Join us on Sunday morning, March 20 for a historic group reading — on a train crossing the Tay Bridge, perhaps the first time this has ever been accomplished — of William Topaz McGonagall’s most famous bad poem, The Tay Bridge Disaster, Here are the poem’s stirring opening lines: “Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry […]
Tag: train
From satire to proposal in 120 years
Ptak Science Books found an apparently serious engineering proposal that echoes a satire done more than 100 years earlier: John B. Prather launched an idea in 1945 for building a high-speed pneumatic passenger/freight train connecting New York City to Philadelphia. [It’s described in his] New York-Philadelphia Vacuum Tunnel, Preliminary Design Features and Economic Analysis… One […]
London to Edinburgh in 5 minutes
The journey between London and Edinburgh would be much quicker had the London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company been allowed and able to build a breathtaking new piece of technology, back when land was cheap and all things seemed possible. The 29 January, 1825 issue of The Mechanics Register presents the scheme in detail: “The […]
Curing shyness for dogs (2): Gunfire
In this second episode in our deniably-popular Curing Shyness in Dogs series, to entertain you and your dog, and perhaps cure one or both of you of various ailments, we examine, distantly, this Master’s Voice Productions-produced set of CDs. This entertainment and/or cure is, the manufacturer says, “the result of two years of studies, planning […]