The Roaring, Flaming Maw of the Electric Phosphate Smelting Furnace

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:00:56 PST

Alfred T. Palmer took this photograph of raw industrial beauty in Alabama, 1942. What you're seeing is an enormous, high-tech (at the time) furnace for making elemental phosphorus, a chemical widely used in fertilizers. You can see the some of the engineering features of this machine in today's ultra-modern server rooms.

The wires on the furnace are bound together in a pattern (and with ginormous ties) that's remarkably similar to these wires in a server room. OK, that's not a big revelation in engineering terms, but it's interesting to see what features are preserved in the evolution of industrial design. [Royal Pingdom, via Valleywag]

Thanks, once again, to the Library of Congress for making so many cool public domain photos available for free on Flickr. Check out the whole glorious LOC stream.

Diving Into the Russian Nuclear Sub Wreck

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:00:16 PST

The Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine that was lost under mysterious circumstances involving some explosions in 2000. Here it is a year later, dredged up from the waters by a Dutch crew. Want to see the insides?

Thanks to Seth L, who pointed out these cool pictures in a comment thread about scary settings in scifi movies.

Kursk Wreck [English Russia]

io9: really giant machines

The Roaring, Flaming Maw of the Electric Phosphate Smelting Furnace

Diving Into the Russian Nuclear Sub Wreck