It’s kind of a cliché to say that we live in a wonderful technological age. You have access to all the world’s information in the palm of your hand. You can connect with virtually anyone on the planet for free, instantly. And what’s really interesting about today is, you can look into the past.
Life before film
Imagine if your only access to the past was by looking at paintings. Those paintings may be sophisticated, they may be lifelike, but they aren’t necessarily accurate. They can capture a place, but not a moment in time. For that you need a photograph. And if you really want to see something like you were there, you need a moving image.
Movies are pretty much a 20th century invention. Although there were some halting steps toward motion pictures before that, the art form really broke through in the 1900s. Technology grew at a very fast pace and by the middle of the century, there was a movie of almost anything. Sadly, a lot of that early stuff was lost because motion picture film of the day was so flammable. However, with the advent of safety film and proper archiving, history can be preserved.
Today, with easily available tools, old film can be upsampled, stabilized, and colorized so that it looks almost like it was shot today.
Check out California in the 1940s
Here’s an example of what can be done. This is footage of the Los Angeles freeways, of Newport Beach, and through the oil wells of what is probably Long Beach. In other words, everything you see is probably million dollar property now. And the freeways, of course, have grown by leaps and bounds. Compare this picture, courtesy of Google Maps, with the way that same spot looked at 1:21 in the video above.
Sadly, the years haven’t necessarily been kind.
About that video
The YouTuber who made that video took a lot of freely available sources, cleaned them up, and tried to present something that looked contemporary. It’s important to have some idea what things looked like in the original film, so here are the sources they list:
https://archive.org/details/pet1028r3
https://archive.org/details/pet1028r2
https://archive.org/details/pet1028r4a
https://archive.org/details/pet990r4alasf
It’s important because while the finished video is easier for us to watch, it’s less accurate. We don’t really know what the colors were necessarily. The sounds were made up. A lot of detail has been added by a computer. Most of all, the video gives us the impression that the technology of the time could give you that picture quality.
We take it for granted today
Today, we don’t think about how we can look to the past. There’s so much available on YouTube, at Archive.org, and on TV. We can see how people looked. We can hear how they talked. Once upon a time, that was impossible. In fact, it was impossible in your grandparents’ lifetime, or perhaps your great-grandparents. That’s how recent all this tech is. And we think nothing of it.
Today, of course, we’re generating more video and more photos than ever before. Every day, I’m told, more imagery is captured than was captured in the decade of the 1970s. And it’s not stopping any time soon. It’s a good thing that our children’s children couldn’t possibly laugh at how we look now, isn’t it?
