Posts Tagged ‘Westinghouse’
“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle”*…
Long before the lights from Pittsburgh’s PNC Park began illuminating the North Shore every summer, a local corporation gave the city an art show every night on the same grounds.
The Westinghouse Electric Supply Company (a subsidiary of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, or Wesco), based in Pittsburgh, moved into a warehouse facing the Allegheny River in 1948. On its roof, a giant orange and blue sign spelled out the the company’s tag line, “You can be sure … if it’s Westinghouse.”
As modernist design trickled down from the Bauhaus to Madison Avenue, most noticeably in the 1960s, corporate giants like Westinghouse began leaning towards minimalist visual identities. In 1960, Paul Rand gave the company a logo that looked like an electrical socket that also spelled out the letter W.
Six years later, Richard Huppertz, head of Westinghouse’s Corporate Design Center, wanted to emphasize the company’s sleek new identity with text-free signage on top of their North Shore warehouse. Huppertz ran the idea by Rand, who then came up with the country’s first computer-controlled sign…
Read the rest of this illuminating story at “Remembering Pittsburgh’s Most Mesmerizing Sign.”
* Walt Whitman
###
As we celebrate bright ideas, we might turn to the noir side and send hard-boiled birthday greetings to Raymond Chandler, novelist (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, et al.) and screenwriter (Double Indemnity, with Billy Wilder, e.g.), whose Philip Marlowe was (with Hammett’s Sam Spade) synonymous with “private detective,” whose style (with Hammett’s) defined a genre, and who was (unlike Hammett) born on this date in 1888.
Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective – but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.
– Raymond Chandler, “Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” (essay, 1949)
A rose by any other name…
Business Insider reports:
We’re now exporting Jersey Shore to Japan.
Because the average Japanese viewer has no clue about U.S. geography, MTV re-titled it Macaroni Rascals.
If that isn’t offensive enough, the translation Macaroni Rascals is actually the polite translation. The real translation is closer to Macaroni Assholes.
Jersey Shore is only the latest popular American show or movie that’s title is hilariously lost in translation.
For example, the film released in China as Six Naked Pigs…
… is better known in Anglo-Saxon climes by it’s original title, The Full Monty:
More “Exported American TV Shows And Movies With Titles Hilariously Lost In Translation” here.
As we marvel that any cross-cultural communications occurs at all, we might recall that it was on this dat ein 1929 that Vladimir Zworykin, inventor, engineer, and pioneer of television technology, demonstrated the “kinescope,” the first practical television receiver. Two days later Zworykin, who was at Westinghouse at the time, presented his work in a paper at a convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which brought him to the attention of David Sarnoff, who eventually hired him and put him in charge of television development for RCA at their newly established laboratories in Camden, New Jersey. Zworykin went on to be a leader in the practical development of television; and helped create charge storage tubes, infrared image tubes and the electron microscope.
Zworykin demonstrating the kinecope in 1929 (source)
You must be logged in to post a comment.