These two beautifully quirky lamps were fashioned out of obsolete technology, including aircraft compasses, railroad signal switching relays and stainless-steel ink cylinders. Creative recycling is so awesome.
Anyone who has ever piloted a Segway or watched a Betamax knows that the tech world isn’t always a meritocracy. Good products can be trampled by inferior ones, and unpredictable consumers can make frustrating choices (Blu-ray, anyone?). More likely, though, is that the product was just a stupid idea in the first place. CollegeHumor has posted a sort of revisionist consumer history in which a bunch of popular products have actually lost the marketing battles against their competitors. [
In 2005, a control room for the A and C subway lines in NYC caught fire. “No larger than a kitchen,” the room held 600 relays, switches and circuits that keep track of trains and keep everything running. Officials originally thought it would take three to five years to get the lines back to normal capacity. (Thankfully it didn’t.) The epic repair time was because the fixed-block signaling system dates back to 1904 and only two companies in the world were able to repair it, one in Pittsburgh and the other in Paris. This is technology’s trailing edge, according to Peter Sandborn in IEEE Spectrum: the huge, crippling problem of obsolescence.
