“… for viewers watching in black and white, the green is behind the brown…”
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I’ve always been disappointed by the dearth of snooker tables in the US, though I understand it just in terms of space (they are twice the size of a regulation billiards table, much less the dinky coin op variety), but it is my preferred game. See, I suck at billiards…but everyone sucks at snooker.
I always assumed billiards was played on a snooker table. Or vice versa.
I learnt something.
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@Ratel Ah - I just realised I was right all along. I am in UK and UK billiards is played on a snooker table. I have no idea what this weird ‘carom billiards’ with no pockets is. (Well, I just discovered it, above.)
Read the page below - scroll down to ‘Snooker and English billiards tables’
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If you are interested in old film, definitely watch “Forgotten Silver” to learn about of one of the pioneers of cinema 
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The fatal accident rate with horses was appallingly high before cars. The horse related fatality rate in NYC in 1900 was 75% higher than the auto fatality rate in 2000. Cars are fast and thus dangerous. Horses have minds of their own and are skittish, especially in an urban environment.
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That is a startling figure - but of course 2000 was after the introduction of modern traffic laws and signals in the early 20th century, followed by the car safety regulations enacted in response to “Unsafe at Any Speed” near the end of the century.
Horses had other problems too, of course… from what I’ve read, the streets of New York in 1900 were basically paved in a 6" layer of horseshit.
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I wonder if what people will write about first generation of autonomous cars on the roads in a hundred years or so will read a bit like this.
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Here is a similar piece revisiting film from New York.
There is a little shot at about 6:18 of two young men walking along holding hands. This easy camaraderie seems to have vanished from the First World.
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Peter Jackson on the decision and rationale for colorizing the footage in They Shall Not Grow Old:
I know that colorization has got its detractors, which is fair enough. I mean, if you have a director in the 1930s that chose to use black-and-white film stock, a director of photography who carefully lit it to make the most of the black-and-white image and you suddenly, a few decades later, smear color over it, then you are actually defiling the artistic vision of the people that made that film.
But that’s not what you’re dealing with here. You’re dealing with people that the government hired, filmmakers that were government employees with the agenda of going to the Western Front in France and Belgium with their cameras and recording the First World War for posterity. It was the first time ever that a war could be recorded with moving picture film; obviously the American Civil War is very famous in the sense that Matthew Brady and many other photographers were able to take photos. So, it’s the first war where we had black-and-white photos.
The First World War is the first war that we have film, moving film. That was deliberate; the British government, they wanted to record this war for posterity. And certainly, for propaganda use as well, I must say.
But I just felt that if a cameraman was packing their bags to go across the channel to the Western Front and somebody came in and said, “Okay, here’s your film stock: Do you want the black-and-white film stock or do you want the color film stock?” Then, they would’ve chosen the color film, because their job was to record this war in as accurate detail as they possibly could. So, obviously they would’ve chosen color. But, of course, color didn’t exist. So, they didn’t have that choice. They were only given black-and-white film.
So, to me, converting this into color with the agenda, basically, of making it as close as we could approximate to what the soldiers themselves actually witnessed and saw was no issue at all. It became a fairly obvious thing to do.
There’s more, like how his team chose the colors, etc plus other interesting details about the film.
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Nineteenth century cities had crossing sweepers — young (usually) lads with brooms who would sweep a path across the street in exchange for tips.
By 1900 the situation was becoming dire:
By the late nineteenth century, more than 150,000 horses would be on the streets of New York City at any given time, and each one of these sizable creatures would produce an average of 20 lbs of manure day – that’s over 3 million pounds within 24 hours just within the city grid!
In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.
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Idk, autonomous cars will probably more like “have minds of their own and are cautious to a fault.”
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That much is true, the biggest reason autos were so dangerous early on is that there was no cultural experience with them. Drivers had never had centrifugal force explained to them, so they tipped over frequently taking corners too fast. There were no age limits, so 10 year olds were delivery drivers or taxis. People getting off streetcars were not used to being closed on by a vehicle traveling 20 mph instead of 5 mph for carriages. Drunk driving wasn’t even a crime. I mean if you can say anything good about the horse having a mind of its own, it’s that they know how to pull a cart even when the driver is plastered. Lack of cultural experience is popping up again with autonomous vehicles, except this time they are dangerous because they don’t behave as recklessly as human drivers.
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As someone with asthma who is at this moment recovering from serious bronchitis in Tijuana, that scares the crap out of me. Pun intended.
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Needs more Quantic…
Also, as noted in the YouTube comments, R2D2 crossing the street on the upper left at 0:48…
Now I know you’re thinking, TIME TRAVEL!
But remember Artoo was built a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and clearly just had a good preventative maintenance schedule helped by some time dilation on the intergalactic trip. The important thing is we now know where Lucas really lifted Star Wars.
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We’ll see…
Arguably, a sign of original thought would be a car complaining that it “never gets to drive anywhere fun”.
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Not really.
First of all, there’s some selection bias here. People look elegant and refined here because these very old films and photographs are, for the most part, taken in places where scruffier-looking people were emphatically not welcome.
There’s also the fact that, to modern eyes, anything resembling a cravat or a petticoat or a bustle or suspenders (etc.) registers as “dressy” or refined. What we’d automatically take as casual or slovenly (yoga pants, tank tops, t-shirts) just didn’t exist, so there’s nothing for our eyes to fix on as a counter-example.
Most of all, the low resolution does wonders for how well dressed those people look. Even this far into mass-produced clothing, clothes were incredibly expensive—compared to how cheap the cheapest clothes are now, I mean. They got worn far more often, cleaned far less often, and in many cases were patched and mended until they were nothing but patches. By modern standards, if you could see it up close, the median article of clothing depicted here would be ragged, patched, and dirty. (You probably wouldn’t have had much that was nice to say about how the people you met on this street smelled, either.)
Bottom line: except for the part where the camera is seeking out people who are well-dressed by the standards of the day, there’s almost nothing here that would look much like “finery” if you’d been there.
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True, some parts of the city were places one’s would risk not only one’s wallet, but one’s life (most of them are hipster areas now)
That’s why any basic thug from the golden age of film noir seems dressed up compared to, let’s say somebody as important as Mark Zuckerberg is nowadays.
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Tangentially related.
Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll Below- X-1 Radio Drama- Listen below.
A world where the roads roll, and people just step on to faster and faster and then slower and slower belts to get anywhere. Wind resistance, congestion and common safety be damned!- Because the Roads Must Roll
From X Minus One, (X-1), Episode 1, January 4, 1956.
Story by Robert A. Heinlein (adapted by Ernest Kinoy) found on Youtube.
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Yes. Breathing the dried feces was probably more dangerous than walking through the wet stuff.
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