Obscure Technology

Automatic or passive seat belts, the great compromise between automakers and the United States government. Passive seat belts were one of those “safety” products that cause more harm than good for the end user. It was much hated by consumers and led to them only having a short life from 1990 to 1995. Now why were these seat belts a thing in the first place? Well the passive seat belts were invented by Volkswagen in 1972 and was first used in the Volkswagen Golf in 1975. This lead the Brock Adam, the United States Secretary of Transportation, to mandated that every car in to have either automatic seat belts or airbags by 1983. Now this angered many lobbyist who thought this was a way too soon of a deadline. In 1981 the mandate was dropped then transferred to the Supreme Court which lead to the mandate to stay, but now with an extended deadline of 1990. Now airbags were still a relatively new system which meant it was pretty expensive. Thus many car companies decided to go with pas...

Rotary engines, the official motor when burning oil is actually a good thing. The rotary engine or Wankel engine is much like chocolate ice cream in the car world, you hate it or you don’t. It is actually interesting concept because unlike other engine configurations, there is no cylinders. Instead they have a rotor which some claim to look like a Dorito spinning. The inventor of this odd engine was a Felix Wankel. Wankel was born in August 1902 in Lahr, Germany. He came up with the idea at the age of 17. It was only after 2 World Wars when he began working with NSU Mototenwerke in the research department without ever getting a degree or a driver license. He complete his design in 1954 and in 1957 and 1958 the prototypes were tested. In 1961 Mazda had contracted with NSU to produce the engine and install them in their cars. The engine was proven to be quite powerful in the 1960s and soon the engine was used by other car companies. The engine would began to lose its popularity in ...

Plasma televisions, the official device of screen burns-in. Plasma televisions were once a luxury item in which anyone envy those who had one. Now they are much forgotten and can be bought relatively cheap on the second hand market for not much money. The plasma televisions, before it got its colors, was co-invented by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and graduate student Robert Willson at the University of Illinois in 1964. They created a monochrome neon orange display for the PLATO Computer System. At this time television was not very common in households and the major benefit of these plasma televisions was that it did not need memory nor circuitry to refresh images. It was until the late 1970s that semiconductors started to become cheaper and CRT’s took over the household. Plasma televisions thin thickness and big screens made its way in places such as Wall Street and lobbies.It wasn’t until 1992 when the first full color plasma televisions was created, and soon manufacturers ...