Random Flukes

From time to time, in our day-in/day-out lives, stuff happens, that, at first glance, seem spooky or mysterious. Most often they turn out to be due to quite explainable phenomena. One of these events happened to me this week.

My 92 year old mother-in-law was being readied for heart bypass surgery. They would not permit her to wear her wedding ring in the operating room so she gave it to my wife for safekeeping. A few days later my wife cannot find it. It has been an anxious week and this upped the tension level.

She seemed to recall putting the ring in her coin purse but she could not find it there. Frazzled, she dumped the purse on the kitchen table and searched everything but found no ring. She remembered throwing out some tissues so all the trash was searched. Still no ring.

Being a retired engineer, I have been known to be “overly thorough”. I have actually been called anal-retentive at times. Sometimes this trait comes in handy.

I decided to carefully look through the coin purse. The photo shows what I saw. Can you see the ring?

[ Click coins to embigenate ]

The other examples of these everyday mysteries that I can recall are more technical.

One day many years ago while walking to my car after work, I heard a strange sound coming from the engine area of my friend’s car. I noticed a pile of shredded rubber under the front of the engine. It turned out that some unknown electrical fault caused the DC generator (this was before the days when alternators were used) to become a DC motor. The turning generator drive pulley shredded the rubber drive belt.

This last example may be hard to visualize but let’s give it a go.

I once owned a car in which I had added an air conditioner. In other words, it did not come with “factory air”. Such add-ons do not get the testing rigor of production automotive systems so glitches were not unexpected. One day the A/C failed and I traced the problem to a failed power switching relay. Examining the failed relay, I could not see a problem visually but voltage measured on the input terminal was not present on the other side of a riveted connection. How could there be an open circuit in a securely riveted connection? Hint: the relay base, where the terminal was riveted, was plastic.

The overheated terminal caused the plastic base to locally melt. Plastic flowed around the rivet and completely insulated it from the electrical terminal. When it cooled and the plastic solidified, current could not flow but the connection appeared firm to the casual observer.

That was Then. This is Now.

I have always been interested in making movies. I bought my first movie camera when I was 15 years old. My first production was called, “The Scratched Corpse or Don’t Eat Crackers in Your Bed”.

Ten years later I am newly married and living in El Paso, Texas. With two incomes, there was money “burning a hole in my pocket”. My new father-in-law, a camera buff, helped me buy my dream movie camera, the classic Bolex H-16.

To me, the Bolex looked like a movie camera should look. It was big, heavy, black and chrome and had a 3-lens turret like this picture. My camera was “previously owned” and came with an optional big, heavy electric drive (normally, the camera operated from a wind-up spring motor). I only used the electric drive once when I took these clips of President Johnson. He visited El Paso in October 1967 for a ceremony returning some land to Mexico. That small parcel of land had become separated due to the meanders of the Rio Grande.



[ See all my YouTube videos by Googling "youtube rwanat42" ]

It is astounding to compare that old film camera to today’s easy-to-use video devices.

Perhaps the biggest difference is production cost. A 50 foot roll of 16mm film for that camera cost $10 and processing was $5. Since each 50 foot roll yielded only about 3 minutes of movie, that movie cost $5 per minute in 1967 dollars! Compare that to $0 for today’s digital methods.

How about weight. Did I mention the camera was big and heavy? The optional electric drive system included a leather case for carrying the batteries over your shoulder. It required 6 lantern batteries for 11 pounds right there. My wife can take video with her 1.3 ounce iPod nano.

The old Bolex did not have a through-the-lens viewfinder. The aperture had to be set manually using a hand-held light meter. There was no zoom lens. To change lenses the turret had to be rotated to change between normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses. There was no auto focus system. Focus was by estimating distance to the subject. And it took silent movies and editing 16mm film is done by cutting and pasting pieces of film.

Wow. The comparison is stark. I would not want to go back. On the plus side, one could take “professional” movies with the Bolex. Movies made for the theater use 35mm film but movies made for TV used 16mm. There was at least one commercially-released film made using 16mm film: The Endless Summer, 1966.

For the truly geeky, this video shows how to load the film in the Bolex.

How to load the Bolex H16 Rex 4 16mm camera from SVA Film/Video on Vimeo.