Berlin is a curious place, a city with an extraordinary amount of layered textures. This is most obvious in the bars and streets, where you see old, peeling walls and graffiti alongside organic produce and gleaming coffee machines. It is also seen in the city’s tech, most interesting of which is left over from previous ages. Here’s a quick zip through some of the things I saw recently on yet another trip to the city. And we know that Berlin has an East and a West. These pictures are from the East.
The Hot Mangle
If this were purely about the retro, we might have picked the eye-tearing color scheme. As this is a gadget blog, we’re looking at that huge, industrial Heissmangel, something that would look more at home rolling through a field and harvesting wheat.
The name of the hot mangle is somewhat confusing when translated into English — it appears to be more of a rolling iron than a real, water-squeezing mangle. However, it looks like great fun, and the instructions don’t even warn against wearing a necktie while operating it:
Bondi Blue Macs
Many bars still seem to be running their music software from ageing Macs. Ironically, many of these bares also have big plasma screens dedicated to showing looped footage of a cosy fireplace — tacky in the extreme but also somehow comforing under Berlin’s Tupperware skies (they’re like solid gray lids hanging above you).
Here we have two fine example. First, the original iBook:
This was spotted in a Prenzlauerberg café which seems to be unchanged since the days before the Wall fell. The screen went to sleep just before the photo, but the machine is running OS 9 quite happily. We’re not sure if those cassette tapes are ever actually used, or if they are there just to make the Mac feel at home, but they’re a great touch. Photo by John Brownlee.
Here we have another Bondi Blue Mac, this time an iMac. It’s hard to tell which OS it is running from the picture — that beach screensaver is still bundled with Macs today, but I’d be surprised if it was OS X. We would have checked with the owner, but at this stage we were already a little drunk.
The Hurricane
This one is slightly outside of the target area — the Hurricane dryer was found in Geneva — but as I got the mail whilst still in Berlin it counts. It is also the best clothes dryer ever, as it is called the Hurricane. The device is best described by the mail I got from the dicoverer and photographer, Travis Tarr:
Guys, check out this awesome contribution to clothes laundering technology that’s in the basement of the place I’m staying in the Carouge suburb of Geneva…
The HURRICANE Dryer! By Tachsel. Pics attached. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that all Geneva basements were made to double as Cold War radiation shelters.
The Hurricane looks to be a cabinet into which is pumped hot air. My mother used to have something similar, a freestanding English version which loaded from the top and made the electricity meter spin like hip-hop DJ. Hers however, was not called a Hurricane, and was therefore rather dull.
Bonus: Fridge
Last, and most certainly least, is this old refrigerator, tucked away in a bar on a bleak Berlin corner. Made by Bosch, it has the stylings of a 1950s US model, complete with dangerous, child-trapping trigger lock handle (I’m not kidding — there were actually public service ads in England in the 1970s warning kids against climbing inside these). This fridge could, of course, be a completely modern model with retro styling but, given the surroundings, we doubt it.
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