Industrial and sponsored films.
Industrial and sponsored films. Streaming 24 hours a day, synchronized to the second across all viewers worldwide.
The following films and shorts broadcast on CH 82 SMOKESTACK:
Highlights from the California State Fair, including a stunt where two locomotives collide head-on. Subtle it is not.
A 1957 survey of peacetime atomic energy, from power plants to radioisotopes in medicine, farming and industry.
How oil is drilled, hauled, refined and burned, narrated by Lowell Thomas. A crash course in petroleum.
A silent theater commercial for Flash Cleaner, using triple-exposure shots to pitch factory mechanics and housewives alike.
Tourists ride a railroad to the top of Marin County's highest peak. Open cars, waving riders and big views.
Union leaders introduce a dramatization of a garment worker's memories of life before the union. A 1950 labor film with a very pointed message.
Home movies of a western rail trip: train windows, Grand Canyon tour buses, a steamship departure aboard the President Coolidge and a picnic.
Industrial and sponsored films.
An early multinational shows off its reach, with office and factory scenes plus stops in Japan, Sweden, Australia and Egypt. Part I of a corporate world tour.
A speeding salesman picks a tour of a wrecked-car graveyard over a fine. A 1957 traffic safety film from Southwestern Bell.
Chris Smith's 2009 documentary profiles author Michael Ruppert and his bleak theories about oil and civilization's collapse.
A condensed record of the Golden Spike celebration for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, held at Cain Rock in Humboldt County, California.
A 1960 pitch to bowling center owners recasting bowling as a spotless, automated suburban family outing.
A silent German classroom film that follows iron ore into a smelter and out as steel, circa 1930.
A film on turning old recipe terms into modern kitchen methods, with a sponsor's lemon juice in a starring role.
Early footage of the American forest industry, with loggers bringing down giant trees. Timber!
Three plastics experts chat on a transcontinental flight about how plastics shaped everyday life. A 1952 Union Carbide promo.
A 1940 Dodge-sponsored tour of American history, resources, industry and agriculture, set to a patriotic drumbeat.
Industrial and sponsored films.
A corporate world tour continues: General Motors workers, offices and factories, and scenes from far-flung markets. Part III.
A 1959 promo for soft drink vending machines, shown off with bold shape, color and texture as part of America's new look.
A 1949 tour of the American cigarette industry, its tax contributions and its pleasures. Dated corporate cheerleading.
A Rubik's Cube clip from the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, a community media channel.
Factory worker Adam Hathaway sees productivity as husband, worker, foreman and company president. A 1958 split-screen lesson.
A 1936 manufacturers' association film insisting that the creative spirit that built America will keep shaping its economy.
Industrial and sponsored films.
The General Motors world tour wraps up with more offices, factories and foreign scenes. Part IV.
Manteno State Hospital's staff put recreation, work and industrial therapy to work for psychiatric patients. A 1953 look at how it was done.
A 1939 pitch for television sets that explains how mobile broadcast units work, with a live orchestra demo.
How to spot, pick and cook the best beef cuts, from choice-grade steaks for broiling to the right cooking method. A 1970 trade-group film.
Inside a radio-building factory, hands assemble parts and machines hum. Men and women at work on the line in a silent industrial film.
A masked man appears in a woman's bedroom and whisks her to the 1956 GM Motorama and Frigidaire's Kitchen of the Future. A musical car dream.
The 1939 General Motors tool and die strike, told by the union that ran it. Picket lines in Detroit, Saginaw and Cleveland, with a very clear point of view.
A silent film following the schooling of a child headed for a life as an industrial worker. Vocational guidance, 1920s style.
A store manager dreams of talking appliances in famous voices, plus a spring sales event. A Westinghouse sales film, 1952.
A corporate world tour continues: General Motors workers, offices and factories, and scenes from far-flung markets. Part II.
John Q. Public learns how stock gets listed on the NYSE through an oil drum company's growth. Animation meets investing, 1952 style.
The first in a series on early movies, with clips from The Great Train Robbery, The Jazz Singer and more, plus how film is made. 1948.
More motivation for 1920s Chevrolet salesmen. Part II of the sales-training double feature.
Boys and freight trains frame a 1953 tour of what the chemical industry gives the world. Curiosity, exploring and a lot of chemistry.
The electrical work behind Chicago's Chevrolet sky sign on Michigan Avenue, from workers on the outside to wiring on the inside. 1935.
A motivational pep talk film for 1920s Chevrolet salesmen. Part I of a sales-training double feature.
A class election turns ugly, and a teacher steps in to understand why kids use their fists. A 1952 short on childhood violence.
Chevrolets built from foundry to finished car in a Flint, Michigan plant in 1936, months before the sit-down strikes. A factory valentine.
Early model cars glide down a lovely street, a mule cart passes, and Chevrolets circle the pyramids and the Sphinx. Raw export footage.
After school integration in St. Louis, a racial incident erupts at Beaumont High. A 1956 documentary on how the board planned it.
An Indiana family visits the New York World's Fair, where a Fair worker named Jim shows off Westinghouse's wonders of science. 1939.
A 1960 Frigidaire film arguing that the feminine design of its appliances makes the kitchen the center of family life. Very much of its time.
A Depression-era documentary on the Mississippi River from the Civil War into the 1920s: exploration, exploitation and soil erosion. 1938.
History of transportation, staged at the B&O Railroad's pageant, The Fair of the Iron Horse. Early steam, shiny rails and showmanship.
An auto mechanic hears a radio show praising the cooperation of ants and gets carried away. A 1950 cartoon with a political message.
A 1941 trip through Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Sao Paulo, following coffee from harvest to shipping.
A cartoon explains the talkies: Talkie brings Mutie to Dr. Western, who gives him a voice. The sound system, demonstrated with animation.
Industrial and sponsored films.
No dialogue, just a public library at work: a librarian helping patrons, children, and books delivered to the hospital and homebound. 1940.
Silent Ford Motor Company footage from the 1920s to the early 1940s, including Rouge plant assembly lines. Not in chronological order.
Angel, newly arrived from France, thinks she has won a trailer, but two con men have talked her into a contract. This is the trailer for the episode.
A 1948 campaign film on Governor Thomas E. Dewey's life and career, from his 1935 prosecutor appointment onward.
A silent look at Ford Model A assembly in the late 1920s, probably at the Rouge plant, from body to finished car.
Ten-year-old Tommy is caught taking money from his teacher's purse, and a psychiatrist at a guidance clinic tries to understand why. 1951 drama.
General Motors' history of factory medicine, from the early 1900s to rehabilitating World War II veterans on the assembly line.
An immigrant with poor English suffers a workplace accident, then learns to speak up. A 1920s docudrama pushing assimilation, preachy and period.
A teenage girl and her parents learn they all have growing up to do, in this 1951 North Carolina mental health drama.
A wealthy heir elopes with a nightclub singer who can't cook. After the breakup, she learns, and serves the perfect meal. A 1940 appliance-sponsored comedy.
Horses, buggies, bicycles and early automobiles share the road in this silent 1920s Agriculture Department film. A trip that took forever gets quicker.
A 1955 film on the life habits of cockroaches, the four common kinds, how they get in, and how to control them. Dated pest advice.
A boy adopts a stray dog, his father lands on trial in a land of gnomes, and tooth-brushing gets the last word. A sponsored musical cartoon.
A Soviet newsreel on industrializing the USSR, 1925 to 1930, full of factories, machines and displays of power. Official propaganda, dated.
Industrial and sponsored films.
Marionettes tell the story of coffee, from Kaldi and his goats to a ballet dance and industrial processing. A 1938 puppet promo.
A tour of a Philadelphia publishing house, from machines to bound books. See how a 1920s textbook got made.
A short educational film on how Saudi Arabia finds, draws and conserves water. Wells, pumps and desert, circa 1950.
A 1946 live-action and animation mix on the dangers of atomic weapons, sponsored by an atomic information committee. Cold War-era worry, front and center.
Henry Ford's film collection shows America from 1914 to 1945, with autos, factories and everyday life as the Ford camera saw it.
Western Europe in 1951 has three million more mouths to feed every year. Part of a six-film series checking on postwar recovery.
An animated tour of the Ford Cycle of Production exhibit at the New York World's Fair, with purchase orders marching across the country.
A 1954 civil defense film asks what an atomic blast does to a tidy house versus a messy one, using tests in Nevada. Housekeeping as survival.
Industrial and sponsored films.
Steam locomotives parade at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's 1927 centennial pageant, The Fair of the Iron Horse. Silent.
How to turn condensed soups into casseroles, stews, salads and lunches. A 1952 sponsored homemaking film.
Bob Hope hosts a 1945 war bond rally, and the guest list is ridiculous: Sinatra, Crosby, Harpo Marx, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda and more.
Thomas Edison at 74, in his office and at a light bulb factory, where he oversees production. A 1922 day in the life.
A 1957 dramatic short about an overweight man's rough few minutes in New York's Penn Station. A dated look at how weight was discussed.
Nurse-midwives ride the Kentucky hills for the Frontier Nursing Service. Marvin Breckinridge filmed her cousin's humanitarian work in 1930.
A steamship boss schemes to keep the railroad out of town, and a whip-cracking hero called Pinto Pete keeps rescuing the good guys. 1924 silent western.
Silent 1928 tour of General Motors cars selling in 104 overseas markets, half a million a year, and the highways built to carry them.
A 1956 history of television, from the labs that built black-and-white and color sets to broadcasts, with animated explainers of cameras and transmitters.
Mining coal above and below ground, step by step. A silent 1920 short from a coal industry association.
Steve has a peptic ulcer and a tense job, and this 1959 health drama ties them together. Its ulcer theory is now discredited.
The H.W. Johns-Manville asbestos story in 1921: mines in Arizona and Canada and factories in New Jersey and New Hampshire.
A 1950s promotional film for Nutrilite food supplements, selling health from the farm field up.
Golden Spike ceremonies and celebration in Willits, Cain Rock, Arcata and Eureka mark the completion of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. Part I.
More Golden Spike festivities as California celebrates the Northwestern Pacific Railroad finishing its line in October. Part II.
A cartoon character hops out of a telephone magazine to answer a reader's letter about industry jargon. Telephone terms, explained with animation.
A 1926 silent theater commercial telling moviegoers to buy an electric refrigerator, and to visit a refrigerator show.
A ride backward over New York's S curve on the elevated railway, shot from the front platform of a special train. Rooftops, towers and passing trains.
Ford sells farmers on the tractor in this dramatized 1917 ad. Out with the horse, in with the Fordson.
Edwin S. Porter's 1903 railroad comedy opens at a grand station where a pretty girl in white waits on her trunk for a train. A parody of rail romance.
The famous 1906 Market Street ride, filmed for Hale's Tours by the Miles Brothers, starting at their studio at 1139 Market. San Francisco before the quake.
Benjamin Brodsky's silent travelogue spotlights the work of Japanese women, filmed for the YWCA. A restored tour of Japan in the late 1910s.
Racing cars roar around Long Island in the 1904 Vanderbilt Cup, filmed from three spots on the course by Edison cameramen.
A combined dog and bologna machine grinds away in a factory where each frankfurter is labeled by breed. Edwin S. Porter's 1904 gag.
A very brief view of Dr. William Gorgas, the Panama Canal's chief sanitation officer, standing in front of a building. Fever fighter, 1904-1913.
Heavy industry as spectacle: coal cars tip their loads in one go, from Edison's Erie Railroad series.
A Labor Day parade marches through bunting-draped streets, probably in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1906. Banners, bands and townsfolk.
A busy street scene on Lower Broadway in New York City, filmed in 1902. Horses, streetcars and a crowd on the move.
Mr. Nobody Holme warms up his sluggish car with a stick of dynamite. A 1916 silent cartoon where the engine gets quite the wake-up call.
An ineffectual cop, Officer Heeler, quits the force after losing his battle against speeders. A 1916 silent cartoon of the early motoring age.
The big steamer Coptic sits at a San Francisco dock operated by the Pacific Steamship Co. 1897.
An animated prologue about Adam and Eve leads into a married couple's housework woes. A 1925 silent comedy with a vacuum cleaner in a leading role.
Tel E. Phone introduces reporters to his descendants, from Mike the microphone to other offspring of the telephone. A 1929 sound-era explainer.
Buster Keaton's Civil War masterpiece: Union spies steal his locomotive, so he steals it back. Some of the greatest stunts ever filmed.
An exhausted stenographer can't keep up until a man demonstrates the Edison business phonograph. A 1910 office comedy with a sales pitch.
On July 4, 1917 at Forest Hills, Theodore Roosevelt makes a speech backing vigorous U.S. war involvement, then reviews the local rifle club.