Aug 24, 2026, 4:46 PMThinking about the era of technology where the easiest way to display images was to take all the air out of a tube and point a death ray at your face.
It's fine though. There was a thin screen between you and the death ray that caught all the death and turned it into pretty colors.
Aug 24, 2026, 4:48 PMEach of the death ray tubes came with a heart-stopping machine in the back. For your convenience if you had too many moving hearts around and needed to stop one.
@mark Wait until you find out about microwaves
@Drayson @mark that's some Roswell tech right there. i know how ovens work. gas fire or electricity in an element. i know how open fires and bbq/grill works. gas hob, induction, electric hob. simples... then a spaceship doesn't crash in new mexico and suddenly we know how to heat stuff by agitating the atoms? i call bs.
@snosrapkungfu @Drayson @mark I believe a common origin story is a radar technician noticed that after working on a functional radar antenna a chocolate bar had melted in their pocket. Which is neat and all, but does raise questions about the standards for safe working practices at the time.
@pmb00cs @snosrapkungfu @Drayson @mark
my freshman chem prof, a Berkeley PhD, talked of distilling their own Benzedrine and aligning the tubes in particle accelerators by looking toward the source and feeling the high-energy particles (protons) impinge on their eyeballs when everything lined up right.
Radium Girls. Louis Slotin (Los alamos). Thalidomide as a nausea drug for moms…
Aug 24, 2026, 6:50 PM
@mark
When I worked at JVC all the electronic engineers would keep one hand in a pocket at all times when poking around near the heart-stopping machine. You have to be nonchalant around the death technology. If you have both hands out near it, you look too eager to participate in all the Science that's happening, which you only get to do once.
Aug 24, 2026, 5:41 PM
Aug 24, 2026, 6:58 PM@hypolite Fairly hefty capacitors in there, if I remember correctly. Take a *long* time to lose their charge after the image-displaying-device is turned off. @petealexharris @mark
Aug 24, 2026, 6:49 PMdon't forget the lead
remember how heavy they were?
there were pounds of lead in each CRT
they were hard to break
but if you did break one:
lead dust
Aug 24, 2026, 5:16 PM@mark
They also contained a somewhat precious, if poisonous, metal that you could salvage, but you risked death by electrocution in the attempt.