"Famous Hell Drivers - Racing Lions - Feminine Courage!"
Since there was no "Harry Potter" in IMAX 3-D in the 1930s, where would you go to see an ultimate spectacle? You'd go to the amusement park to see motorcycles roaring up, down, and around a huge wooden barrel, filling the air with atrocious noise, fumes and a tremendous sense of danger - with spectators standing just yards away from the action!
Roll Up, Roll Up, It's Thrills, It's Spills - It's the Amazing "Wall of Death"!
Derived from normal wood board motordromes the America's Original Extreme Motorcycle Thrill Show became one of the most daring acts at fairgrounds and carnivals in the early 1910s, achieving peak popularity during motorcycle-crazed 1930s....
The first such motordome appeared in 1911 in Luna-Park at Coney island, New York; and in only 4 more years these walls became completely vertical, with not just single drivers, but the whole motorized crews thundering upon them.
We wanted to start this page with "put your girlfriend with a lion on a motorcycle, and sent her up the wall!" - but we're not going to do that (fearing wrath of.., you know). So we'll just continue with simple facts:
With over a hundred walls of death traveling the US by the 1930s, perhaps the coolest version was the 'Liondrome' in which a rider is accompanied by a tamed lion. We featured one such image before, but now we have more info about this sort of crazy entertainment:
With stage names like "Lolita" and "Ethel Purtle" these fearless women actually kept these lions for pets... driving them on vertical walls for fun and profit. Imagine a job description like that... (try to apply for it today, after you read a bit more info):
To have a lion right behind you on your passenger seat would be quite risky (it might get a bit too stressed and bite your head off, you know), so the drivers placed them in side-cars, and were careful not to smell of alcohol while driving - lions absolutely hated it!
With a bit of good luck and a lot of centripetal force...
In modern times, family teams of riders still take the original "American Indian" motorcycles to the wall, and the attraction still has a dedicated following:
Obviously, somebody had to take a small car up the wall eventually - and here is a video to prove it, with two cars braving it:
Mohammed Jawed, for example, drives his compact car up the wall in Afganistan, "circling the shuddering wood-plank Wall of Death during his traveling stunt show's stop in Kabul" -
Something more modern, and significantly more viral (alas, completely fake) - is the ad campaign for Nissan Qashqai, featuring outrageous "flying" car stunts: see our article about it here! (lower the volume before opening it)
Making all sci-fi punks in the world "feel lucky", since 2008
(for other weekly "Biscotti" issues - see our main page and monthly archives)
COMMENTS:
3 Comments:
MikaelM said...
Cool post.
The first poster is from a danish amusement park, and the text reads (roughly translated): "For safety, we use Castrol" and "See the champion drivers Capt. Wulfhorst and his partner Miss Iris Johnson in their phenomenal car- and motordriving on the vertical wall (Wall of Death)".
Haha! If driving a motorcycle in a giant hamster wheel isn't dangerous enough, obviously the best solution is to put a freakin' lion on your motorbike too.
Reality Hacking was utterly ludicrous, but I thought this post was a bit interesting. Anyway, no one pays for this content and it's usually fantastic, so sod off.
I have bought at least one thing from a advertisement here (a book). So maybe the ones not contributing to the income stream should sod off? It is a comment section, not a praise-only defender of the faith section.
"The Man Who Shrunk The World" cover is golden. Love the skeleton-influenced costume. A bit of blog-hunting suggests that it's a Jack Kirby cover from Strange Tales #92, January 1962.
Oops, didn't quite get to the end of the blogtrail before posting. Somebody scanned and upped the Kirby story from that issue, since it's never been reprinted (guess why).
If anyone's interested: http://monsterblog.oneroom.org/stories/?story=shrunk&page=1
We have just added your latest post "Dark Roasted Blend: Apocalyptic Scientific Experiments" to our Directory of Science . You can check the inclusion of the post here . We are delighted to invite you to submit all your future posts to the directory and get a huge base of visitors to your website.
The photo you labeled "Ice Train" appears in the fantasy art compilation "Spectrum 15 here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Spectrum-15-Contemporary-Fantastic-Underwood/dp/1599290278
It's one of my favorite images in the book! If you are a fan an fantasy art (like me) you should check it out!
Wowsers, Mr. Simon is the real deal. About time the Future looked like itself again, isn't it?
Looking at these images takes me back to the best psychedelic trip of my life. One merry night in 1981 I spent a pile of cash on naughty things and a copy of Syd Mead's book "Sentinel." Hours and hours in Tomorrowland...
If it weren't for the creepily starved and pin-up girls he envisions as pilots... Maybe they put so much money in their vehicles that they could afford neither food nor protective clothing.
Those will never sell. Here's the design process that works:
Homer: All right, you eggheads! I want a place in this car to put my drink! Designer: Sir, the-the car has a beverage holder. Homer: Hello! Hello, Einstein! I said a place to put my drink. You know those Super Slakers they sell at the Kwik-E-Mart? (Makes a large circle with his hands.) The cup is this big! Designer: (Talks as he writes on a clipboard.) Extremly large beverage holder. Homer: I'm not done yet. You know that little ball you put on the aerial so you can find your car in the parking lot? That should be on every car! Designer: (Talks as he writes on a clipboard.) Little ball. Homer: And some things are so snazzy, they never go out of style! Like tail fins and bubble domes and shag carpeting.
The picture with two green tram cars is most probably taken in the AnsaldoBreda workshop. The damaged vehicle on the right was involved in a crash in Milan, near Porta Romana, on 10 october 2008: it derailed due to an error of the driver, who was using his mobile phone while driving. After going out of the track, the Jumbotram hit another tram, an older model made in 1927 (those tram, called "Carrelli" are one of the symbols of the city). Noone was injured, but people on the older vehicle got blocked inside the car due to a failure of emergency opening of the doors.
The video at the end isn't a train hitting a concrete wall, it is a crash test for nuclear waste transport containers. The container is on a flatbed train car that has been turned on it's side, and the train hits the container (the yellow box)
Sorry if you know this already, but it has happened that trains that are to be scrapped have been cleaned up and then dumped in the sea to make artificial reefs for wildlife and divers to enjoy. That may explain the underwater image. Or maybe not! :-)
The crushed black tanker car was the result of implosion. "The general-purpose tank car in the photo below was being steam cleaned in preparation for maintenance. The job was still in progress at the end of the shift so the employee cleaning the car decided to block in the steam. The car had no vacuum relief so as it cooled, the steam condensed and the car imploded." Keep in mind that steam has around 1600 times the volume of condensed water.
Two links:
How tank car implosions work. http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2008/04/22/how-tank-car-implosions-work/
Lessons Learned in 2001: Over/Under Pressure Relief Required for System Safety from the Richland Operations Office Department of Energy http://www.hanford.gov/RL/?page=525&parent=506
I'd have to watch the episode again, but the underwater subway car is probably a screencap from an episode of CSI: New York. It' looks awfully familiar...
The train on the "unfinished" bridge is out there deliberately; there's nothing that will stop it from backing up in that image.
The imploded tank car might be from a test/demonstration that was done - I'd have to dig out the video again and see if it's the same location.
Train disaster happen quite often, luckily mostly without fatalities. One example for a catastrophe is the disaster in Eschede/Germany, where a high-speed train derailed and collided with a bridge, killing 101 people on board.
montparnasse is a station in paris, france, quite in the center of the city. its original name is "gare montparnasse". from there, trains depart to the south-western part of france.
You should look up the train wreck in Prince George, British Columbia about 2 years ago. We all stood in the park and watched the train burning across the river. You could see the smoke all around town.
Picture #6 in the Russian section shows two rubber tired wheels attached to some wreckage between the two trains. The spiked objects to the right are diamond harrows which are not quite obsolete farm equipment. There's another harrow in the center further back and a badly bent on on the left. The wreckage with wheels is the harrow cart. It looks like a farmer was crossing the track when he shouldn't have.
Ad. Utterly Surreal: Tilt-Shift Train Wrecks I'm not convinced... these look as actulal tilt-shift photos, not "PS trickery". Of course tilt-shift can be immitated by retouching a photo on PS or other software but why bother? The fun You get with a tilt shift lens (such as PC-E Nikkor 24mm for example) is worth a lot more than time spent on your PS. The PS tilt-shift retouched photos will NEVER look as good as taken with an actual perspective-correction lens. Peace to You all. I love this blog.
The photo of former New York City rollingstock unit 9577 is *definitely* not a train wreck. As someone mentioned before, this is one of the repurposed Redbirds that have been stripped of usable parts, cleaned, and dumped off the eastern seaboard. Please get it right, or note it.
If you're going to show an accident involving NYC rollingstock, at least show a real accident
Check this out.. Two photos of the only train wreck in US history where four steam locomotive trains collided... occurred at East Thompson Connecticut, Dec.4, 1891.
@ujanja They were intentionally put there to encourage reef growth on the otherwise flat and featureless ocean floor along the eastern seaboard off the coast of the Carolinas. This reef growth has also been great for tourism and fishing in the area.
I am very impressed to the people who made a lot of stuff like that. I always wanted to learn how to make them. But unfortunately, I can't. So to make myself happy and contented I make sure that I have all the stuff I want or atleast search for a site like this to give my own perspective. Thanks for the post.
1: http://funnypics3.blogspot.com/ Great collection of Funny Pics
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To quote from the article you linked to, these animals are found at "depths of 600 to 800 meters (2,000 to 2,600 feet)". That sounds a bit more reasonable. Incredible fish for sure.
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3 Comments:
Cool post.
The first poster is from a danish amusement park, and the text reads (roughly translated): "For safety, we use Castrol" and "See the champion drivers Capt. Wulfhorst and his partner Miss Iris Johnson in their phenomenal car- and motordriving on the vertical wall (Wall of Death)".
Haha! If driving a motorcycle in a giant hamster wheel isn't dangerous enough, obviously the best solution is to put a freakin' lion on your motorbike too.
Really cool!
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