This morning I was googling GE Adventure, just to see where we sat in the results and I randomly stumbled on some full scans of old GE comics which I promptly grabbed and uploaded to our Flickr account.
In case you’re up for it I’ve uploaded Inside the Atom, Adventures in Jet Power, Adventures in Electricity (7) and Adventure into the Past. I especially liked the explanation of how a turbine works Adventures in Jet Power.
There is a really amazing profile in last weeks New Yorker about a neuroscientist named Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (unfortunately the full text of the article is only available to subscribers). One of the things that struck me about the piece is how Ramachandran described why he found science so fascinating:
In his early teens, Ramachandran began conducting experiments in chemistry and biology in a makeshift laboratory under the staircase in the family’s house in Bangkok, where his father was stationed. He also read books on the history of science and was struck by the role of intuition and play in many important discoveries: Galileo adapting a child’s spyglass and discovering the moons of Jupiter, which led him to challenge the geocentric model of the universe; Faraday tinkering with a magnet and coil and discovering electromagnetism. Rahamchandran often recounts these anecdotes to his students. “These stories are inspirational and fun,” he told me. “But they’re also telling you about how to do science.”
I’ve been telling everyone I see to read this article since I finished it a few days ago and have been thinking non-stop (I wrote a a little more about it and him at my personal blog). It struck me over the weekend that part of our big goal of making science cool needs to be to bring back the kind of magic Ramachandran describes. While experimentation and data is a huge aspect, intuition and curiosity can play an equally large role.
I was reading Metafilter this morning and came across this post about Playboy’s archive (a bunch of issues from the last however many years that you can browse in full). Anyway, something the poster wrote really struck me: “but hey, the advertisements alone are incredible.” Looking back on old ads is a pretty amazing thing as they almost perfectly capture the style, culture and consciousness of whatever time period they were made.
For a company as old as GE, I’m sure the ads are a goldmine (we saw a bunch at the Schenchdaty Museum). Take this one:
The caption explains, “Edison launched major campaigns to attract ‘admirers’ to his lamps and even today the bulb is often associated with the contemplation of new ideas.” How crazy is it to think that not only did the company at one point need to convince people that light bulbs were a good idea (another old sign in the museum explained, “The use of electricty for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.”), but they also actively courted the association between the lightbulb and ideas.
Or take this ad, for GE refrigerators:
The first paragraph explains, “Really, you can’t blame her. Who wouldn’t drag her friends out into the kitchen to show off her new General Electric? There it stands, gleaming white, strong as a safe, incredibly quiet … the envy of all who see it.” It’s amazing to me, as someone that has never lived without a fridge, that at one point you had to sell people on the idea, not the brand.
All of this is a kind of long-winded way of getting at an idea: A giant database of GE ads for us all to peruse. With a good interface and some nice search engine, it would probably make for a great little history lesson.
Early in World War II, James Wright was working in General Electric’s New Haven, Connecticut labs, under a government contract to create an inexpensive substitute for synthetic rubber. One day in 1943, Wright happened to drop boric acid into silicone oil, and was astonished to find that the resultant goo would stretch and bounce further than rubber, even at extreme temperatures. In addition, the substance would copy any newspaper or comic-book print that it touched.
A guy named Peter Hodgson then bought the rights to manufacturer it and made a nice chunk of change selling little eggs full of it to kids so they could do fun stuff like make bouncy balls and pick up newsprint. Who knew?
[Photo courtesy of Analytik. Used underCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.]
Noah and I went to the Schenectady Museum today, which is technically an area museum, but since 75% of the interesting science in Schenectady is General Electric, they pretty much own the museum. We saw a few rad things, including Edison’s final patent, and a very odd tinfoil spool recording, but the coolest thing is a poster set we found.
Apparently done in a series of over 100 each, these are posters are pretty amazing. They were meant for schools and classrooms, to get kids excited about science.
The most interesting thing about this from a marketing standpoint is that it breaks down all the complicated stuff GE is doing into bite-sized thematic posters, and then has a sensationalist headline.
HEY YOU CAN TOTALLY DO THIS NOW
So what I’m thinking is we could do some experiments with what the imagery would translate into with a more modern style of illustration, add some animation, and make them kind of one-trick interactive – like you could do a feature demo or something really cool, like a one hit minigame.
UPDATE: I have been thinking about it for a few days, and went to a comic store, and bought a ton of books that have inspirational artists that feel like PROGRESS. I have some friends in the industry too. Maybe the thing is we commission a variety of modern artists to do limited posters, and we make them animated/interactive. Obv the internet is for making things accessible not limited, so what makes them special ? I think probably a special kind of immersiveness.
