Jeremiah Warren takes a look at The History of Thomas Edison in honor of his 165th birthday.

“Kodachrome 2010″ by Xander Robin is a short documentary about Kodak’s iconic Kodachrome color film, and Dwayne’s Photo, the last film lab to develop it. When it was introduced in 1935, it was the first commercially successful color film. The last Kodachrome film was produced in 2009, and Dwayne’s Photo stopped processing the film in 2010.

via PetaPixel

The Haight-Ashbury Museum of Psychedelic Art and History is a proposed permanent museum that will focus on psychedelic art and Haight-Ashbury’s role in the psychedelia movement of the 1960s (video). Museum supporters are raising funds for the project on IndieGoGo.

The Haight-Ashbury movement left an undeniable impact upon the world and the reverberations of the psychedelic sixties are still being felt today. Strangely there is no museum dedicated to keeping the history alive and relevant for the millions of visitors who come to San Francisco searching for inspiration and authenticity. A non-profit community supported museum will permanently cement San Francisco as the home of psychedelia. Our intention is for the museum to become an attraction in and of itself that will educate and inspire visitors for generations to come to reinvent the world according to how they want to live.

via The Art of the Prank

This previously unseen footage of Disneyland is from 1957, less than two years after the park opened. The film was created from archival footage by the Disney History Institute.

via Rob Sheridan

Linotype: The Film is a documentary about Linotype, the 19th century type casting machine that revolutionized printing and remained dominant until it was made obsolete in the 1970s by computers and new printing techniques (trailer). The film is directed by Doug Wilson. It premieres at the SVA Theatre in New York City on February 3rd, with subsequent screenings along the East Coast. The West Coast premiere is February 21st at Typekit in San Francisco.

Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary centered around the Linotype type casting machine. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing and society. The film tells the surprisingly emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world.

“The New French Hacker-Artist Underground” by Jon Lackman is a fascinating Wired article about the French UX collective, a shadowy group that uses covert actions to preserve neglected historical and cultural treasures in Paris. Over the past 30 years, the group has infiltrated art museums to demonstrate security flaws, and says it has completed 15 covert restorations, including the 2006 repair of the Pantheon clock:

A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s.

Thanks to Deborah Yoon for the tip!

photo via UX

Stereographs, side-by-side photographs that when viewed together produce a 3D effect, normally can only be viewed with a stereoscope. Stereogranimator is a site that lets viewers browse 40,000 vintage stereographs from the New York Public Library’s archive and convert them into animated GIFs and anaglyphs that can be enjoyed on the web. The site was built by the New York Public Library Labs, and is inspired by the work of artist Joshua Heineman.

via The New York Times ArtsBeat

photo via The New York Public Library

One hundred years ago today, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott infamously reached the South Pole only to find that a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had beaten him by five weeks (Scott did not survive the return journey). To mark the anniversary, an Antarctica-based filmmaking team led by director Julie Katch and editor Allison “Sandwich” Barden created “Drunk History: The South Pole.” The video is inspired by the Drunk History series by Derek Waters.

Lunchbreath created a series of illustrations depicting some of the Unsuccessful Pirates of History.

This 1960 IBM ad touts the capabilities of SAGE, a massive Cold War-era automated system for tracking and destroying incoming enemy bombers. The heart of the system was the IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer, which at 275 tons is still the world’s largest computer. Each computer had 55,000 vacuum tubes, required a half acre of floor space, and operated on punch cards. There were 52 AN/FSQ-7 computers around the country. SAGE was retired in the early 1980s.

Here are photos Scott Beale shot in 2006 of the SAGE on display at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

via Retronaut

video via chiklit, photo via MITRE

Steve Jobs, microprocessor pioneer Ted Hoff, and other Silicon Valley luminaries discuss the arrival, in the 1970s, of the microprocessor. The video is part of the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

via Brain Pickings

The 1941 newsreel “Dizzy Dali Dinner” documents Salvador Dali’s Night in a Surrealist Forest Ball, a dinner event in Pebble Beach, California that was a benefit for European artists displaced by World War II. Dali’s wife Gala, wearing a unicorn head, presided over the event from a giant bed, and the distinguished guests were served such delicacies as live frogs.

via Dangerous Minds

“New York The Wonder City” is a 1938 short film that gives a glimpse of pre-World War II New York City. The film was edited by Eugene W. Castle of Castle Films, a company that specialized in watch-at-home movies in the era before VHS.

via Miss Cellania

“Raiders of the Lost Archives” by StooTV is a shot by shot comparison between the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark and 30 adventure films from 1919 to 1973.

via MetaFilter

derDon1234 created a compilation featuring the most important events of the last 100 years (1911-1011) in 10 minutes.

via The Awesomer, BuzzFeed & MPViral.com

Jeremiah Warren created this fast-paced, informative history of the modern calendar.

C.G.P. Grey takes a look at why some people think the end of the world will come in 2012.

If you don’t want to watch the full version of the video, here’s a short one that gets straight to the point.

Ben Moore of Screen Rant has created an amazingly detailed infographic, Every “Significant” Bat-Suit Ever, that presents a visual history of nearly all the Batman costumes through the years, starting with the Caped Crusader’s comic book debut in 1939.

via Geeks Are Sexy

All That Glitters: The History of Shiny Things is a delightful documentary by Etsy about glitter and the surprising history behind the tiny dazzling particles. The short features a variety of items from Etsy vendors.

4,242 Rubik’s Cubes were used by artist Peter Fecteau to create Dream Big, an amazing 1,000 pound mosaic sculpture that depicts civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in three colorful images. Dream Big was on display for the 2010 ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan placing in top 50 out of 1,700 artists.

The idea came to me in a dream, literally, and it was an uphill battle to bring the project from concept to completion.

via Stumbleupon and Koikoikoi

images via Tori Jo Photos

C.G.P. Grey presents A Brief History of Santa.

On the 24th of December every year children around the world put out milk and cookies in the hopes of luring a magic fat man into their home who will leave presents behind before sneaking into the house next door.

How did such an odd tradition begin?

In 1969, designer Saul Bass pitched a comprehensive rebranding of the Bell System—from its outdated logo to the uniforms and trucks of its workers—in this fascinating short film. Many of the recommendations were adopted, including the still recognizable Bell System logo (discussion of the logo begins at the 10:00 mark).

We’ve written previously about the work of Saul Bass.

via AT&T Tech Channel

“Food Will Win The War” is a World War II animated propaganda film about the agricultural productivity of America, created by Disney animators in 1942. The film emphasizes the scale of American agriculture with some rather odd examples—for instance if the entirety of American corn production were fashioned into one giant ear, it would extend from London to the Black Sea (“and that hangs right over your head, Adolf”).

via Super Punch

Based on the 2010 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith of the same name, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, is a new thriller/horror movie produced by Tim Burton and directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Although the film is due out in June 2012, the ominous lenticular night and day posters showing an axe-wielding Lincoln were just released.

IMDB provided this synopsis for the film:

President Lincoln’s mother is killed by a supernatural creature, which fuels his passion to crush vampires and their slave-owning helpers.

While IGN has provided the official synopsis for the film:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter explores the secret life of our greatest President, and the untold story that shaped our nation. Visionary filmmakers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of Wanted) bring a fresh and visceral voice to the blood-thirsty lore of the vampire, imagining Lincoln as history’s greatest hunter of the undead.

via Geeks are Sexy

Lists of Note is the latest website by Shaun Usher, who also runs the wonderful Letters of Note and Letterheady. This new website focuses on notable examples of lists throughout history. The example here is a to-do list hand written by Kurt Cobain in 1991 that he used to prepare for the shooting of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit music video.