Cutaway drawings of stores, hotels, factories, plants, etc.
This TV studio in Chicago had one problem: it was located in the same building as printing presses for the Chicago Tribune. Vibration from the rumbling presses would compromise TV production.
Solution: float the studio on air.
Rubber bags, each 14 x 30 inches, were inflated and placed under the flooring. The bags elevated the floor 1/4 inch.
Click to Enlarge Image to 1019 x 677 px:
Source: Popular Mechanics November 1950
One of the great things about the old Fortune magazine was how it often treated extremely mundane subjects with great wonder and awe. Not only would they profile the high-level anticts of John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, and Henry Ford, but they would take things down to the opposite end of the spectrum and highlight things like the inner workings of an oil well in one of Rockefeller’s fields or the daily routine of one of Hearst’s low-level stringers.
This office building cutaway actually calls itself an “X-ray” of an air conditioning system, and I am not completely certain of its original source in Fortune. I’d guess that it came with some kind of profile of a giant, national air conditioning company, perhaps Carrier.
Not at all the loving detail of the American Standard advertisement I blogged about previously, but interesting nonetheless.
What do you do with a cutaway hotel? I haven’t the faintest idea. I tossed together some amateur motion-tracking shots and a soundtrack to come up with this.
This great cutaway originally comes from a July 5, 1947 Saturday Evening Post ad for Armstrong’s Industrial Insulation. For an extra-sized view, click here and then click a second time on the magnifying glass.
The ad says, in part:
When you look behind the scenes, a modern hotel is an astounding place. Few guests appreciate that their comfort demands such a complex and highly mechanized institution. The men (1) who ordered ice probably don’t know that there’s a complete ice-making plant (12) hidden away in the basement. The dancers in the ballroom (5) don’t stop to think what it takes to provide air conditioning (11). Touch a spigot (2) and ice water spurts out. Turn a valve (4) and heat is waiting. Heat and cold flow through the hotel like lifeblood in its veins. Insulation on the pipes makes it economically possible to put heat and cold where they are needed.
Cutaways don’t get any better than this one. I’m trying to be an upright and honest Web citizen, but I cannot find the attribution for this photo. Here is the original source.
