New documentary sets I have finished authoring

[funnybook]

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These are sets that I have completed and I'm now ready to trade:

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"The Ring Of Truth" - 1985

I can't find it at the IMDB

Hosted by MIT Professor Philip Morrison, this is an absolutely delightful science documentary series from the Eighties, shown once on PBS and then apparently never shown again. It was released on VHS but it's now long out of print. I finally got my grubby little meat hooks on the whole set and brought them to DVD in the usual Funnybook style - pleasant custom menus with no background noise, a little bit of time and thought put into placing sensible chapter stops, and above all, maximum quality - each episode runs almost an hour and was recorded to DVD in one hour mode, one episode per disk, six disks. This is Mr. Wizard for grownups and I positively love it. The elderly gentleman making gold leaf by hand is just one example: He starts with molten gold which he pours into a small mold to make a bar about the size of a free motel soap. He then rolls it through a metal press much like the washing machine wringer of days gone by, except that here the rollers are solid steel. The soft gold bar lengthens to a ribbon and gets longer, and thinner, and longer, and thinner as he passes it through the roller again and again. When it's the the length of a garden hose and as thin as paper, he really goes to work. He cuts the ribbon into small squares, about an inch on each side, and places those between squares of paper perhaps three inches to a side, until he has a stack about an inch high. Then he binds the bundle tight and starts whacking it with a huge mallet. After many thousands of strokes he opens the bundle and the little squares of gold have spread out to the size of the paper... so he cuts them into little 1 inch squares again, and does it again... in the end, after about **one hundred thousand** strokes of the mallet, he has made genuine gold leaf by hand. How thick is gold leaf? Well, if you printed the entire Bible on gold leaf it would be about as thick as a single sheet of regular paper. And that's just five minutes of this magnificent six hour series...

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"Television" - 1988 - Hosted by Edwin Newman

http://imdb.com/title/tt0094564/

This eight part PBS documentary series from the Eighties was, again, apparently only ever aired once and then never shown again. Unlike many others, though, this was never retailed on any medium. I have managed to track down all eight and I must say it is nothing less than spectacular. It's the history of the development of television, starting with the first fuzzy mechanical TV images from 1928 and spanning the next sixty years. We come to know the creators of television, the rival inventors, the rival methods of producing moving images, the rival national pride as America, England, Germany, Japan and others each claim to be "first"... then the way it all exploded like a mushroom cloud once the ball got rolling. There are more clips from old shows than I would have imagined, bringing back memories that had been unvisited in my mind for forty years and more. Eight episodes of almost an hour each, finished up to DVD the same way as I mentioned above with The Ring of Truth.

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"The Machine That Changed The World" - 1992

I can't find it at the IMDB

I did this one over a year ago but I don't think I've ever mentioned it here. What "Television" is to television, "The Machine That Changed The World" is to computers. See Eckert and Mauchly develop and demonstrate Eniac with the help of Grace Murray Hopper, one of the few women involved in the early days of computers and now held as a pioneer programmer. See Thomas Watson found IBM. See Doug Engelbart demonstrate his little invention he called the mouse... and never got the credit or a penny for it. See the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center develop the foundation of the greatest wealth in human history, only to fail to realize what they had created and give it away freely to Steve Jobs abd Steve Wozniak, just in time for Bill Gates to drop by and steal it from them and become the richest man alive. From punch cards dating back to 1804, to Babbage's design of the Analytical Engine in 1834, to Herman Hollerith winning a competition to take the 1890 Census with his electronic tabulating machine, to Eniac, to the Apollo Moon landing, to Steve Wozniak soldering a motherboard together in a garage, to the Space Shuttle to the IBM PC to the Apple Macintosh, this superlative documentary series is my personal favorite documentary series of all time. I don't mean to sound like a broken record but, you guessed it, only shown once on PBS fifteen years ago and apparently never aired again. Five episodes of about an hour each, done up to DVD in the same way as the sets mentioned above.

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This set I did not author myself:

"The Secret Life of Machines" - 1988

http://imdb.com/title/tt0431571/

Another Eighties treasure, again from PBS and yet again, apparently shown only once and never shown again. This guy took a different machine each week and went back to the beginning and told us how it was conceived and developed, and built a working prototype to enlighten and entertain.... for example, the fax machine. The story goes that he got steamed when nobody would release it commercially so he mpegged it and tossed it out on the internet, complete, for free. Nicely authored to seven DVDs by ICStephen.

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If you'd like to have any of these please send me a private message with your e-mail address and, if you have it online, a link to your list.

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[Captspiffy]

These title look like they'd be fun to watch.
How about a possible trade for all of them?

Here's my list.

www.freewebs.com/captspiffy

thanks.....

Captspiffy