put some water in it and put the lid on. I then brought the contraption to my wife attention, and told her to watch. I put the tub on the floor in the living room, reeled the wire out so I was a safe distance away and pressed the button. There was a satisfying pop, and then a kind of crackling noise, and my missus shouting, you've set the Christmas tree on fire you effing idiot, which was true. As it was a real tree it offered good kindling. Lucky enough I was able to put it out with my can of coke. I actually have a video clip of it, but like a lot of ppl, when an event happens, the camera person, my wife, panicked and messed the shot up, so after the tree caught fire you could only really hear it and not see it burning, not that there was much to see as it only lasted a second or 2 before it put it out.

I remember a similar thing being used for electronic warfare, where the operators would take photos of the spectrum being monitored. Specific frequencies would come up and be tracked for analysis.

Was anyone else expecting the oscilloscope in the intro to turn red and say “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

I used a lot of HP measurement and recording (not sound recording) equipment in labs in the early 80s. The thing I think about when early-ish HP products come to mind is so-called Reverse Polish Notation - a programming language (?) they used. It worked just fine, but you kinda had to put your brain on backwards when programming.

For Graflex Backs Fuji still sells film for Oscilloscopes or X ray equipment etc. Standard 4x5 or 8x10 film or any size etc. Fuji Super Hr-U, you can get it either especially sensitive to green, or sensitive to all.

I have recently restored a Tektronix curve tracer and wanted to get a matching camera for it; sadly, the one I found doesn't quite fit. I'm now planning to make my own adapter for a regular tripod mount so I can snap a clean picture with a compact camera.

Welcome back. I hope you had a great vacation.

Esoteric, yes. Between your channel Technology Connections and Cathode Ray Dude I think the world is well served by such beautiful, esoteric and important information for history. Thank you. I hope you continue to produce such quality content.

Great video, Gilles...👍

8:55 Nice.

9:32 sorry Giles, but those appear to be 'D' cells NOT 'C'

I like your addendum at around 14:55, about examining problems that people have run into the past, and how they found solutions to them. Learning how people approached problems and how they came up with innovative solutions is a great way of giving you ideas and frameworks to approaching problems when you run into similar situations yourself, even if they're not directly comparable. One thing I really appreciate about your videos is that you make sure to clearly communicate what was the actual problem that people had, and then you introduce the device that was used to solve that problem and how it achieved that. I notice quite frequently that people just end up explaining what something is doing, rather than *why* it's doing that thing; and without understanding why things are done in a certain way, it's incredibly hard to actually apply that knowledge to other situations.

There were a few years at work where we needed to document waveforms, and the Polaroid scope camera was the tool that we used. Polaroids do generate a lot of trash with each photo, but this was the only way to record waveforms at the time. Modern digital scopes that can just save the image to a thumb drive are an incredible convenience by comparison!