The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

Renee and Marc grew up in a prime time for television. School House Rock. Newhart. Saturday Morning. Must See TV.  Somewhere in the twentieth century, a box arrived and everyone in the house started facing the same direction. For a few decades, half a billion people could watch the same moment at the same instant. Then the box multiplied. We cover the story of how TV changed the culture. This isn&...

Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. All about Television. But the nerdy science-y television stuff.  So, we had to do a song all about the way a tube TV manages to keep the image in sync. Snaps, triggers, latch, return. It was just begging to be a snappy, poppy, funky song.  Lyrics below: [Verse 1] Picture starts to drift Rolling on the glass That beam won&a...

Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time.  A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set a shivering centrepiece on the table and let the room see what you could afford. Then it came in a box for pennies, and everyone could have the shape. This week one wo...

Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again.  That special temperature is a just a bit below average body temperature. Right around Ninety-Five degrees F. So, that's our song this week.  Sorry we're running a bit behind. Schedules and production issues collaborated to...

Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened. For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give...

Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow.  But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that...

For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed. Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answ...

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry.  Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose.  Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish.  L...

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet. Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to...

Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow.  Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator. For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on...

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy! The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole liv...

Tomorrow we talk about a piece of tech that was millennia in the making. The humble flush toilet. We have a special guest coming in to record on this one to help us with the story. But you can't make a song about flushing toilets without thinking about the things that water washes away. Physical and emotional. So, this song is all about flushing things away. And the little trap that keeps the...

Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were. At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhatt...

Tomorrow's episode is on pay phones. A technology that was once essential until mobile phones became ubiquitous. There's a lot of history (and nostalgia) that Marc and Renee love to gab about. So tune in tomorrow for the full episode. But...you can't talk about pay phones without talking about paying. The scene...small town, unfamiliar territory, sun going down. You need to get out...

First things, first. We have merch. Silly, yes, but available here . Now onto the show... Have you ever pressed your face to the window in a plane as a kid and stared at the wing thinking flying shouldn't work? Have you ever sat in seat 23B with the baby crying five rows up and perfume getting reapplied three rows over and wished for just forty minutes of respite? Of course you have. Passenge...

Next episode is all about the development of passenger planes. So, this week our song is about that emotionally stressful situation that air travel has turned into.  The bare feet where they shouldn't be. Loud talkers. Hogging the arm rests. Passive aggressive travelers.  It felt like a blues song in A Minor. But mashed together with our Season 2 house band's yacht rock groove. Lyrics be...

Have you ever sat at a red light at 2 AM with no traffic in any direction and waited anyway? Have you ever rolled through that same red light 2 AM and felt vaguely guilty about it? Of course you have. The traffic light is the most obeyed command in human history. Rarely enforced (unless you're in the UK like Marc). No officer in sight. Just a coloured light on a pole, and a near-universal agr...

There are songs and poems about the red and green lights. But what about Amber? Shy. Fleeting. Amber has a job too.  This week's episode is about traffic lights and it felt appropriate to cast our gaze at the glowing amber hue and dedicate this week's song to the lesser-loved traffic light colour.  [Verse 1] Three seconds is all I get Between the start and the stop You look at me like yo...

Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389? So do we. There used to be a thing called knowing where you were. It lived in a spiral-bound atlas in the back seat, or in the head of whoev...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the transition from a world where maps were an everyday driving tool to the world we have now with satellites buzzing overhead telling us exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go. And because this is a podcast about things we miss and what we learn, we learned that keeping maps current is a big job! Things change. Roads change. And...GPS changes...

Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type? So do we. The best games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parse...

Do you remember green screens? Blinking cursors? Games with words instead of photo-realistic massively multiplayer open world shooter role-playing sim games? We do too.  Zork was original. Creative. And extremely well-designed. So, this week's song is an ode to Zork. Resource management. Wandering the unknown. Maps. Frustration. Triumph. Self-evident gameplay.  See if you can catch all the Zo...

In 1882, Edison opened Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and started selling electricity by the meter. He built the grid, built the appliances that plugged into it, and then tried to build an electric car that would charge off the whole system. The car was never the product. The car was a device that generated demand for his platform. The battery failed. Gasoline won. And for about a century...

Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and Highway The episode is about cars. But...cars as instruments of platforms. Edison partnered with Ford to produce electric cars so he could sell more electricity. It failed and what we got (in the US at least) was a car culture. A century of cars representing freedom and self-expression.  And now? Cars are becoming the mechanisms to sel...

Does your thermostat know when you're approaching your own front door? Does your watch know you're stressed before you do? When your car rewrites its own software at 3 a.m., do you know what changed? In 1982, a group of Carnegie Mellon grad students wired a Coke machine to ARPANET because they were tired of walking down the hall to find warm soda. Two questions. Is there Coke? Is it cold...