Little jewels that have fallen into the dark past

There are some things I have purchased in the past that are just too cool for me to give or throw away - even though today's technology has rendered them useless (sigh). I came across one of them the other day when doing an inventory of cool-things-that-are-now-worthless in my top drawer. It seems that my top drawer is full of little items like that, and I hadn't gotten too deeply into it when I came across one of the last of the Sony Walkman(s). (Walkmen?)

This little jewel probably dates back to the mid nineties or so. I couldn't find any real information on it, but I suspect it was one of the last models to be introduced before digital music completely rendered it useless. The engineers at Sony must have been given the mandate to produce a Walkman cassette player that would be barely bigger than the tape cassette itself. After what must have cost those engineers a lot of late nights in the Sony development lab, they completely succeeded. The "Radio Cassette Player WM-F701C" that I pulled out of the depths of my top drawer is almost a miracle of miniaturization. I'd actually call it a miracle except that the MP3 players that came along a few years later were truly miraculous. They could pack every album I ever owned into something the size of half a graham cracker. That's what killed off the WM-F701C. It could only play those small audio cassettes one at a time. You still had to carry a pocket full of them with you on a trip.

In spite of that, the WM-F701C was and is a miniature wonder. Just take a look at the photograph below. Look at how beautifully they crammed all those rollers, guides and springs into that exceedingly small space. It's all the more remarkable when you consider that the vast majority of space inside the WM-F701C had to be reserved for the tape reels of the cassette. To my eyes, it's a piece of engineering beauty, and mine is in perfect shape. Just one very small dent on the back where I must have dropped it one day on my way to work.

As soon as I found it, I rushed out to my sun room where I keep my extensive collection of vinyl records to see if I could dig up a cassette. I found a good one, plugged in a fresh battery, and snapped in my cassette. The result -- nothing. For as beautiful a piece of engineering the WM-F701C is, it has one major weakness: all the moving parts are powered by a little belt, and the little belt had spent all those years in my top drawer slowly deteriorating.

I thought about trying to take it apart and searching for a belt on the Internet, but really. All my cassettes are available as digital files, and with my new smart phone containing nearly every song I would ever want to listen to, I don't even carry around a dedicated MP3 player any longer. So, the little WM-F701C has been relegated to a pile of other past electronic miracles that don't actually work either. There's a small (for its day) Kodak Instamatic camera, one of the very first transistor radios that is in unused condition and even contains a nice little schematic. But, I do take them down and look at them once in a while.

Casting the leather jacket in movies, working man or trouble?

There are two main leather jackets worn by actors in Hollywood movies - the military-issued, aviator style A2, and the motorcycle style Schott One-star. Like every piece of costuming, the leather jacket is chosen to help establish the actor's character. Each jacket and its variants has a parallel history. Let's look at the A2 first.

Manufactured for pilots during WWII, this jacket came to symbolize the adventurous, daredevil attitudes of the combat aviator. After the war, great quantities of this jacket were available as war surplus items for less than ten dollars each, so  millions were sold. It seemed to be the perfect leather jacket for the working man. It was rugged, comfortable, and in Hollywood movies it became a symbol for the blue-collar man of action.

The Schott has a history that's even considerably longer than the A2, but instead of being associated with the wild blue yonder, it became a necessary motorcycle accessory. It's been around as long as motorcycles, and like motorcycles in Hollywood films it can either represent the good or the bad.

The A2 seems to get cast whenever a director feels the need to express a little intensity for a particular character. He calls up to the costume department and asks for a "leather jacket" to be sent down. This request always seems to be interpreted as an A2. If he wants much more intensity, or even a downright "outlaw" vibe, he'll ask for a "motorcycle jacket." He still might get an A2, but if he understands the formula, he'll send it right back and demand an actual motorcycle jacket.

Here's the formula:

An A2 is a leather jacket, It equals solid working man or at the very least, man of action. Once in a while a female will wear one, but the jackets are usually too big make the woman look cute. A good example of the man of action is Bob Cummings in Hitchcock's immortal "Saboteur."

The Schott motorcycle jacket means either "outlaw" or "cop." It has a sinister vibe. Put one on a woman, and you add an element of sinister sexuality. Like it's hot and she can hardly wait for somebody to take it off her. It's a great prop, but there should be at least one motorcycle in the scene. Motorcycle jackets in a movie without motorcycles is just wrong. In so many ways.

Marlon Brando literally made the Schott a motorcycle icon with the movie, "The Wild One." In that famous scene of Brando sitting on his bike, holding his purloined trophy, the Schott seems to melt into the bike making the bike, Brando and the Schott one-star seem as one.

Here's where things can go wrong, or right depending on the director, and probably the actor. Schott motorcycle jackets are almost always used the right way in movies, but the A2 often fills the role of the anonymous "leather jacket."

Take the Fonz from the simpering "Happy Days" TV show. He's supposed to be tough. He rides a motorcycle. He actually did jump the shark. He wears a leather jacket. But it's an A2. Not a motorcycle jacket. He looks anything but tough. Put him in a Schott, and he might have actually been taken for tough in spite of the fact that he never got into a pool cue fight.

So, the Fonz was a bad choice. What was a good choice? I think the Ramons were an excellent choice - all wearing Schotts, all with the same last name, all tough and troubled just the way motorcycle jacket wearing people should be.

 Brando! Ride, baby, ride.

 Don't worry, folks. He's got his A2 on. The Nazis. That's who should worry.

 What was he always saying? Aaaaaaaaey. Never cool. Thumbs up, baby, but where is your super-cool motorcycle jacket? You think you look like a tough guy? You don't. You look like the carny who set up the Tilt-A-Wheel and is now heading for some "shave ice."

The Ramones. Super cool, troubled, disenfranchised. I'm sure there are four motorcycles somewhere nearby. I say four because they would rather walk than ride tandem.

Uncle Albert and his crazy ideas

I wish Albert was still alive. I just know we would have been best friends. We'd be hanging out, eating nachos, drinking a little Diet Coke (to keep our wits about us), and discussing some of uncle Al's (I'm sure I would be allowed to call him that) formulas.

The thing about uncle Al and his formulas is that they were a lot simpler than some of those other guys' formulas. You go back about a hundred years, and you see blackboards all over the US and Europe covered in completely indecipherable formulas. Scientists would look at them, stroke their beards (since most of the scientists back then didn't shave -- too many formulas to write) and vigorously shake their heads while mumbling something in German, Hungarian, or even Russian. Sometimes shouting would erupt and many times chalk and erasers would fly through the air pelting any nearby observers with little chalk dust clouds.

There were a lot of arguments back then. Mostly about the speed of light. Some of those formulas indicated that the speed of light was a constant. It never changed. Here's one that illustrates it: 
Even if you don't understand the difference between permittivity and permeability, I think you would agree that the formula clearly shows the speed of light as a constant in our universe. I can't speak for other universes because I haven't yet figured out a way to visit them, although some ardent followers of the now defunct Grateful Dead band assure me with vigorous head shakes that they have indeed visited more than one other universe. However, when visiting those other universes, they didn't take time to perform even the basic experiments to determine if the speed of light is a constant. Or not.

So, along comes my BFF, Al. He says to all the other scientists that, yes, the speed of light is constant, and that we can begin using it in all our formulas. It seems that scientists love nothing better than shoving these constants into formulas. Because they never change. They're constant. And there are a lot of them, too.

Outside of the speed of light, pi is one of the favorites. It's a weird one, though, because you can never get it to stop giving you digits. Most people just resolve it out to 3.14159265359 and just give up. That means that no formula using pi will ever be completely 

accurate. Well, who cares. That's close enough, right? 

Al would just shrug his shoulders and say, "Ja, ja. Es ist glose enoughs." Then he'd light his pipe, 

blow out a cloud of smoke and stare at his chalk board. While stroking his hairless chin. Al didn't go in

for beards.

Al liked to simplify complex formulas. Take the one he is showing me in the photo above. "R = 0."

He looks pretty excited about, too. I didn't know that R equals 0. Did you? Did anybody? No. 

Nobody did until uncle Al drew it up there on his chalk board.

So right about that time I would ask Al about c, the constant speed of light. Al would shake 

his head, erase the R = 0 and scribble out e=mc2. He would turn to me and say, "zo, zat ees der 

speed limits vor ze whole universes. You can't go any vaster zan dat." Zee, der vormulas clearly

 shows dat time vould slowing down, und your mass would grow to take up ze whole universes."

That Al. He had some trippy ideas. Sometimes I wonder what he was smoking.