Rubber has been used to play ball since the first Mesoamerican ball games of the Olmec people began around 3,000 years ago. The ball courts used for that game can be visited at Tulum, Ek Balam, and Coba in Mexico. The Olmec discovered that latex from a rubber tree could be mixed with juice from a species of morning glory to produce a useable rubber. The rubber was formed into hollow and solid balls for the ancient game, but very […]
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What’s Up with U-Matic?
In the beginning (or at least in the late 19th century), there was film. Capturing moving images and playing them back for astonished audiences at the cinema more than a century ago was magical. Though many people are still familiar with film, which has endured as a medium despite changing technologies, there are plenty of moving image formats which have been rendered obsolete over time and have found their way into the holdings of numerous libraries, archives, and museums.
I previously […]
A Laboratory for Video Game Preservation
In 2006, when we began our efforts at The Strong to preserve the history of video games, we knew we were onto an important subject, but we did not truly foresee the vast array of challenges that we would face in preserving video games. Over the years as we founded the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and grew our collection to more than 60,000 video games and related objects we’ve learned quite a bit about how […]
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Floppy Disks in the 21st Century
When’s the last time you thought about everyone’s favorite old-fashioned magnetic media storage device, the floppy disk? Has it been years? Decades? Or never? With our experience today backing up onto cloud storage, shared folders, and USB drives, people seem to have forgotten how difficult saving your digital files used to be. In the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong, our archival collections contain hundreds of floppy disks which hold game design documentation, graphics, text […]
Colorful Chemistry Sets
John and Harold Porter created their first chemistry set in 1915 after seeing the popularity of A. C. Gilbert’s Erector Set. In 1920, Gilbert made his Gilbert chemistry outfit, with the clear intention of encouraging boys to become chemists. In the 19th century, chemistry sets were practical kits made for school use. Savvy teachers have known for years that chemistry classes become memorable when a molecule is put in context. For instance, sodium thiosulfate solution can be used to clean […]
Preserving the First Video Game Merchandising Display Unit
Reading reports about some retail store closings, it’s hard to ignore that many of us often prefer shopping online with millions of products at our fingertips to navigating a shopping cart through the aisles of our local retailers. As a historian with an interest in consumer culture and as someone who spent countless hours of my childhood playing the latest Nintendo Entertainment System games on a demonstration kiosk at our local K-Mart, it’s difficult to image a world without the […]
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The Eyes Have It
When The Strong museum recently acquired a Shirley Temple doll from the 1930s, it went to the museum’s doll conservator Darlene Gengelbach for treatment. These dolls have sleep eyes that open and close with metal rockers. The rocker is a spindle attached to the inside of the doll’s head with a small weight attached to a metal plate. Each painted metal eye has a celluloid pupil and iris.
More significantly, the celluloid centers of Shirley Temple’s eyes appeared “crazed,” a term […]
Rolling Out the First Driving Game
I’ve admired The Strong’s vintage Drive-Mobile arcade game since the first time I stood in front of it with Martin Reinhardt, the museum’s arcade game conservation technician. It was exciting to see how the first arcade driving game—a popular and enduring genre—actually worked. Martin opened the back of the game for me and demonstrated the mutoscope drum design in action. Early mutoscope machines contained a revolving flipbook on a spindle to create the illusion of a moving image when a […]
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH … And Why Some People Do, Anyway
If you are a human with a job and colleagues, your coworkers probably send you links to various items on the Internet. These may include the occasional funny cat video, but most of the time the content probably has a legitimate connection to your job. In my case, people send me numerous articles about preservation and, thankfully, most of it is good news. Recently, however, my colleagues have enjoyed witnessing my apparently comical, yet anguished, reactions to forwarded links with […]
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