Thursday mishmash.

So as we round the turn with History Television's Hitler fest they have Servants of Evil: The Waffen SS on at 8pm. After that we get Exploring Hitler's Mountain at 9. He had a whole mountain? "Hitler spends more than 1,000 days on the Obersalzberg, at his comfortable mountain holiday refuge near Berchtesgaden." And for those who follow MIT, stay up till 2am for Mummy Forensics: Misfit. Jeez.

At 1am you can catch the 1953 version of Titanic on AMC. Not that how but a fair yarn.

Here's one dear to me, s TV show about beer. History Channel has The Works series do a piece on the amber liquid. The rest of their shows tonight kind of drift off the history meter.

But if you fancy a hay burner, TCM has a whack of them on all night. Pretty good choice to. Some Lee Marvins in there. Not bad.

Mid week madness

For fans of the truly amazing check out Mayday: Gimli Glider. "Two engines on a brand new jet fail, forcing the pilot to land on a runway he believes is abandoned." Not only did the pilot land this passenger jet completely unpowered, he glided for miles, the old airport he landed at actually had some kids riding bicycles on it when they landed. It's on Discovery Channel at 11pm.

Hurry and catch The Gene Krupa Story at 9pm on TCM. From 1959 and stars Sal Mineo.

Also at 9 is Exploring Hitler's Berlin on History Television. I told you it was madness. Then get another fix at midnight with Exploring Hitler's Munich.

At 1am go to CBC to find The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade classic.

I had a look at what the History Channel has on and it's about hairy monsters and UFO's. Not mega sized but goofy enough to give them a miss.

All told, not a bad Wednesday.

Tuesday tuneup

It's Hitler time again at History Television! At 8 they have The Color of War: Adolf Hitler. At 9 sink your teeth into Hitler and the Occult. And all the way at 2am this might be an OK show: Mummy Forensics: The Pierced Skull. "The Mummy Investigation Team investigates the body of a South American mummy with a number of visible wounds and a large hole in its skull." The Mummy Investigation Team? MIT?

The History Channel meanwhile, doesn't disappoint. It's a really big night over there. Enjoy Jurassic Fight Club: Cannibal Fight Club at 9pm. Who names these shows? At 10 check out Evolve: Eyes. And they can't get away with a night without a mega show. Here it is: Mega Disasters: Noah's Great Flood.

Yawn.

Just a short post on this little item. It's 1881 and if your in Atlanta Georgia the International Cotton Exposition is the place to be. Sixty fun filled days. Yes, that's right, 2 solid months of the delights of cotton.

The exhibition was, by any account, a huge success. There were over 1100 exhibitors including 7 foreign entries.

Guess without TV and the Internet you gotta do something.

FrIdAy fReAk OuT.

Behind the mask. Discovery Channel has The Sphinx Unmasked at 7pm. "The architectural work's origin and identity remain a mystery. " Guess they didn't actually unmask it then.

At 8pm History Television gets freaky with Lost Worlds: The Real Dracula. No Sears vampires here. At 1am they have Dogfights: MiG Alley.

And at 11pm on the History Channel you can catch Battle 360: D-Day in the Pacific. It's like Dogfights but with boats. Worth it.

Calling me a wiseguy?

Thursday looks kinda quiet. Bloody Christmas: Ortona at 9pm on History Television. And later before it repeats, just plain Bloody Italy at midnight. On the other side at 2am there's Digging for the Truth: Pompeii Secrets Revealed.

A&E has a one hour doc on Genghis Khan at 1am. A stretch to stay up for that.

The History Channel has Modern Marvels: Mad Electricity at 8pm. Then at 10pm catch the Works: Power Tools.

TCM has an evening of hard boiled FBI flicks starring handsome mugs like James Cagney and Broderick Crawford. Lots of wiseguys.

No elephants here.

Slooow start tonight, in fact the first reasonable show is on at midnight: Rome The Ram Has Touched the Wall, from the good folks at History television. At 2am they have Digging for the Truth: The Holy Grail.

I'm done, except I couldn't pass this up for those fans of crap like this. TCM has The Man From Planet X, described as "An alien asks earthlings for help and gets blasted by bazookas." I don't know whats funnier or less imaginative.

See ya tomorrow. Special edition time. First one ever. Seems some FOI requests have opened up the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg file.

Doink doink doink. Wake up.

Looks like a change of hosts for this show, but it still holds up. At 8pm, Digging for the Truth
God's Gold, Part 2 on History Television. And at 9 they have Secrets of the First Emperor. This si what they say" Qin Shi Huangdi of China is a great yet controversial ruler." Wordy.

PBS is in on the mega thing with Nova: Mystery of the Megaflood. "Thousand-foot-deep floodwaters scoured vast areas of the American northwest near the end of the last ice age." Now we know.

History Channel finally has a show or two that has something to do with history. At 9 they have Ancient Discoveries 11: Seige of Troy. The rest of the evening they devote to noxious fumes.

And in case this floats your boat, TCM has an evening of Rosalind Russel movies again.

Walk tall.

Tip of the hat to my wife for this gem. Seems the British (masters of cast iron bridges and rubber trains) have been busy building mechanical elephants. Seems the 50's were their hey day with them roaming the beaches of a Saturday.

Frank Stuart built a pretty famous one and gave rides for the children. The thing is truly amazing with a fairly reasonable approximation of an elephant gait and the size, colour and proportions are bang on.

Why oh why would someone do this?

Check out this link for a cool newsreel and more links.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/mechanical_elephants/#When:15:05:00Z

Monday tonic.

In case you missed it, PBS is running Folye's War, series 5 every Sunday night at 9pm. Think there's one or two episodes left.

Hey hey, it's Dogfights: Tuskegee Airmen on History Television at 8.

Must watch TV at 10pm on TCM with Apocalypse Now. And after that catch The Bridge at Remagen at 12:45 am. It boasts Ben Gazzara AND Robert Vaughn.

PBS at 11pm- Churchill: The Lion's Roar. How WWII was his finest hour.

Alas the History Channel has a bunch of shows about the Batman.

It will make you feel a little woozy.

In my research into world's fairs my journey took me to some surprising places. There were those worrisome electrical "medical" devices, but this takes the cake. It's so out there it's beyond odd.

Short aside time: I actually worked in the old Eatons in Montreal where a device very similar to the one below was used.

So here we go. Sometimes around the beginning of the 1800's a British inventor, George Medhurst, came up with the idea to send letters and packages through pneumatic tubes. Shortly after that he expanded his idea to include people in what can only be described as a container pushed through a huge rubber tube by air pressure, essentially the same damn thing as the smaller packets.

Skip ahead 20 odd years and we find another British inventor, John Vallance, toying with the same idea. What are the odds about this going on anyways? Two British guys messing with huge black rubber tubes? Vallance actually built a full sized version, some 8 feet in diameter and running for 150 feet. Cooler heads prevailed and no one was forced to ride INSIDE the thing. In fact Medhurst pretty much knew for sure that it would be a crappy customer service experience and said so early on.

In 1827 he proposed a much more comfortable alternative with his "atmospheric railway". He kept the tube small and ran it along a standard rail line, using the air pressure to pull the train along the track.

All told, 4 atmospheric railways were built in England, France and Ireland. The latter two just used air power to pull the train up a hill, it was on it's own going down. The most successful of these railways, the London and Croydon Railway ran over 7 miles. The darn thing propelled a train to 70 miles an hour in 1845! That's moving by any standard. A small tube was layed between the rails with a slit in the top for a hook to protrude from. It was sealed with rubber and leather flaps to keep the pressure up. A piston in the tube was pushed by the air pressure. The railway folded in 1847.

Another railway, the South Devon Railway ran for about 15 miles and was seriously considered for a total run of over 50 miles. The railway's chief engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel thought this was the way to go. Because of the hilly terrain a larger tube was used and this system pushed trains along at 60 mph.

Other British inventors kept at the shooting a person through a tube idea. The Electric and International Telegraph Company, in 1853 used the idea to propel cartridges with paper messages in them, mainly telegrams, from the receiving telegraph office to their customer's desk. This was exactly what was used when I worked at Eaton's. In 1860, Josiah Latimer Clark, inventor of the above device joined up with Thomas Webster Rammell to form the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company and came up with a 30 inch tube into which a lozenge shaped craft was inserted and squirted through to it's destination.

Intended to carry cargo only this gizmo was demonstrated in 1861 at Battersea. A larger 4 foot diameter one came out shortly after and then an almost locomotive sized one was shown at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1864 and could carry people. Hmmm. Basically the huge tube 8x9 feet had a rail type car inserted into it that had a flared skirt of bristles to keep the pressure in, kind of like a spitball in a pen shaft.

Thorough Thursday.

Once again let's stretch the boundaries of what constitutes a genuine "history" TV show and what masquerades as one, with History television's continuation of it's UFO week. Tonight, starting at 8pm we have UFO Files Hangar 18: UFO Warehouse and UFOs and the Cold War afterwards. Somewhere around 2 in the morning they stray off course and have Timewatch: Mystery of the Headless Romans on. "The discovery of 30 decapitated Romans in York kicks off an intense archaeological investigation."

PBS has a more down to earth offering with Nova: Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice at 9. And at 10pm catch a repeat of last Sunday's Mystery with the new Foyle's War, series V. An excellent, though fictional, murder mystery series set in WWII England. Don't miss a single episode.

Wednesday wonder.

Seems that History Television has UFO stuff on all week. Some of it's pretty neat. At 8pm they have UFO Files: Black Box UFO Secrets. "Black-box recordings from commercial airline flights; astronaut reports." And right after at 9 it's Conspiracy?Area 51. "Since the late 1950s, an array of UFO sightings has been reported in the skies above Area 51, north of Las Vegas." Bet they have black box recordings of it too. And if you can stay up at 2am they take a sharp right hand turn with Gladiator Graveyard.

And in the same vein, AMC has the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. I know I'm stretching it but just listen to the description: Klaatu and his guardian robot, Gort, come from afar to warn Earth about nuclear war.

And if you really feel like it, TCM has a whole night full of Red Skelton. My lord.

Fair game.

The American Institute Fair, started in New York in 1829 was America's first fair and tried to do what all the fairs of the time were doing. "At these fairs were displayed the finest products of agriculture and manufacturing, the newest types of machinery, the most recent contributions of inventive genius . . ." All kinds of doo dads from the best minds of the day. Organized by the American Institute and run pretty much regularly till the turn of the century, the 1829 fair was the first fair on American soil that could be called a world's fair.

Since it was run annually, the attendance wasn't at the levels of European fairs, but drew spectators who came each year to see what was new. Kind of like the the latest cars at the auto shows.

Reading some NY Times articles from the 1880's gives a hint at what the audience could expect.

Electricity was the big thing then and companies vied for eyeballs. One company demonstrated (just how I don't want to know) a "splendid exhibit of electro-medical devices." Sweet Jesus. It gets worse. They apparently had an apparatus for "galvano-cautery" too.

Another company offering wares in the same field had a machine called a water rheostat described as a "marvel of cheapness and efficiency."

And to make you feel all warm inside we have a company offering electric burglar alarms. The description I found of them sounds pretty damned sophisticated, even for now, with keyed entry, on/off for different zones, and timers to set for when you are away. They also made remote gas lighting and extinguishing devises.

Wonder if they made any gas sensing devices.

Robot roll call for a Monday.

It's good enough to be history itself. Catch North by Northwest at 8pm on TCM.

At 9 on PBS you'll find History Detectives: Japanese Balloon Bomb; Society Circus Program; Camp David Letter. "Scrap could be evidence of the Japanese balloon bomb; Cobina Wright's Society Circus; memorabilia reveals the beginning of Camp David." Then at 11pm they have Churchill: Destiny. "Winston Churchill's early life; his aristocratic birth; his rise and fall in politics." I'm a sucker for anything Churchillian.

And to round off a quiet Monday have a look at the History Channel at 9pm for Ancient Ink, a look at the history of tattoos.

Back with more bot worthy TV tomorrow.

Friday frolic.

An explosive start to historical TV tonight with Lost Worlds: Secret Cities of the A-Bomb. *pm on History Television. "The secret world of the Manhattan Project." Hey it's Friday so you can stay up late for Secrets of the Dead: Voyage of the Courtesans. "Female convicts set up a lucrative business, offering themselves to sailors on a ship sailing from London to Australia in 1789." Is that legal?

Discovery Channel has Doomed Sisters of the Titanic at 11pm. Interesting little show about the Olympic and Brittanic.

The History Channel finishes up Friday night on a pretty good note with Modern Marvels: Diamond Mines at 8pm, then jump over a couple of hours till we get to Battle 360: The Grey Ghost. The USS Enterprise story, at 11pm.

More TV goodies in 24.

Small, but mighty.

I'm going to skip over a few fairs (all French, my they love a good fair) and jump to the early 1800's when not one, nor two but three fairs were held in Paris. Dubbed the THE NAPOLEONIC EXPOSITIONS, they were held in 1801, 02 and 06 respectively. They actually fell on the heals of the industrial fair of 1798 and quite honestly all four of them could be lumped together. France had been eyeing England's fairs and were concerned that they were in England's shadow when it came to industrialization and modernization.

So here we find Napoleon doing a jolly good job of kicking butt and France feeling pretty cocky and what better way to strut your stuff then have a national exposition.

What is truly amazing about these fairs is that they included a little of what you would expect like manufacturing processes and art and more than a good dose of other stuff. Furniture, clock and watchmaking, agriculture were all represented.

On the dull practical side, but none the less amazing, we have Joseph Jacquard and his loom, winner of a bronze medal at the exposition. The fame it brought Jacquard was not all positive. His life was threatened by mill workers thrown out of work as a result of his labour saving, speedy device. The government stepped in and saved his hide. Their vigorous endorsement gave skeptics a chance to see how much more fabric could be produced and in patterns hitherto unattainable.

France's dominance as a producer of quality textiles was a theme revisited in subsequent expositions. Signs of equality were everywhere. There were displays of cloth woven by blind weavers and a special section devoted to cloth spun by convicts.

Thursdays shows.

There is hope after all. History Television has Clash of Warriors: Manstein vs. Vatutin at 8pm. "German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and Russian Gen. Nikolai Vatutin fight the Battle of Kursk." And things keep rolling with Battlefield Detectives: Stalingrad right after at 9.

PBS fans can catch Nova: Pocahontas Revealed, on also at 9. "Archaeologists discover Chief Powhatan's capital, revealing more of the American Indian aspects of the Jamestown story."

The History Channel has a kick at the can too at 11 with Investigating History: Mountain Massacre. Check out this link http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=322706 for info on this unusual story.

There you have it. Nearly 80% more stuff than last night.

Mid week marvels.

Whoa, I felt a little guilty starting so late tonight, but for the love of christ there's barely nothing on. So far all I could find is Rome: Stealing From Saturn at midnight on History television.

This is the weakest night yet. Shameful.

Dial dalliance.

Monday was a big night, it's gonna be hard to top. So lets start with History Television's 8 pm offering: Digging for the Truth God's Gold, Part 1. "When Romans looted Jerusalem's Temple nearly 2,000 years ago, priceless golden artifacts became lost." Then there's not much till 1am when Finding the Fallen Serre 1915: Brothers in Death is on and then right after you'll find Lost Worlds: Palenque.

AMC has Geronimo: An American Legend on at 8 too.

TCM has one you don't see very often, Sister Kenny. It's at 10:30. "Australian Elizabeth Kenny graduates from nursing school and becomes famous for her treatment of polio." Part of the Rosalind Russell bash they're having tonight.

The History Channel has a few goodies too starting at 8 with The Universe: Alien Galaxies, followed by Ancient Discoveries: 12 Machines of the Gods at 9 then, get ready for it, 2 back to back Mega Disasters, but only one of them meets my high standards of history content. It's the warm and fuzzy Deadly Jet Collision.

Not so bad for mid week.

Expo-nential.

First thing you gotta know about worlds fairs is that they have a governing body. An official entity that covers the whole fair/exposition thing. Not surprisingly it's called the Bureau of International Expositions. One may have expected an office but a bureau is nice. Classy. They were founded in 1928, which is surprising since fairs have been a part of the human landscape for centuries. Thanks God they organized when they did.

OK, to get the ball rolling let us journey to England, the year is 1760 to an event called the First Exhibition. Though not a "worlds" fair it was nevertheless real big for the time, and in fairs that's what counts.

Sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts it featured a series of exhibitions showcasing not so much the artistic abilities of the crafts people but their manufacturing and commercializing ability. Examples of tapestry, carpets and porcelain competed for prizes.

The following year there was an exhibition of agricultural methods and machinery. Bet it was hard to get a ticket for that. The RSA got into a whole lot more exhibitions over the next 100 years or so. More on that in another post.

And, just so you know, the Royal Society instituted a tree planting program in the 1750's (50 million trees planted) to offset the deforestation by Britain's shipbuilding industry. Them's a lot of boats.

Monday dial dance.

Getting a late start tonight but its worth it. At 8pm History Television has Dogfights: P-51 Mustang. Nice. After that it's Thirteen Days at 9pm. The Kevin Costner Cuban missile crisis opus.

PBS has another episode of this sometimes good series, History Detectives: Red Hand Flag; Seth Eastman Painting; Isleton Tong. "A flag that may have been carried into battle by a black infantry regiment during World War I; painting may have been done by military officer Seth Eastman." Right after that at 10 is The War of the World: The Clash of Empires. "Economic volatility, ethnic conflict and empires in crisis led to the rise of brutal regimes in Germany, Japan and Russia." Heavy. But a good double score for PBS.

The History Channel has another in the series Cities of the Underworld with episode 9: Freemason Underground. Secret handshakes and all.

And if this is too taxing for you check out TCM. They have fluffy Paris movies from the 50's on all evening.

Rare but not unheard of Sunday night version.

If you're up for it TCM has The Count of Monte Cristo at 7pm. Real early version from 1934. Then at 11pm they have an interesting little movie about a often overlooked conflict: The Battle of Algiers. And if you want more quality check out Mrs. Miniver at 1:15 am. "William Wyler's Oscar-winning classic about the tensions faced by a family of hard-working Brits in war-torn England." Great little flick.

Catch the last half of Metropolis: Alexandria on History Television (started at 6, sorry). Then at 8, tune in for Crusaders' Lost Fort. Not much to go on other that the their vivid in depth description "Historians try to solve the mystery behind the destruction of an ancient fort." Right after that at 9 it's big movie time with Kingdom of Heaven. "During the Crusades, a young blacksmith rises to knighthood and protects Jerusalem from invading forces." Stars Orlando Bloom and Jeremy Irons. Huge.

Start of a new eek tomorrow and a new obsession. See you then.

Friday night shows.

Hey hey, I'm back at it. Time off was great, but now it's time to get at the serious stuff. TV isn't fun you know.

For fans of French comics check out Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatre at 7PM on CBC French. Yeah it's in French but it is a joyous and faithful rendition of the popular historical comic. Stars Gerard Despardieux.

At 8pm on TCM they have 1776. A so so version of you know what.

At 11pm the Discovery Channel has The Pharaoh's Lost City.

And at 12 History Television has Lost Worlds: Athens-Ancient Supercity. Note the lack of mega here. At 1am they have Dogfights: Long Odds, at 2am they have another episode of Lost Worlds: Knights Templar.

And to round off the evening the History Channel has 3 Ganglands in a row starting at 8pm. Lucky us.

Tomorrow I'm back with a brand new obsession: world's fairs.