AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

Changes in hairstyles mean changes in equipment. The days of the 'style and set' are long gone. The overhead salon dryer of old, vital for 'setting', is now often only found in local neighbourhood salons that cater to the clientele who used them in their heyday in the fifties and sixties. The overhead salon dryer can be more easily found on film setting Doris Day's perfectly coiffed hair, in period pieces such as the TV series Mad Men, or in the ultimate kitsch film, Grease. In the latter, the song "Beauty School Drop Out" recreates the Fifties' version of the beauty salon.
   --Karolina Kendall-Bush

Although the carts and cabins that littered street scenes for centuries, supplying anything from food to music, have by no means passed away completely, their presence is now largely confined to tourist hot spots in our capital cities. The barrel organ, in particular, is emblematic of a London street culture that has long since passed. Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century were associated with the barrel organs and ice-cream carts that they would push around the centre of the capital. These days, ice-cream carts have been replaced by ice-cream vans (still largely in the hands of Italian families), and the barrel organs have disappeared completely. This photograph of a barrel organ was taken in Warsaw, the first time I had actually seen a barrel organ being played in the street.
   --Karolina Kendall-Bush

In the 1950s and 1960s, every French cafés had a pinball machine, also known as the 'flipper' in France. It was in the 1930s that first coin paying machines are introduced, but it was only after the Second World War that the pinball machine begins to have a real success with David Gottlieb's "Humpty Dumpty" machine. The first electronic pinball machine appeared in the mid-1970s. It continued to be present in French cafés until the end of the 1990s. No doubt due to the rise in smaller and portable electronic games such as Nintendo and the Game Boy, the pinball machine gradually disappeared. 
    --Sheena Scott

When I learned to type, the only way to make a copy was by tucking a black page between two sheets of white paper. The black 'carbon' stuck to the white page behind it and left an imprint. With each passage through the typewriter, the carbon paper seemed more covered with typewriting script, except of course that it had simply lost its ink in all those places. Every carbon-typed page had to be corrected separately so that the typist ended up with carbon paper black all over her fingers at the end of the day. Making three copies was a nightmare of wadded paper rolling through the carriage and black gunk everywhere. There were special erasers just for the carbon copies, but they never worked and the copies were always full of traces of typos. The best thing about typing with carbon paper was seeing what kind of traces one's writing left at the end of the day. (JM)

Here is a photograph of carbon paper by the photographer Tamir Sher who has kindly granted us permission to print it here.  The website of the photographer is: tamirsher.wordpress.com (photo found by Chancul Jung who is working on carbon paper as one of his projects)

The last coin-operated street parking meter in the City of Westminster was removed in May 2009, and has now entered the collection of the Science Museum in London. The death of parking meters was sealed by the introduction of 'Pay & Display' ticket machines, and more recently by pre-pay, mobile telephone and credit card payment systems. The last five parking meters in Westminster, with a small LCD screen displaying the number of minutes parking time available, were in fact fairly recent successors of mechanical meters (with a pointer that ticked away the minutes), whose strong visual symbolism of the passing of time is a seemingly familiar but now vanished sight on the streets of busy cities. 

Jacob Paskins

The Minitel terminal is a device similar in design to a desktop computer, with a small screen and keyboard, which provides access to a text-based information service via conventional telephone lines. Although a number of countries developed similar systems during the 1980s, the French Minitel has been the most widely used, and is commonly described as a predecessor of domestic use Internet. Minitel was created to provide telephone directory information - with the ultimate aim of replacing printed phone books - but it also quickly served as a platform for other information such train times, horse racing results, horoscopes, retail purchases, and chat lines. Several million terminals were distributed free of charge to French telephone subscribers during the 1980s and 90s, but its use has recently declined, due in part to the limitations of the low resolution text only screens, and restricted user interaction. Minitel's current owners France Telecom until recently planned to scrap the system, but it seems this has been temporarily delayed. This said, in an era where digital technology is becoming the rule, and as similar text services such as Ceefax/Teletext (which function on analogue television sets in the United Kingdom) are beginning to be phased out, it seems inevitable that Minitel is heading to the end of its illustrious
career.

Jacob Paskins

Cross-Channel Hovercraft operated between various French and English ports from the mid 1960s until 2000. Carrying foot passengers and cars, the world's largest hovercraft could make the crossing between Calais and Dover in times quicker than trains through the Channel Tunnel today. However such performance of these noisy giants required perfect maritime conditions, and the slightest breeze rendered the propelled air-cushions useless. Like Concorde, the Channel Hovercraft was a relic of  the sixties obsession with speed and technology, but with ageing craft, and intense competition from slower but more reliable ferry and rail operators, the dream and exhilaration of gliding along the Straits of Dover at brake-neck speeds has no place in twenty-first century travel.

Jacob Paskins

These three photographs were taken with one of Jann's Polaroid's with film that had been left in the camera for at least a decade. The camera in question, a Spectra QPS, was joined that afternoon by a cheap Polaroid One Step purchased in the 1990s for location work on a film. We'll be blogging more later about our impressions of taking last polaroids with the small cache of remaining film Jann had kept back.
We're excited to hear, nonetheless, that the group that has been striving to get the Polaroid factory back in action in the Netherlands and fabricate once again film for these wonderful cameras has managed in the past weeks to make enormous progress:
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Though we will tend as a group to take a more critical distance on our objects, this is one case where we want to take a stand. We're eager to see Polaroid cameras be one of the objects for which we do not have to write an obituary.
That's Jacob with a Nikon D80 Digital Camera, by the way, and Hanne is holding the Polaroid One Step in the top Polaroid.