Andrew Bales

A year before cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, American Joe Kittenger took a lift below a two-hundred-foot helium balloon. The ride took an hour and a half in a tiny open-air basket that took him 102,000 feet above New Mexico.

When he jumped from nineteen miles up, the free-fall lasted four and half minutes. Kittenger's space dive began a long and costly race. After Russian Eugene Andreyev set an official free-fall record, an American Nick Piantanida spent the mid-sixties trying to bring the record back to the United States.

Since the Apollo missions of the sixties, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been home to an odd couple: a pair of crawler-transporters. Weighing in at six million pounds, their gargantuan metal slab is reminiscent of an oil rig carted around atop four military tanks.

Every space voyage begins its journey on the back of a crawler. From the towering Saturn V rockets to the line of relatively compact shuttles that followed, the odd ritual looks like this:

Given the infinite access we’re afforded to color, it’s hard to imagine the importance its been given throughout history and the passion that has gone into its hunt.

In the pursuit of vivid color, each region of the world tapped its own resources. In the Middle East, the semi-precious stone Lapis lazuli yielded a bright blue pigment, and in China, the deep red-orange pigment vermilion was derived from a common ore of mercury.

Kellogg’s rushed Pop-Tarts onto the market in 1964, shortly after their competitor announcement a similar toaster snack release called Country Squares. Since then, the evolution of the Pop-Tart has been long and strange.

Pop-Tarts began simply, with a handful of flavors. Though they come wrapped in tinfoil and ready-to-eat, they’ve always been closely tied to the toaster. Pop-Tart’s first mascot was an animated toaster named Milton.

Recycling audio has allowed directors to more easily create the worlds of their films. Just like in life, the sounds that influence the mood of a moment are often out of sight, off screen.

Andrew Bales continues with part three of his four-part look at iconic stock sound effects.

Andrew Bales continues with part two of his four-part discussion of iconic stock sound effects.

Andrew Bales begins a four-part series on stock sounds and canned emotion.

When we hear the word “noise,” we think annoyance and distraction. And that makes perfect sense. Noise is essentially interference, something that disrupts our experience with everything from radios and televisions to images on digital cameras. But our ears have a unique relationship with colorful noise.

The barber pole has come a long way to be stationed above old brick shops, to repeat and repeat its lonely spins. In fact, the barbers themselves have a strange past, their title once denoting a more taxing profession.

In the middle ages, if you required dentistry, surgery, fire cupping, or a session of leeching, you’d visit the barber-surgeon. It was hundreds of years before the roles we now know as doctors and barbers diverged completely.