Posted on 10/24/2008 11:58:14 AM PDT by mojito
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time: movie footage of London shot in 1904. This clip is an excerpt from a 12-minute long video that was made as a travelogue to lure visitors from Australia. It is a fascinating and all too brief glimpse into the vibrant, teeming London of Sherlock Holmes:
I don't know when the rest will become available.
That’s amazing, thanks for sharing. Kind of eerie when you consider that every person in the video is now dead. It was way too short though, going searching for more old footage like this!
Save for later.
A sobering thought.
This video almost has a "dinosaurs before the comet" feel to it. I don't mean to insult these people, but they were living in the last days of a confident, prosperous, optimistic world, with no clue that almost a million of their countrymen would die in a war that started a decade from when this film was made.
Since the end of the Napoleanic Wars, Europe had gone through a remarkably peaceful time, by historical standards. That world would be shattered to an extent that it is almost impossible for us to fathom.
OMG That is amazing.
It’s early 19th century, but you can go see Dicken’s World: www.dickensworld.co.uk
Bump... awesome.
I did a painting inspired by a poem of his, and in fact, have a pic of it posted on my FR homepage...it was like completing a circle when I found that....
I get the impression that HG Wells was a more than a bit of a monster, but those few paragraphs strike me as awfully good writing.
Now imagine your great great great grandchildren, in 2108, stumbling upon some of your old home videos, from 2004, where the children are running around happily, playing in the water, and dancing with their parents - before all the terrible wars and totalitarian tyranny and demographic catastrophes of the 21st Century.
Remember, The Messiah's mentor thought that he would need to murder 25 million American "capitalists" in order to impose communism in North America.
You are very good.
Wow, we're both a couple of Molly Sunshines today, aren't we?
View later
Everyone in that movie is dead.
Oh wonderful! I love the little moments- kids being kids, people hamming for the camera. Priceless!
It’s always interesting to think about other times, and how it felt not to know things we now take for granted. I once read a fascinating book about the first millinium (the year 1000 AD). One of the things that really struck me was how quiet their lives were, since nothing was motorized. Of course, they were lucky to live into their 40s.
Yeah. They choke me up every time.
Perhaps it’s because of the lines that follow, which are perhaps the most poignant ever committed to paper:
“And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.”
Randomly, my ITunes was playing an old Bob Dylan bootleg song, and it was a perfect match.
Very cool...
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