Hasta La Gadget!

It may be hard to believe as you read Wired on your iPad, but heating oil and metal plumbing pipes were hot tech topics just 100 years ago.

They were businesses, too, on which inventors pinned their hopes and corporations placed their bets in the form of factories, salesmen, and marketing budgets.

For a peek inside 100 years of cutting-edge inventions, take a look at this gallery of 20th-century advertisements. They show how products that we take for granted today, like bicycles, electric trains and radios, were once strange and wonderful enough that they needed bold, artistic introductions.

The posters, from an upcoming exhibition by the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association, show a century of massive change in technology, from plumbing to iPods. They also provide a glimpse of changing design trends: Bare-breasted beauties gave way to stark abstractions, which were succeeded by eye-catching color photos, which were replaced with primary-color silhouettes.

For more images and background, see the online  exhibit, titled “Innovations in Technology: From the Turn of the Century to Today.”

Images courtesy IVPDA.

This curious plug-ejecting power-socket has just won first prize in the The Future Perfect Company design competition. The brief: Come up with “attractive and aspirational” designs that help people carry on as normal when they get older.

For most of the world, pulling out a plug is as simple as yanking a cord. Arthritis? Wrap the cord around your wrist before you pull. In England – where the fear of electrocution is only matched by the fear of the gangs of teenagers that roam the streets like marauding post-apocalyptic biker-gangs (only without the bikes) – things are more complex. Switches, interlocks and a three-pronged design with a side-exiting cable mean you need some strong fingers to unplug a plug.

Glenn Crombie’s winning design has an eject button. Press it and three prongs push the plug out and let it drop gently to the thick carpets that cover the floors of Britain. Never mind that frail fingers will have to press hard on a thin rod to make it work, or that when the plug is not in place there are three prongs sticking out to catch on skirts, slacks or any furniture you may wish to place in front of the sockets.

I guess the best thing to do would be to change UK plugs, but that’s about as likely as the country ditching the pound for the Euro, driving on the right or finally admitting that it is no longer in charge of a world-spanning empire.

Innovative push-out plug socket wins student design competition [The Future Perfect Company via Core77]

See Also:

• Revolutionary British Power-Plug Can be Yanked by its Cable …
• Mysterious Spinning Power Outlet Accepts Any International Plug …
• Fold-Flat Concept Fixes Bulky British Power Plug
• Power-Plug Concept Fails to Out-Coddle UK Version
• Gallery Of The World's Power Sockets

Warning: Do not watch this video if you lay awake at night, kept from sleep by the terrifying knowledge that one day soon the human race will be thrown into slavery by The Machines. For the more naïve amongst us, here’s the clip:

Oh, I forgot to say that if you don’t like to see a finger being locked in a vice and then whacked with a metal bar, you probably shouldn’t watch, either. Sorry.

The robot hand you see is German made, by researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. In building the first part of the Terminator, the researchers were going for robustness, and they appear to have achieved quite chilling success.

Not that utility has been traded for toughness: As the video shows, the hand is capable of an astonishing range of movement. The fingers are controlled by 38 tendons, each of which is driven by its own motor inside the forearm. Two tendons serve each joint. When their motors turn the same way, the joint moves. When they turn in opposite directions, the joint stiffens. This lets it toughen up to catch balls, yet be loose enough to perform delicate operations.

During tests, the researchers went all Joe Pesci on their robot creation, and took a baseball bat to the arm — a 66G whack. The result? Nothing. The hand came away unscathed.

Not only can the hand take punishment, it can also deal it out, exerting up to 30 Newtons of pressure with its fingers, plenty for either a stimulating massage or a deadly choking grip. It is also fast. The joints can spin at 500-degrees per second. If it tenses the springs joined to the tendons first, and then releases that energy, the joints can reach a head-spinning 2,000-degrees per second, or 333 rpm. That’s fast enough for it to snap its fingers and summon a human slave to do its bidding.

It doesn’t stop there. The head of the hand team, Markus Grebenstein (don’t you just wish it was Grabenstein?), says that the plan is to build a torso with two arms. His excuse? According to an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Grebenstein says that “The problem is, you can’t learn without experimenting.”

Yes you can, Mr. Grebenstein. Just watch Terminator 2.

Building a Super Robust Robot Hand [IEEE Spectrum]

See Also:

• Robot Hands Get a Grip on the Future
• Video: Fingerless Robotic Hand Can Pick Anything
• Getting a Grip: Building the Ultimate Robotic Hand
• Car-Crushing Robot Hand Could End Up Back in Scrap Heap
• A Low-Tech Robot Hand
• Robotic Hand Handles Eggs, Runs On Compressed Air
• Super Realistic Bionic Hand

A packing box with a built-in box-cutter. What could possibly go wrong?

What about being refused passage aboard just about anything? Or the fact that you’re sending a dangerous weapon through the mail? Or the environmental issues of adding a shard of steel to each and every box, ready to be tossed away by recipients with and without their own box-cutter? I could go on.

In fact, I will.

What about the hole in the top of the box which lets you grab and rip out the tool, but also lets packing peanuts out and dust and and water in? Or the fact that a few routing bashes in normal transit will – inevitably – cause a naked blade to peek out of its cardboard nest and slice off the postman’s finger?

I receive more than my fair share of parcels in the mail in the course of my awesome job, and I use the tool that God meant us to use for opening up taped-shut cardboard boxes: the biggest, sharpest key on my keychain.

Look Before You Leap, Think Before You Design! [Yanko]

See Also:

• Cardboard Chair is Both Package and Product
• Amp Cranks Cardboard Boxes Up to 11
• Credit Card Cutlery: Ordinary Cutlery, Without the Cut

3D printing used to mean intricately-shaped chunks of plastic or resin, but the range of materials available to churn out one-off designs has grown, through glass and stainless steel to – now – titanium.

The service only comes from I.Materialize right now and is done using a process called Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). The machine lays down a layer of titanium powder and a high-powered laser sinters it into a solid later. Sintering is the process of turning powder into solid using heat, but without liquefaction.

This is repeated layer after layer until the object is ready, just like the 2 x 2-cm ball you see above, looking like something between a golfball and a microphone you might see in front of a blues singer.

Pricing depends on size, and the volume of titanium used. A 2 x 2 x 4-cm part, using one cubic centimeter of titanium, would cost you €93, or $125. Make something the same size, but with four cubic centimeters of titanium and the price goes up to just €144, or $194.

This is pretty cool, and I’m saving up to build my first titanium terminator (my previous prototype was fashioned from human bones and old printer-motors, which draws uncomfortable questions when I test it outside). You, mortal, can peruse the I.Materialize blog, where you can find pictures of what everybody else will be making: sentimental trinkets.

i.materialise launches DMLS: You can now 3d print in Titanium [I.Materialize. Thanks, Joris!]

See Also:

• Rebuilding Bones Stronger and Faster with Titanium Foam
• Custom iPhone Back Hewn From Solid Titanium
• 3D Printing, Now in Stainless Steel – Wired.com
• 3D Printing, Now in Glass
• 3D Printer Feeds On Paper and Glue