Tackling Technology - 1950s Style

Cycling with headphones or earbuds is a modern danger which older technology did not encounter. Imagine cycling with a radiogram in your ear!

Perhaps aware of the growing ignorance of bygone times and their impedimenta amongst those under 80 [see for example Sydling St Nicholas Sun Reader's Letters 2 April 2019: "What is a Posser and might my husband be one?"] the Threadbone Press has taken the boldest of steps.

Times are hard and not, some would argue, propitious for the publishing industry which only last year saw profits fall from c$2billion worldwide in 2017 to £2.10s.3p in Chetnole alone. So hats off to the Threadbone Press which, against this unpromising background, has launched the Professor's Guides - an ambitious series of books designed to bring the modern day "streetwise" youth up to date with the oldest imaginable [1950s] technology.

So will those with insufficient sense to take out their ear buds before before cycling obliviously into dense urban traffic learn anything from these guides.

An excellent example of the Bush Excelsior radiogram designed to entertain those who, on social occasions, preferred to have their legs spread. This model played 78s, EPs, LPs and havoc with a cross-your-heart bra.

Threadbone Press Series Editor - Ceres Editour - thinks so. "I think so", she said. "I don't know for certain, but all our research and market testing suggests that either they will or they won't... So yes, I think so". Affpuddle University's Regius Professor of Antiquated Technology Professor Oldhat - who began life as plain Dr Oldhat [University Lecturer in Modern Technology] and failed ever to update his lecture notes - is less equivocal. "As I have been telling my students for more years than I care to [or can] remember, the old methods are still the best and old technology - which was simple and serviceable provided one had a soldering iron and access to the Cossor valve-range - remains viable to this day". Referring to a folder full of faded browning paper, he added, "These lecture notes are still as relevant today as they were when I first wrote them. Times may change, students come and go, but these thoughts - including how to repair a Bush D16-T - need no updating. You still have to undo the 35 underside screws, decouple the resistors and hard-wire the capacitance unit just as you always did. Either that or send for the repair man."

The Professor's Guides Volume 1 is available from Threadstones, the orinoco store and all good bookshops. It may be followed by others in the series "depending on take up".

DIGITAL DOWNLOAD HERE

FLIPBOOK HERE