Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

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Watch enough clas­sic movies — espe­cial­ly clas­sic movies from slight­ly down­mar­ket stu­dios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again: once record­ed or acquired for one film, they could, of…

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vintage Film

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A num­ber of years ago, British Pathé uncov­ered some strik­ing footage from 1922 show­ing two women exper­i­ment­ing with the first mobile phone. A spokesman for the archive said: ”It’s amaz­ing that 90 years ago mobile phone tech­nol­o­gy and music … was not only being thought of but being tri­alled.” “The phone even has a lid…

Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

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“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to…

Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

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McGraw-Hill/pub­lic domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Once upon a time, long before Mau­rice Sendak illus­trat­ed Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he pub­lished, notes Ars Tech­ni­ca, “his first pro­fes­sion­al illus­tra­tions in a 1947 pop­u­lar sci­ence book about nuclear physics, Atom­ics for the Mil­lions.” Only 18 years…

Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

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If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by…