The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

In 1608 a Dutch spectacle maker put two lenses in a tube to spot enemy ships, and the government wouldn’t even give him a patent. Four hundred years later the same idea is a ten-billion-dollar gold mirror a million miles from home, catching light older than the Earth. Renee and Marc follow the glass from Galileo to Webb: telescopes held up with string, a mirror polished perfectly to the wrong shape, and Renee’s forty-year grudge against a smudge.

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For this week's episode Marc and Renee look to the sky. Big fans of telescopes and astronomy the Nerds run through the history and future of astronomical instruments. Humble beginnings as tools for naval intelligence to instruments that peer into the very beginning of time. 

So, our song this week is about that longing to see farther that you can with your eye and the desire to see the heavenly bodies more clearly. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
Lay me down in the cool night grass
Mama gazing way up high
That one's a w...

A secret radar valve crossed the Atlantic in 1940, a candy bar melted in an engineer’s pocket, and the first microwave oven weighed 750 pounds and needed its own plumbing. Fifty years later it was a $200 box in nine out of ten kitchens. Marc and Renee get into the magnetron, a radio telescope tricked by somebody’s lunch, and a brother who set his hair on fire with a paper towel. And, after eighty years, why your leftovers are still cold in the middle.

Shout out to Tom for correcting us on some pigeon facts from...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the microwave...where it came from and where it's headed. But, as modern and convenient as the microwave is...sometimes it just leave your food cold in the middle. Have a listen to the episode's song and see if you can relate. The sadness, the disappointment, the frustration. The edges are too hot and the middle of that mystery burrito is still cold. 

Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
Took it from the freezer
Laid it on the plate
Watched it turnin' in the light
Lord, I could not w...

The first thing ever scanned at a supermarket checkout was a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit, in Troy, Ohio, in 1974. Now barcodes get scanned ten billion times a day, the price sticker is long gone, and the price on the shelf may soon depend on who's buying. 

Renee and Marc cover freight-car grime, grease pencils, the mark of the beast, and the smart cart that still wants you to hold everything up to the light.

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Join Renee and M...

What would the barcode say to you if it could talk? Would it wax poetic on its journey through the consumer landscape? Would it tell you all about the hands it passed through?

No. It wouldn't. It's a barcode. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
I'm on the milk and the morning bread
I'm on the pills beside your bed
You carry me through every door
You never looked at me before

[Pre-Chorus]
There's so much in me
Waitin' to come free
Just shine on me

[Chorus]<...

For centuries, even millennia, the price of storing important information has gone down as technology advances make each generation obsolete.

That was mostly true until the last couple of years. Storage prices have increased drastically and it's the first time this has happened in the mechanical storage era. This generation of storage is more expensive today than it was last year. 

Renee and Marc, always students of history, decided to take a look into the history of storage. From clay, to papyrus, to parchment, to sticks, and beyond into the modern era. 

Grab a...

This week's episode is all about storage. And one of the things Renee and Marc cover is reuse. 

Have you ever taped over a sentimental moment? Ever lost a wedding video by recording The Price is Right over the top? That's what this week's song is all about.

Tune in tomorrow for our chat on storage, but enjoy that awkward moment when you realise you lost a precious memory forever. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
Had to find a tape tonight
Didn't have a second spare
Grabbed the one that caught my s...

Prophecy is a poor trade. The pay is parlous and nobody thanks you. A year on we went back to three predictions: precipitation, power, and proving you're a person. We prognosticated, we were patronised, and then we were proved right, which is more than we expected. Join us for prophecies, politely revisited, and a parlous state of affairs.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us...

Every once in a while, Renee and Marc go back and talk about things from previous episodes that have changed over the last year or so. 

In this episode, they decided to share that conversation with everyone else. Mostly because things that they predicted in previous episodes came true. What prognostications did they make? 

Tune in to hear all about it. But, as usual, they pulled together a song that represented the episode. And it seems that everything they talked about this week just..got...worse. So, come have a listen.

Lyrics below:

The Gas Meter. Wait, what? We're doing an episode about gas meters? That's pretty nerdy even for Renee and Marc isn't it? Yes. 

It ticks all the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast check-boxes.

What do you know about the gas meter in your basement, or on a wall on the side of your house? Come have a listen and learn a bit about this invisible piece of tech that did its job for 180 years before anyone thought to replace it.

We'd love t...

Tune in Thursday for this week's episode all about Gas Meters. You know we love invisible infrastructure and the gas meter is one of those things that worked for 180 years with very little change...and now natural gas is fading out very slowly in residential use and the meter infrastructure is changing too. Ok, maybe gas meters don't sound fun...but Renee and Marc always bring the laughs and this week is no different. Lots of great knowledge this week.

So, this week's bonus song, "Never Broken," is all about the meter that did its job, but...

What started out as a text from Marc's brother turned into an investigation into the hundred year history of monosodium glutamate and how that turned into a durable insulating film for high-end processors. 

The umami taste gave us critical microprocessor coatings. Crazy.

So, coatings for chips...and chips.

This one is a bit weirder than what we normally cover, so you know it's going to be fun. 

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss th...

What does MSG have in common with microprocessor coatings? You'll have to listen to our new episode "Chips and Chips" coming this week to find out.

Renee and Marc dive into the strange world of food and CPU coatings this week and that's the inspiration for the song. There was a time when MSG was vilified. It was so demonised that restaurants would put signs in their windows saying "No MSG." But you know what? MSG is in every savoury food you love. It's not going to kill you. Humans have been eating it and using it...

A bowling alley looks like the least engineered place you can spend an afternoon. Rented shoes, sticky floors, someone's name spelled wrong (or rudely) on the  display. Underneath the grime, neon, noise, and beer stains is four thousand years of arguing about pin dimensions, a materials-science arms race, and enough instrumentation to describe your delivery as a set of physical parameters.

Before 1952 the cost of running a lane scaled with the number of people bowling, because somebody had to sit in the pit and set the pins by hand. After the pinsetter, one more bowler cost almost n...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the history of bowling technology. Pins, pinboys, automatic pinsetters, rubbers, resins, polymers! Oh, so much chemistry and mechanical engineering. 

But this week's lively soul/funk groove is all about the dreaded 7-10 split. Hope you're enjoying our new Season 3 house band. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
Eight went down
Eight
Went
Down
I heard 'em fall
Heard
Them
Fall
Two still up
Two stand wide
On the left
On the right

[Pre-Chorus]
That lane is quiet
M...

For most of history, the top floor was where the poor people lived. Nobody wanted to climb four flights, so the ground floor was the good address and the attic was the punishment. Then a man in Yonkers built a brake, stood on a platform in front of a crowd, and had someone cut the rope with an axe.

The car dropped a couple of inches and stopped. He said "all safe, gentlemen," and the shape of every city on earth changed.

Otis didn't invent the elevator. Hoists and lifting systems go way back, and...

Have you ever entered a full elevator car just to ride the elevator one single floor? Did you feel the judgement? Did you feel the shame?

This week's song is a begging, pleading, song about that unforgivable sin. The single floor elevator ride. 

Renee and Marc are back this week after some time off with a brand new season that starts tomorrow. Our first tech topic is...wait a minute, this can't be right...elevators? Elevators. Huh. OK. Interesting. 

Tune in tomorrow for the Season 3 opener all about elevators. And since we've got a...

Happy One Year Anniversary! 

Marc and Renee want to thank you for a great year of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. We've been on a bit of a holiday with the summer months, but people are still listening. 

This is just a bit of a behind the scenes and a little discussion about Orcas, Bruce from Australia, Numbers, and a few flubs and redos. 

Just a bit more context on our discussion on numbers and listening stats...while a "big" episode a few months ago might have a couple hundred listens, the last episode we...

Renee and Marc grew up in a prime time for television. School House Rock. Newhart. Saturday Morning. Must See TV. 

Somewhere in the twentieth century, a box arrived and everyone in the house started facing the same direction. For a few decades, half a billion people could watch the same moment at the same instant. Then the box multiplied. We cover the story of how TV changed the culture.

This isn't a typical TV story though. Because we're us, we jump into the details of the tech as well as the impact to 20th century c...

Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. All about Television. But the nerdy science-y television stuff. 

So, we had to do a song all about the way a tube TV manages to keep the image in sync. Snaps, triggers, latch, return. It was just begging to be a snappy, poppy, funky song. 

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Picture starts to drift
Rolling on the glass
That beam won't fire on time
Vertical hold is slack
Phase is off the mark
Every sixty-three, we're go...

Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time. 

A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set a shivering centrepiece on the table and let the room see what you could afford. Then it came in a box for pennies, and everyone could have the shape. This week one wobbling dessert travels from aristocratic showpiece to grocery aisle novelty, and we ask what gets lost when you take the work o...

Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again. 

That special temperature is a just a bit below average body temperature. Right around Ninety-Five degrees F. So, that's our song this week. 

Sorry we're running a bit behind. Schedules and production issues collaborated to keep us a bit late.

Enjoy the song and the episode when it comes out. Lyrics below. 

[Verse 1]
I hold my shape in the chill
set...

Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened.
For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us...

Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow. 

But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that went missing. So, today's song is all about the one that slipped out the lint trap to freedom.

Song today. Episode tomorrow.

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]

For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed.

Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answer was a lacquer made from nitrocellulose, the guncotton left over from First World War explosives. The same chemistry runs through early film, the first...

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry. 

Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose. 

Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish. 

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Slow it down
Colour runs
Leave it now
Leave it once
A line bends out
Into lig...

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet.

Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to cool yellow fever patients in 1840s Florida and died bankrupt. Jacob Perkins patented the first vapour-compression machine in 1834 and nobody cared. And Thomas Midgley Jr., who invented the safe refrigerant Freon that finally put a...

Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow. 

Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator.

For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the avocado green tank in a neighbour's garage. 

This week's song is all about the Cold One on the Porch. A jaunty poppy yacht ro...

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!

The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through, is a remarkable engineering achievement.
Rome had running-water toilets two thousand years ago, watched the idea swirl...

Tomorrow we talk about a piece of tech that was millennia in the making. The humble flush toilet. We have a special guest coming in to record on this one to help us with the story.

But you can't make a song about flushing toilets without thinking about the things that water washes away. Physical and emotional. So, this song is all about flushing things away. And the little trap that keeps the bad stuff from coming up and stinking up your life again. 

Lyrics below

[Verse 1]
End of a long Tuesday

Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were.
At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhattan left ceremoniously in 2022, with a press release, like a retiring quarterback.
In between, the booth became a cultural object (Superman changed in one, every spy movie...

Tomorrow's episode is on pay phones. A technology that was once essential until mobile phones became ubiquitous. There's a lot of history (and nostalgia) that Marc and Renee love to gab about. So tune in tomorrow for the full episode.

But...you can't talk about pay phones without talking about paying. The scene...small town, unfamiliar territory, sun going down. You need to get out of here and your cousin Susan is the only person that is close enough to come get you. But you have one slightly worn quarter and there's only one pay phone in...

First things, first. We have merch. Silly, yes, but available here. Now onto the show...

Have you ever pressed your face to the window in a plane as a kid and stared at the wing thinking flying shouldn't work? Have you ever sat in seat 23B with the baby crying five rows up and perfume getting reapplied three rows over and wished for just forty minutes of respite?

Of course you have. Passenger jet aviation is one of the most transformative things humanity has ever built, and most of us experience it as a tube...

Next episode is all about the development of passenger planes. So, this week our song is about that emotionally stressful situation that air travel has turned into. 

The bare feet where they shouldn't be. Loud talkers. Hogging the arm rests. Passive aggressive travelers. 

It felt like a blues song in A Minor. But mashed together with our Season 2 house band's yacht rock groove.

Lyrics below. 

[Verse 1]
I boarded last, no room in the overhead bin
Lord, I boarded last, no room in the bin
Walked down to twenty-three and...

Have you ever sat at a red light at 2 AM with no traffic in any direction and waited anyway? Have you ever rolled through that same red light 2 AM and felt vaguely guilty about it?
Of course you have. The traffic light is the most obeyed command in human history. Rarely enforced (unless you're in the UK like Marc). No officer in sight. Just a coloured light on a pole, and a near-universal agreement to stop when it's red and go when it's green. 
This episode traces the humble traffic signal from the gas-lit lantern that exploded o...

There are songs and poems about the red and green lights. But what about Amber? Shy. Fleeting. Amber has a job too. 

This week's episode is about traffic lights and it felt appropriate to cast our gaze at the glowing amber hue and dedicate this week's song to the lesser-loved traffic light colour. 

[Verse 1]
Three seconds is all I get
Between the start and the stop
You look at me like you know
What I'm trying to say
Brake a little early
Gas a little late
Either way yo...

Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389?

So do we. There used to be a thing called knowing where you were. It lived in a spiral-bound atlas in the back seat, or in the head of whoever was driving. The Thomas Guide assumed you'd figure it out. The TripTik gave you only the path. GPS skipped past both and asks...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the transition from a world where maps were an everyday driving tool to the world we have now with satellites buzzing overhead telling us exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go.

And because this is a podcast about things we miss and what we learn, we learned that keeping maps current is a big job! Things change. Roads change. And...GPS changes us. As we depend on GPS, our spatial skills degrade.

So, that's the idea for this week's song. Places we once knew...

Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type?

So do we. The best games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parser. Mario did it with a question mark block. The machine showed you what it was. You figured out the rest.

This episode is about...