1950s

Declassified footage of 1950s tests of Project Orion, the nuclear pulse propulsion concept, including the Hot Rod prototypes flown on conventional high explosives. It shows the pusher-plate idea working in small scale.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

The 1951 US civil defense film 'Duck and Cover', starring Bert the Turtle, which taught schoolchildren to drop and shield themselves during a nuclear attack. It was shown to millions of children and is preserved in the National Film Registry.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Tom Scott investigates the claim that the microwave was invented to heat hamsters, and interviews James Lovelock about freezing and microwave-thawing hamsters in the 1950s. It traces early magnetron uses beyond radar.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

Asianometry traces the 30-year rise and peak of Japan's semiconductor industry from the 1950s to the 1980s, covering how a postwar country gained competence in an emerging technology.

The classic 1950s recording of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing 'Sixteen Tons', a song about a coal miner trapped in company-store debt.

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.