5 Modern Day Treasures That Got Saved In The Craziest Ways

Fortunately, '60s technology was built to survive Soviet missiles, so the chicken-tainted equipment was still intact (if in dire need of disinfecting). Unfortunately, not many people knew how to work the old equipment, since it was, well, old. So the LOIRP started the painstaking work of repairing the drives from scratch, which at one point involved finding a substitute for the now-banned whale oil NASA used to lubricate the tapes.

But the result was worth it. With the equipment up and running, not only could the team access photography previously thought lost, but because those Cold War cameras were actually better than most of the junk we're blasting into space right now, LOIRP was able to digitize the images with modern software, dramatically increasing their quality.

With a much sharper image, these old photos reveal new information, and have been re-uploaded into the Planetary Data System, where they're now being used to correct figures about Earth's previous arctic ice levels and identify climate changes from the '60s. So right in time, then.

After this discovery, the canisters were gathered up and shipped to various film archives on a military Hercules plane. (Commercial airports refused to fly the reels, because unlike local archaeologists, they were spooked by how dangerously flammable they were.) The contents of the Dawson City archive, or as some news outlets called it, the King Tut's Tomb of Silent-Era Cinema, were then carefully inspected.

Not only was the collection chock-full of old movies which had been presumed lost, but also reels upon reels of news about major historical events. There was footage of an early civil rights march from 1917, the 1920 anarchist bombing of Wall Street, and even visual proof that the White Sox threw the infamous 1919 World Series.

So why was film history chilling out under an ice rink? As it turns out, Dawson City used to be the end of the line for films touring Canadian theaters, and because it wasn't profitable enough to ship them back to Hollywood, they remained there. So in 1928, as the canisters started piling up in the basement of the local library (and occasionally catching fire), one of the caretakers had a crazy genius idea: Why not dump them in a local swimming pool, which was being paved over to make an ice hockey rink? That way, the rink's permafrost could protect the films from the elements, and vice versa.

Surprisingly, the ice rink plan worked like a charm, except for the part where everyone involved eventually forgot they were there and we "discovered" them decades later, in the same manner you "discover" the stale condom you forgot about in the back of your Transformers wallet.

Between those Andy Warhol antics and the company's dire financial straights, Moore chose to abandon the project, with only two of the promised 12 chapters published, and the other two forever ruined by Columbia's scissors. That is, until #3 saw a very unexpected release in 2009, when scholar and Moore fanboy Padraig O Mealoid saw an item on eBay that claimed to include not just Big Numbers #1 and #2, but also a "rare unpublished xerox" of #3 for the low, low price of $49.99.

As it turned out, a friend of the seller had worked with Moore on the series, and had been smart enough to hang onto his preview copy of the third chapter. And since there was no legal way for anyone to own a copy anymore, they did the '90s equivalent of putting it on a torrenting site -- they xeroxed a bunch of copies and passed them out to diehard fans, one of whom eventually put his copy up on eBay. And with the moody artist statute of limitations having long expired, Moore gave permission to share the issue in its crude photocopied form on O Mealoid's LiveJournal, where it was quickly overshadowed by Russian pornography.

For years, an international team consisting of researchers from Notre Dame University and Canada's Cinematheque Quebecoise have painstakingly restored one of the first-ever animated films, the 1914 dinosaur cartoon Gertie. Several later editions of the film still exist, but the original (which had a cool proto-Roger Rabbit bit between the cartoon and a live vaudeville performer) was lost to time long ago. But no longer! The team has fully restored the OG version, straight up drawing all the missing scenes by hand, based on extensive academic research. They've even taken their century-old cartoon show on the road.

Behold, the closest to Jurassic park archeologists will ever get!

But Gertie isn't the only early cartoon mascot in need of some touching up. Cinematheque Quebecoise is also working to restore a lost cut of Hen Hop, which Pablo Picasso considered the best thing that had happened to cinema since movement.

Meanwhile, a Croatian team is sifting through 880 pounds of film negatives, positives, and additional materials in an attempt to restore the classic European kids' cartoon Professor Balthasar. Honestly, it sounds easier just to draw some new ones.

After losing his actual voice to ALS in 1986, Hawking used the CallText 5010 text-to-speech system for decades. This tech tanked for the very reason Hawking loved it -- it made you sound like a goofy 1950s robot. In fact, Hawking considered the voice to be so much his own that he categorically refused to ever use anything but the original 5010. But in 2009, with his hardware failing, Hawking's technical assistant and a team of engineers were tasked with finding a way to repair it or lose his voice forever.

The problem was that fixing '80s text-to-speech hardware today is like getting good WiFi on a pager. The team quickly discovered that they were going to have to start from scratch, as the company responsible for the system, Speech Plus, hadn't made replacement parts in decades, what with having gone bankrupt long ago.

After five long years, the team finally approached Eric Dorsey, one of the guys responsible for the synthesizer voice codes. Together, Dorsey and the team traveled the world, eventually finding an old voice board and some dusty schematics at a former work buddy's place, as well as a backup tape of the Hawking voice in an office in Belgium. From that, they managed to build an emulator out of dated Nintendo software and Raspberry Pi.

After over eight years of painstaking work, the emulator was a perfect success, one that let Hawking hang onto his awesome android voice for the rest of his life. Not only that, but with the new updated tech, his unique voice can be preserved until the end of time, where it'll probably be used to herald the rogue AI apocalypse he kept trying to warn us about.

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