They had one of these in a Chinese restaurant when I was young. I was mesmerised by them and always wanted to know the magic behind it. Thanks for showing it 35 years later!
i used to go to a local flea market with my mom all the time as a kid. i always would go to the same few stalls. one of them had one of these hanging in the back, i loved just looking at it. the place ended up burning down.
I remember a couple of these hanging in a Chinese restaurant we used to visit. After a while the mechanics made a terrible noise and they left them hanging, but un-powered.
The other type of moving picture that I remember from my childhood used oil that was pumped from a reservoir in the bottom and channeled to follow tiny nylon strings back down. There was a light inside that would sparkle off the oil droplets. The effect was generally used to look like rain, but I saw a few that were made to look like a trickle of water making its way down a mossy rock wall. The pump used a gear-reduction box on a motor that ran off mains power. I remember the distinctive sound of the gear box. Later, as an adult, I learned that it was so the pump worked very slowly, since the oil was only traveling down in distinct droplets. I can think of maybe a dozen different ones that I saw as kid.
I thought of that as well. If you were going to do something modern day though, you could just use an LCD screen and microcontroller for nearly the same price.
LEDs can make a lot of things much more viable. Things like Christmas tree fires shouldn't really be an issue anymore because they give off so little heat you could just leave your lights on all the time. And things like this that would be a fire risk and take considerable amounts of power to keep running are completely viable again
When I was a child, we used to stop a a little café on old US Route 66 called "The Ariston Cafe" on the way to St. Louis. They had a picture of a mill on a stream with water flowing by it (my memory is also trying to tell me that the entire scene scrolled along too it was a looong time ago). It used to fascinate me to no end as we waited for our food to be prepared...
I grew up in Northern Wisconsin in the 60s/70s. Every bar/tavern/pub had a sign like this from one of the local beer distributor. I was memorized by them until a friend sold his bar so the state could build the highway wider and I got a good look inside to see the same setup as you show here.
We've still got one of a waterfall that's mounted on a lounge wall, and of which I bought in the 90's from one of those pop-up High Street Christmas shops. It has many air vents drilled into the wooden sides of it, and it squeaks quite a lot when running. So, because of that and the smells that emanate from it, I've not had it running for more than a few minutes per year when family insist on seeing it in action.
I won't lie the first time you showed it it was genuinely mesmerizing. After seeing all the components the magic disappeared for me when you showed it a second time, hahaha. Not in a bad way just in a very analytical way to my brain. I have some appreciation for it now. Its crude but,,, impressive!! In how you get such a pretty effect with simplistic tech
My grandmother had one of these in her kitchen, I remember being fascinated by it as a kid. My grandpa noticed my curiosity one day and brought it down and helped me disassemble it (much to my grandma's chagrin) so I could see how it worked. We reassembled it and it hung on that kitchen for another 30 years until they both passed. RIP Papi and Mami. Edit: She also had a table lamp that had an undersea scene printed on a cylinder that projected onto an outer milky plastic shade with a wavelike shape. When the lamp heated up it would cause the printed scene to rotate which made the fish look like they were swimming with an undulating effect.
In the 70's there were cylindric vertical lamps with a metal cage inside that started to rotate from the heat of the bulb in the center giving a similar effect. The cage started to rotate through the air convection inside the cylinder. I haven't seen them in a while and with LED lamps they wouldn't work as intended.
That reminded me of the electric fire we had when I was a lot younger... There were two radiant 'bars' mounted above a fairly convincing coal bed. Hidden below that a lamp made the lighter parts of the coal bed glow. But the icing on the cherry was a little fan blade balanced/ pivoted above the lamp. Convection turned the 'fan' so the coal embers flickered nicely. I was easily pleased back then.
@@keithmiller5042 We had an electric fire like that when I was little, but the mechanism was even more trivial, it was just a strand of ordinary tinsel that was rotated by a clock motor. The effect was reasonable, however, as the tinsel cast both moving shadows and reflections.
My late wife, who was Chinese, had acouple of these in her restaurant, a suspension bridge crossing a bay at night. In addittion to the moving water all the lights on the bridge cables & supports, plus the streetlights ashore were picked out with tiny ‘pea bulbs’. Customers were fascinated.
I worked in the power generation industry and when I was sent on a course, the training centre had something similar illustrating the steam and water flow through a cut away view of a turbo-alternator.
Now you've said that; I think the „moving“ schematic diagrams used in visitor centres at British nuclear power stations might've worked in largely the same way... 😇
An old beer company in the US called Hamm's used to sell clocks featuring something a lot like that. They were a fixture in dingy-ass bars in the 70s & 80s.
They were a fixture in my dentist's office in the 1960s. He had one facing the chair, with the beer advertising removed. The ripples were supposed to be calming, I guess.
I remember those! Any of those Hamms promos would instantly lower the class of the place by 25% Throw in one of those cheesy Schlitz pool table lights and you had an instant dive bar.
@@xlerb2286 My uncle had a set of those Schlitz lights over his pool table in the basement. I thought it was great when I was a little kid. Whenever I went there I felt swave, suffocated, and deboner. 😀
@@sometimesleela5947 _Ironically_ enough, I think a lot of British-made flame-effect fires of the 50s & 60s used a very similar technique, usually a slitted cylinder with an incandescent bulb inside configured such the heat from the bulb made the cylinder rotate and caused a dancing glow effect on the fiberglass „logs“ at the front. 😇
Good old nostalgia. I haven’t seen one of these in many years but they were quite common when I was younger. I also remember my Grandmother having an oil lamp that was always fascinating to me. They were rather large, bronze colored, and typically a statue of a lady or goddess was encircled with little wires or cables that oil would run down and it would appear almost like rain as the light glimmered over the oil droplets. I haven’t seen one of those in many years either.
I saw something similar in a film and couldn't work out how they made a moving bouncing ball effect, it turned out the front was painted in reverse and the bounce pattern was the only clear part, so as the colours scrolled across the back of the screen, much as does here, only sideways, they could provide different colour bouncing balls, which I thought was a fantastic idea I forget the film, it's the one with the guy who played Al Bundy, while he was in the series Married with Children, it may have been a budwiser sign, I forget, but there if you want to see it I think it turned out the sign was in production for about 20 years, about 1967 to 87 so amazed mroe weren't available online when I checked.
Here in the US there is a beer company called Rainer and the brewery was at Tumwater Washington where there was a waterfall. They had promotional signs that were very similar to this with their waterfall. I always wanted one of those signs. 🙂
Thats a nice object, for some reason it reminds me of a Chinese restaurant in the 80s. could rally do with an upgrading to LEDs but do you stick to constant brightness-colour or see if slight colour changes warm - cool white dimming might make it even more trippy..
Around 1965 my parents had 2 lamps, they both worked the same way. There was an outer semi-opaque lamp shade. There was an inner cylindrical shade that freely rotated, driven by the rising warm air from the incandescent bulb. One was a waterfall, the other was tropical fish appearing to swim round a bowl.
These have been around for a LONG time. My Grandparents had something similar featuring a gent. doing a spot of fly fishing in a "running water" stream. Theirs didn't use a fluorescent fitting, rather, it used two pygmy size "refrigerator interior" type light bulbs, which required reasonably frequent replacement. The casing was sheet steel with substantial ventilation slots top and bottom, whilst the synchronous motor was an old, presumably re-purposed, Smiths Sectric 240v clock motor.
Pygmy lamps? The only other place I ever saw those were in electricians test lamp sets. 💡 So that means your picture there could also double-up as a circuit tester. Now _that's_ what you call getting your moneys worth! 😁
@4:20 The upside-down version seemed even more realistic, as the water-ripple effect seemed to be of a pool-surface and the trees like mirrored reflections above the cut-off water-cascade.
Every Chinese restaurant here in the Netherlands had one of these on a wall back in the 80's... Some were pretty big as well, I remember wondering how these worked when I was a kid
Oh goodie! I cant tell you how much time I have spent looking at that sort of simulated motion image, marvelling and wondering how it did what it did, imagining how it might be done, but never having permission to take it to bits to find out for sure. Sort of calming, hypnotic even. I dont suspect many under 50 would be impressed at all with something like that. My aunt had a lamp that contained oil that when heated by the lamp below would begin to flow oil in droplets down wires to look like a rain shower. Within the simulated rain curtain stood a bronze, nude greek maiden posed as if showering. My mom wouldnt let me marvel at that much. I dont think she believed I was that fascinated with dripping oil.
The LED upgrade would be to record a looping video of the operating display and play it back on one of those LCD picture displays. But I know what you mean. Get rid of the ballast and go with an LED panel. There would still be heat to get rid of without allowing light to escape.
It reminds me of the effects scrollers that go in-front of theatre lanterns. But I don't see that lasting too long if it is mated up with a 1kW tungsten lamp.
I've never seen these before! These seem considerably more peaceful (minus the noise) over the rapidly flashing LED panels, TV screens and monitors most restaurants have these days.
These (And similar) were also around in the 70s - My parents had a couple of desk lamps which had a similar pattern to that plastic, mounted onto a cylinder with vanes suspended from a pin above the bulb and driven by the heat from the latter. It was simple, but the apparent motion of the water in the Japanese scene painted on the lampshade absolutely mesmerised me as a kid! 😇 Kinda like how Big Clive mesmerises me today, admittedly... 😍💜😊
I remember seeing these moving picture for sale in street markets and never in the Hi-street shop and I was thinking WHY? Perhaps there a problem with then. Now I know there could be a burning problem with then. Thanks Clive for showing us that
There was a store in a mall where I used to live they always had these sort of things. paintings with little lightbulbs poked through etc. it was always fun to go in and see the different electrified paintings and artworks.
My Auntie had a similar moving picture. She moved to near Sunderland and must be 55 years ago. The effects are not too bad at all. Thanks Clive an interesting object. 👍👍
Always wanted to see the insides of one of these tacky things! Years ago, I saw a moving cigarette advertisement in a gas station. It appeared to be some kind of lenticular animation with a lined/ruled LCD screen on top to drive the animation by alternately covering/uncovering the lenticular lines. I've never been able to find anything like it, and wish I'd offered to buy it on the spot when I saw it. I guess it might be called an "Active lenticular display"?
damn, I remember being fascinated by one of these when I was little. It was in a pub we went to a few times. I'd completely forgotten. I suppose the recall meant I never saw one again 'til now.
The local Chinese restaurant had one of these that showed waterfalls on the Yangtze River, and it also had a built-in sound module that played the sound of flowing water and birds. I remember after several years the animation stopped working, then eventually they just took it down entirely.
Thanks for the internal view! I saw two of these in a Chinese restaurant near my house, some 20 years ago, and it attracted a lot of attention. Maybe you could convert yours to LED, although the synchronous motor would be a problem - I have a Christmas tree that uses a GU10 lamp and moving patterns to create color effects on fiber optic strings spread out through the branches. The (huge) AC-AC transformer was lost between houses and I didn't change it to LED, because of the synchronous motor (buying a DC low rpm motor is an overkill for a very old tree, that would still need a DC power supply). It's still in use this Holiday season, with cheap Chinese LED strings, running on batteries 🙂
We have quite a few of those, and the clear class cubes and rectangle blocks with the 3d Lazer etched pictures inside. We made friends with a couple that went to various fairs and Christmas bazaars all over the West side of the US. When they came to our area we'd help them set up and take down their booth and sell the chachtkis. It was fun and we got some money and free parking and tickets so we'd wander around on breaks. Haven't turned on the one we have over a bedroom door from the living room, but it, or any of the others never smelled hot or caught fire. The cubes and pictures just started getting more expensive and the market was saturated so they just went away and our friends aged out and retired eventually.
Hamm’s beer signs were my favorite kinetics. In addition to the horizontal background filter ripple effect, a vertical conveyor provided an ever-changing panoramic image. Think it was called Scene-O-Rama.
They had similar ones, less flammable I imagine, in "cheap shops" here in AU, they used a spinning disk with patterns rather than a roller and I think incandescent bulbs rather than the fluro tubes. They had some very nice designs, and as someone else said a mesmerising quality.
I remember a variation of this as a child at my grandparents’ house 65+ years ago. It was a vertical cylindrical lamp illuminated with an incandescent bulb. The inner rotating cylinder had vanes at the top, which caused it to rotate from the rising warm air. The good old days and fond memories.
Those were everywhere in the early '90s...every flea market had stalls selling them, and smaller diners sometimes had several around. One of the coolest ones I remember was at a local mall, and was a storm scene on the ocean. .it was also one of the largest... picture window sized.
oh this brings me back I remember those pictures, I think they even had them at disney. I always thought the plasticy sound was meant to represent the water/rain.
I'd guess that the wires are intended as anti-static measures, although it's unclear what (if anything) they're connected to. It's noisy because the top belt has wandered.
These things definitely still exist. Hispanic-dominant flea markets here in the states still have these by the hundreds, not sure if they're made the same way now or not. I honestly don't suspect much has changed in them though because the effect they give is absolutely identical.
Well, THAT'S shattered the illusion, Big Clive! I expected something a little more "sophisticated" on the inside! ... That picture is a lot like me. Enigmatic on the outside. Simple on the inside! 🤣
I like the effect! It could be modified, just by removing that paper and cutting out a big section of the back for more air flow. Maybe even a more modern low heat light tube. Of course none of that might work, and it might still go up in flames!
it's really cool (or hot). I bet they were expensive when new.. I had a car race game which had a similar revolving sheet for the movement of the road.
1:35 “This is just not fitting very well, is it? Right, give me a moment. I’m just going to try to get it into a good position” …said the actress to the Bishop! 😂
I read “dodgy” and, for whatever reason thought “lewd”… so now I’m torn between the satisfaction of a good technical explanation and disappointment that there wasn’t some naughty Easter egg built in for whomever opened the thing 😅
If the frame was made from something more suitable like aluminium and the wiring was a little cleaner I wouldnt see much of a problem. The motion is really beautiful to look at
replacing the starter with a LED starter (just a wire link or a fuse inside) and the fluorecant tube with an LED tube will get rid of the fire hazard. the ballast can also be jumped with a Wago connector and completely removed, shedding a lot of weight off of the picture
I have such a strange nostalgia for these and not quite sure why? I think they were ubiquitous in Chinese buffet restaurants and some of those Asian shops in the mall? I always thought they looked really cool! Would be neat to make an LED version that's sorta reverse version of those fire lights.
I have "forest fire" lamp my mother had. It is a cylinder plastic picture similar to the waterfall, and inside another cylinder suspended internally by a pointed rod. An incandescent lamp heats the inside and spins the inner cylinder by the heat from the lamp. This lamp would not work with leds, unless a motor were installed...
Doesnt seem too hard to make it less flammable. Should probably be painted with flame-retardant paint instead of the paper backing, and then just make sure the ballast isnt too small for the limited cooling in there and the motor fails safely in case it gets blocked somehow (thermal fuse maybe).
Ballast runs hot because it is designed to be used with a heat spreader as mounting, not plastic. Even with that they run up to 75C above ambient, and are rated up to 130C surface temperature, well above the operating point for most plastics. Easiest fix is a drop in electronic ballast on an aluminium strip, running along the entire top of the cabinet, which will run a lot cooler, and the strip is also needed with the electronic ballast as it too needs it to dissipate heat. Seen many cooked ballasts as the aquarium trade used to put the magnetic ballast in a plastic case for fish tank lights, which would almost invariably fail after 2 years, either by going open circuit after melting the plastic case to expose it, or by going short circuit, blowing the expensive fish lamp, generally 2, as most people first changed the lamp, and the shorted ballast them blowing the filaments open on the new lamp as well. Otherwise a simple LED retrofit tube will work, or just put in a strip of aluminium angle, with LED tape mounted on top and side, and a small 12V power supply for the tape. Angle so you get light up and to the side, and a diffuser on the top to spread the light, so as not to get hot spots above the LED dies. not needed on the side as the reflector will do that anyway.
You would see these things in Chinese restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s. I also remember stalls on the indoor market (sadly no more, as the owners gradually squoze out stallholders with rent increases) selling them. I never bought one, because I thought they cost just a little more than I was prepared to spend on something I would get bored of very quickly. And in any case, the one thing on that market that I was _really_ lusting after was a ginormous boom box which had suitably-impressive speakers, FM all the way up to 108, short wave, and the usual two cassette decks -- except what made this one really special was, the play-only deck was a car-style slot loader with single "press gently for fast-forward, press harder to eject" button .....
They still produce those for simulated fireplace or lantern decorations. Use just the same mechanism of a moving foil, but of course backlighted with LEDs these days. You can get them quite cheap at the usual Chinese shopping sites, I thought about buying one last year, as I thought it looked really nice and quite realistic. But I don't really have much place to put it here and the motor noise is also a downside, so I decided against it.
This reminds me of some beer advertising signs that my uncle would bring home from the tavern he worked at in the 60’s. They made great night lights for the main living area of the house.
my grandmother had several "forest fire" diorama drums in her living room, I guess those were similar in concept but quiet and IIRC They weren't motorized and the movement came from hot air rising from the 40 or 60 watt incandescent bulb inside, and on the top there was sort of a fan connected to the moving part of the drum. it might be interesting to see the diffuse light source of the fluorescent tube in your flat diorama replaced with a finer beam type light such as a clear argon display tube.
I always enjoyed these. I'm guessing the wires are to keep the clear plastic belt from rubbing the back of the image off. I wonder how much static electricity you could build up inside one of those if things aren't quite right. Also, they definitely need the fluorescent light. Leds are good, but even the cold white doesn't get the right tone.
If they had ever made one with a bonfire theme, that would cause confusion, sitting watching the pretty flames, "never seen that smoke effect before, even smells like real smoke, wonder how they achieved that?"
We "inherited" a bunch of craptastic decorations for a bar in the finished basement, and one of them was a b33r glass, one of those tall conical ones, that was always being endlessly filled by an apparently limitless bottle. Noisy af, though. Oh, I should add that the decoration was pre-1970.
I have a guess, the wire across the conveyor might have the purpose, apart from holding the foil down to provide a bit of earthing, to ground possible static electricity. These plastic foils are prone to stick quite nastily to the glass when statically loaded otherwise and generate a lot of friction.
Similar to the effect on my electric fire, just orange LEDs inside a rotating metal tube with random flame shaped cutouts in it, projected onto the back of a black plastic sheet with translucent random stripes on it, the 2 mesh together, it's a nice effect with the glowing coal and embers 😊 I like the newer smokey type coal, flame fx nowadays though. I seem to remember a really big version of the waterfall in a Chinese takeaway in the 80s.
neat, really wish i had kept some of the tacky décor we had when i was a kid. kinda miss the look of the old fiberoptic flowers, rain lamps etc. they would be cool to modernize.
I'd expected it to use some kind of polarized filters with a rotating polarized disc, etc. But as always, the simple approach seems to work best. Now Clive, can you do the LED upgrade, possibly even moving the light source into a little sidecar for better ventilation? And most importantly, will that waterfall carbonate?
They had one of these in a Chinese restaurant when I was young. I was mesmerised by them and always wanted to know the magic behind it. Thanks for showing it 35 years later!
Our local Chinese had one until an interior refurbishment a couple of years ago.
@@johnnodge4327Was that after the fire? 😂
I immediately thought of seeing one in a chinese restaurant
I've only ever seen these in Chinese restaurants.
good, it's not just me lol
People may think that this is a bit of cheesy technology, however this is the innovation that brought us into this age. No idea is wasted.
i used to go to a local flea market with my mom all the time as a kid. i always would go to the same few stalls. one of them had one of these hanging in the back, i loved just looking at it.
the place ended up burning down.
I remember a couple of these hanging in a Chinese restaurant we used to visit. After a while the mechanics made a terrible noise and they left them hanging, but un-powered.
"the place ended up burning down" I wonder why...
The other type of moving picture that I remember from my childhood used oil that was pumped from a reservoir in the bottom and channeled to follow tiny nylon strings back down. There was a light inside that would sparkle off the oil droplets. The effect was generally used to look like rain, but I saw a few that were made to look like a trickle of water making its way down a mossy rock wall. The pump used a gear-reduction box on a motor that ran off mains power. I remember the distinctive sound of the gear box. Later, as an adult, I learned that it was so the pump worked very slowly, since the oil was only traveling down in distinct droplets. I can think of maybe a dozen different ones that I saw as kid.
Those oil drop lamps looked wonderful until they ran for a few months and got clogged up with dust and gnats.
I seem to remember lots of Chinese food takeaways had them in the 70s and 80s. Very nostalgic.
Chinese buffets around here still had them 10 years ago or so.
Looks like a LED upgrade project.
Cultural vandalism
With scavenged backlight from broken LCD monitor
I thought of that as well. If you were going to do something modern day though, you could just use an LCD screen and microcontroller for nearly the same price.
LEDs can make a lot of things much more viable. Things like Christmas tree fires shouldn't really be an issue anymore because they give off so little heat you could just leave your lights on all the time. And things like this that would be a fire risk and take considerable amounts of power to keep running are completely viable again
@TransistorBased what was your point.
5 minutes straight to the point, no padding it out for ads. you are a saint.
When I was a child, we used to stop a a little café on old US Route 66 called "The Ariston Cafe" on the way to St. Louis. They had a picture of a mill on a stream with water flowing by it (my memory is also trying to tell me that the entire scene scrolled along too it was a looong time ago). It used to fascinate me to no end as we waited for our food to be prepared...
I grew up in Northern Wisconsin in the 60s/70s. Every bar/tavern/pub had a sign like this from one of the local beer distributor. I was memorized by them until a friend sold his bar so the state could build the highway wider and I got a good look inside to see the same setup as you show here.
Are you still a Fellow Cheesehead ? HAHAHAH
Wausau /Merrill since 1974....
We've still got one of a waterfall that's mounted on a lounge wall, and of which I bought in the 90's from one of those pop-up High Street Christmas shops. It has many air vents drilled into the wooden sides of it, and it squeaks quite a lot when running. So, because of that and the smells that emanate from it, I've not had it running for more than a few minutes per year when family insist on seeing it in action.
My local bar has a Hamms beer "Scene-o-rama" like that from 1956. Classic.
Yes I remember that sign I was think of Rainer beer but it must have been Hamms !
I won't lie the first time you showed it it was genuinely mesmerizing. After seeing all the components the magic disappeared for me when you showed it a second time, hahaha. Not in a bad way just in a very analytical way to my brain. I have some appreciation for it now. Its crude but,,, impressive!! In how you get such a pretty effect with simplistic tech
"I'm standing on a seat now" - bigbigclive
biggerclive
My grandmother had one of these in her kitchen, I remember being fascinated by it as a kid. My grandpa noticed my curiosity one day and brought it down and helped me disassemble it (much to my grandma's chagrin) so I could see how it worked. We reassembled it and it hung on that kitchen for another 30 years until they both passed. RIP Papi and Mami.
Edit: She also had a table lamp that had an undersea scene printed on a cylinder that projected onto an outer milky plastic shade with a wavelike shape. When the lamp heated up it would cause the printed scene to rotate which made the fish look like they were swimming with an undulating effect.
These were so ubiquitous growing up. Thanks for the stroll down nostalgia lane Clive!
In the 70's there were cylindric vertical lamps with a metal cage inside that started to rotate from the heat of the bulb in the center giving a similar effect. The cage started to rotate through the air convection inside the cylinder. I haven't seen them in a while and with LED lamps they wouldn't work as intended.
Those were popular here too.
That reminded me of the electric fire we had when I was a lot younger... There were two radiant 'bars' mounted above a fairly convincing coal bed. Hidden below that a lamp made the lighter parts of the coal bed glow. But the icing on the cherry was a little fan blade balanced/ pivoted above the lamp. Convection turned the 'fan' so the coal embers flickered nicely. I was easily pleased back then.
@@keithmiller5042 We had an electric fire like that when I was little, but the mechanism was even more trivial, it was just a strand of ordinary tinsel that was rotated by a clock motor. The effect was reasonable, however, as the tinsel cast both moving shadows and reflections.
crikey thats brought back memory's, can almost smell the lamp melting the plastic base .
That's the style of lamp I was thinking of in my comment. Presumably, the picture frames were a logical evolution of the same. 😇
My late wife, who was Chinese, had acouple of these in her restaurant, a suspension bridge crossing a bay at night. In addittion to the moving water all the lights on the bridge cables & supports, plus the streetlights ashore were picked out with tiny ‘pea bulbs’. Customers were fascinated.
My guess is the wire across the belt is to remove static build up.
I disagree. I think the wires are to maintain tension on the plastic strip, so it doesn't flex randomly while moving.
The upper one, at least, doesn't appear to be electrically connected to anything
I worked in the power generation industry and when I was sent on a course, the training centre had something similar illustrating the steam and water flow through a cut away view of a turbo-alternator.
Now you've said that; I think the „moving“ schematic diagrams used in visitor centres at British nuclear power stations might've worked in largely the same way... 😇
An old beer company in the US called Hamm's used to sell clocks featuring something a lot like that. They were a fixture in dingy-ass bars in the 70s & 80s.
They were a fixture in my dentist's office in the 1960s. He had one facing the chair, with the beer advertising removed. The ripples were supposed to be calming, I guess.
I remember those! Any of those Hamms promos would instantly lower the class of the place by 25% Throw in one of those cheesy Schlitz pool table lights and you had an instant dive bar.
@@xlerb2286 My uncle had a set of those Schlitz lights over his pool table in the basement. I thought it was great when I was a little kid. Whenever I went there I felt swave, suffocated, and deboner. 😀
Burning water, it could have been a very dramatic effect.
They could have pegged the irony meter by animating a fireplace scene this way.
@@sometimesleela5947 _Ironically_ enough, I think a lot of British-made flame-effect fires of the 50s & 60s used a very similar technique, usually a slitted cylinder with an incandescent bulb inside configured such the heat from the bulb made the cylinder rotate and caused a dancing glow effect on the fiberglass „logs“ at the front. 😇
Good old nostalgia. I haven’t seen one of these in many years but they were quite common when I was younger. I also remember my Grandmother having an oil lamp that was always fascinating to me. They were rather large, bronze colored, and typically a statue of a lady or goddess was encircled with little wires or cables that oil would run down and it would appear almost like rain as the light glimmered over the oil droplets. I haven’t seen one of those in many years either.
The raining oil fountains were very messy.
Sounds like the oil fountain at the end of "Adventure Thru Inner Space", a ride of early Disneyland
I saw something similar in a film and couldn't work out how they made a moving bouncing ball effect, it turned out the front was painted in reverse and the bounce pattern was the only clear part, so as the colours scrolled across the back of the screen, much as does here, only sideways, they could provide different colour bouncing balls, which I thought was a fantastic idea
I forget the film, it's the one with the guy who played Al Bundy, while he was in the series Married with Children, it may have been a budwiser sign, I forget, but there if you want to see it
I think it turned out the sign was in production for about 20 years, about 1967 to 87 so amazed mroe weren't available online when I checked.
I seem to recall seeing in person a Budweiser sign of similar description.
Oh My, Same one at the local bar when I was a kid. Adults and Kids for the lunch hour. Thanks much for the trip down memory lane.
Here in the US there is a beer company called Rainer and the brewery was at Tumwater Washington where there was a waterfall. They had promotional signs that were very similar to this with their waterfall. I always wanted one of those signs. 🙂
Sorry it was Olympia brewery.
Thats a nice object, for some reason it reminds me of a Chinese restaurant in the 80s. could rally do with an upgrading to LEDs but do you stick to constant brightness-colour or see if slight colour changes warm - cool white dimming might make it even more trippy..
Used to have them in virtually every Chinese restaurant in the 80s and 90s
Probably very well to be modernised with a LED-TL-style lamp so it will be keeping its cool for way longer.
Around 1965 my parents had 2 lamps, they both worked the same way. There was an outer semi-opaque lamp shade. There was an inner cylindrical shade that freely rotated, driven by the rising warm air from the incandescent bulb. One was a waterfall, the other was tropical fish appearing to swim round a bowl.
These have been around for a LONG time. My Grandparents had something similar featuring a gent. doing a spot of fly fishing in a "running water" stream. Theirs didn't use a fluorescent fitting, rather, it used two pygmy size "refrigerator interior" type light bulbs, which required reasonably frequent replacement. The casing was sheet steel with substantial ventilation slots top and bottom, whilst the synchronous motor was an old, presumably re-purposed, Smiths Sectric 240v clock motor.
Pygmy lamps? The only other place I ever saw those were in electricians test lamp sets. 💡
So that means your picture there could also double-up as a circuit tester. Now _that's_ what you call getting your moneys worth! 😁
@4:20 The upside-down version seemed even more realistic, as the water-ripple effect seemed to be of a pool-surface and the trees like mirrored reflections above the cut-off water-cascade.
But then you mis the red deer they tried to incorporate on the left of the image.
Every Chinese restaurant here in the Netherlands had one of these on a wall back in the 80's... Some were pretty big as well, I remember wondering how these worked when I was a kid
Memories...👍👍 Thanks Clive
Oh goodie! I cant tell you how much time I have spent looking at that sort of simulated motion image, marvelling and wondering how it did what it did, imagining how it might be done, but never having permission to take it to bits to find out for sure. Sort of calming, hypnotic even.
I dont suspect many under 50 would be impressed at all with something like that.
My aunt had a lamp that contained oil that when heated by the lamp below would begin to flow oil in droplets down wires to look like a rain shower. Within the simulated rain curtain stood a bronze, nude greek maiden posed as if showering. My mom wouldnt let me marvel at that much. I dont think she believed I was that fascinated with dripping oil.
A lovely visit to Nostalgia Lane.
Thank you BC 👏👏👏👍
Now I'm wondering where my old Hamms Beer sign got off to. Not sure if it used the same design.
Grew up in Northern Wisconsin, and I think every bar had one of their motion signs in them.
These and those oil rain lamps were the gold standard for a cool uncle's pad in the 80s
I was hoping for an LED upgrade. Thanks for showing the insides.
The LED upgrade would be to record a looping video of the operating display and play it back on one of those LCD picture displays.
But I know what you mean. Get rid of the ballast and go with an LED panel. There would still be heat to get rid of without allowing light to escape.
It reminds me of the effects scrollers that go in-front of theatre lanterns. But I don't see that lasting too long if it is mated up with a 1kW tungsten lamp.
I've never seen these before! These seem considerably more peaceful (minus the noise) over the rapidly flashing LED panels, TV screens and monitors most restaurants have these days.
These (And similar) were also around in the 70s - My parents had a couple of desk lamps which had a similar pattern to that plastic, mounted onto a cylinder with vanes suspended from a pin above the bulb and driven by the heat from the latter. It was simple, but the apparent motion of the water in the Japanese scene painted on the lampshade absolutely mesmerised me as a kid! 😇
Kinda like how Big Clive mesmerises me today, admittedly... 😍💜😊
I've always wanted one of these, but I didn't even know how to describe what I was looking for. Thank you clive!
They were all the rage in Chinese restaurants thirty years ago! 😁
I remember seeing these moving picture for sale in street markets and never in the Hi-street shop and I was thinking WHY? Perhaps there a problem with then. Now I know there could be a burning problem with then. Thanks Clive for showing us that
There was a store in a mall where I used to live they always had these sort of things. paintings with little lightbulbs poked through etc. it was always fun to go in and see the different electrified paintings and artworks.
Oh jeez I remember seeing some of these in the 90s. I forgot they existed. Thanks for sharing and taking me back to my childhood.
Convert it to LED perhaps?
Yeah! Swap that fluro tube for a nice UVC tube. /j
no, no... convert it to run off an oil lamp!
i always wanted 1 of these, they had a cool flower that would bloom in a repeating pattern in a restaurant i remember
My Auntie had a similar moving picture. She moved to near Sunderland and must be 55 years ago. The effects are not too bad at all. Thanks Clive an interesting object. 👍👍
Always wanted to see the insides of one of these tacky things!
Years ago, I saw a moving cigarette advertisement in a gas station. It appeared to be some kind of lenticular animation with a lined/ruled LCD screen on top to drive the animation by alternately covering/uncovering the lenticular lines. I've never been able to find anything like it, and wish I'd offered to buy it on the spot when I saw it. I guess it might be called an "Active lenticular display"?
Combustion imminent smell - ROFL - love it! I noticed this odor on other odds and ends and now I know what to call it!
damn, I remember being fascinated by one of these when I was little. It was in a pub we went to a few times. I'd completely forgotten. I suppose the recall meant I never saw one again 'til now.
The local Chinese restaurant had one of these that showed waterfalls on the Yangtze River, and it also had a built-in sound module that played the sound of flowing water and birds. I remember after several years the animation stopped working, then eventually they just took it down entirely.
Loved these as a kid!
Thanks for the internal view! I saw two of these in a Chinese restaurant near my house, some 20 years ago, and it attracted a lot of attention.
Maybe you could convert yours to LED, although the synchronous motor would be a problem - I have a Christmas tree that uses a GU10 lamp and moving patterns to create color effects on fiber optic strings spread out through the branches. The (huge) AC-AC transformer was lost between houses and I didn't change it to LED, because of the synchronous motor (buying a DC low rpm motor is an overkill for a very old tree, that would still need a DC power supply). It's still in use this Holiday season, with cheap Chinese LED strings, running on batteries 🙂
We have quite a few of those, and the clear class cubes and rectangle blocks with the 3d Lazer etched pictures inside. We made friends with a couple that went to various fairs and Christmas bazaars all over the West side of the US. When they came to our area we'd help them set up and take down their booth and sell the chachtkis. It was fun and we got some money and free parking and tickets so we'd wander around on breaks.
Haven't turned on the one we have over a bedroom door from the living room, but it, or any of the others never smelled hot or caught fire. The cubes and pictures just started getting more expensive and the market was saturated so they just went away and our friends aged out and retired eventually.
Hamm’s beer signs were my favorite kinetics. In addition to the horizontal background filter ripple effect, a vertical conveyor provided an ever-changing panoramic image. Think it was called Scene-O-Rama.
They had similar ones, less flammable I imagine, in "cheap shops" here in AU, they used a spinning disk with patterns rather than a roller and I think incandescent bulbs rather than the fluro tubes. They had some very nice designs, and as someone else said a mesmerising quality.
What's interesting is how many people, like myself, remember these in bars from when they were kids. The 70's were different.
I love the fact that your light is held up with ''Fixing Band'' how industrial of you! ... i could see it in the reflection of the glass 😄😄😄
Quite a cool effect! 👍
I remember a variation of this as a child at my grandparents’ house 65+ years ago. It was a vertical cylindrical lamp illuminated with an incandescent bulb. The inner rotating cylinder had vanes at the top, which caused it to rotate from the rising warm air. The good old days and fond memories.
Those were everywhere in the early '90s...every flea market had stalls selling them, and smaller diners sometimes had several around.
One of the coolest ones I remember was at a local mall, and was a storm scene on the ocean. .it was also one of the largest... picture window sized.
The kind of thing which would make any interior designer recoil in fear like garlic to a vampire! 🫣
oh this brings me back I remember those pictures, I think they even had them at disney. I always thought the plasticy sound was meant to represent the water/rain.
I'd guess that the wires are intended as anti-static measures, although it's unclear what (if anything) they're connected to. It's noisy because the top belt has wandered.
Very cool, love to see the use of practical effects to make the magic happen instead of digital trickery.
Brings back some nostalgia
I remember those aquariums
Which I would stare for a whole evening
These things definitely still exist. Hispanic-dominant flea markets here in the states still have these by the hundreds, not sure if they're made the same way now or not. I honestly don't suspect much has changed in them though because the effect they give is absolutely identical.
Well, THAT'S shattered the illusion, Big Clive! I expected something a little more "sophisticated" on the inside! ... That picture is a lot like me. Enigmatic on the outside. Simple on the inside! 🤣
I remember seeing these things in bars back in the day. They were quite entrancing when I was a kid.
I saw an electric fireplace made the same way. I figured it must be a 60's thing, had no idea it was so modern.
I like the effect! It could be modified, just by removing that paper and cutting out a big section of the back for more air flow. Maybe even a more modern low heat light tube. Of course none of that might work, and it might still go up in flames!
it's really cool (or hot). I bet they were expensive when new.. I had a car race game which had a similar revolving sheet for the movement of the road.
1:35 “This is just not fitting very well, is it? Right, give me a moment. I’m just going to try to get it into a good position”
…said the actress to the Bishop! 😂
I read “dodgy” and, for whatever reason thought “lewd”… so now I’m torn between the satisfaction of a good technical explanation and disappointment that there wasn’t some naughty Easter egg built in for whomever opened the thing 😅
A more modern version might be a fun project...gonna have to check this out :)
"Three stars, items was very pretty, until it burnt my house down. That was also pretty ... while it lasted."
If the frame was made from something more suitable like aluminium and the wiring was a little cleaner I wouldnt see much of a problem. The motion is really beautiful to look at
replacing the starter with a LED starter (just a wire link or a fuse inside) and the fluorecant tube with an LED tube will get rid of the fire hazard. the ballast can also be jumped with a Wago connector and completely removed, shedding a lot of weight off of the picture
I have such a strange nostalgia for these and not quite sure why? I think they were ubiquitous in Chinese buffet restaurants and some of those Asian shops in the mall? I always thought they looked really cool! Would be neat to make an LED version that's sorta reverse version of those fire lights.
I have "forest fire" lamp my mother had. It is a cylinder plastic picture similar to the waterfall, and inside another cylinder suspended internally by a pointed rod. An incandescent lamp heats the inside and spins the inner cylinder by the heat from the lamp. This lamp would not work with leds, unless a motor were installed...
Doesnt seem too hard to make it less flammable. Should probably be painted with flame-retardant paint instead of the paper backing, and then just make sure the ballast isnt too small for the limited cooling in there and the motor fails safely in case it gets blocked somehow (thermal fuse maybe).
Ballast runs hot because it is designed to be used with a heat spreader as mounting, not plastic. Even with that they run up to 75C above ambient, and are rated up to 130C surface temperature, well above the operating point for most plastics. Easiest fix is a drop in electronic ballast on an aluminium strip, running along the entire top of the cabinet, which will run a lot cooler, and the strip is also needed with the electronic ballast as it too needs it to dissipate heat.
Seen many cooked ballasts as the aquarium trade used to put the magnetic ballast in a plastic case for fish tank lights, which would almost invariably fail after 2 years, either by going open circuit after melting the plastic case to expose it, or by going short circuit, blowing the expensive fish lamp, generally 2, as most people first changed the lamp, and the shorted ballast them blowing the filaments open on the new lamp as well.
Otherwise a simple LED retrofit tube will work, or just put in a strip of aluminium angle, with LED tape mounted on top and side, and a small 12V power supply for the tape. Angle so you get light up and to the side, and a diffuser on the top to spread the light, so as not to get hot spots above the LED dies. not needed on the side as the reflector will do that anyway.
I remember cylindrical lamps similar to this, but the gimmick was driven by the heat of the lamp, escaping through fan blades…..that was in the 50s!
Yep, with an orange bulb, et voilà, tasteful flames for yr electric heater.
You would see these things in Chinese restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s. I also remember stalls on the indoor market (sadly no more, as the owners gradually squoze out stallholders with rent increases) selling them.
I never bought one, because I thought they cost just a little more than I was prepared to spend on something I would get bored of very quickly. And in any case, the one thing on that market that I was _really_ lusting after was a ginormous boom box which had suitably-impressive speakers, FM all the way up to 108, short wave, and the usual two cassette decks -- except what made this one really special was, the play-only deck was a car-style slot loader with single "press gently for fast-forward, press harder to eject" button .....
Well, the effect does look amazing. Maybe it is time for an upgrade to LED to remove the fire hazard.
They still produce those for simulated fireplace or lantern decorations. Use just the same mechanism of a moving foil, but of course backlighted with LEDs these days. You can get them quite cheap at the usual Chinese shopping sites, I thought about buying one last year, as I thought it looked really nice and quite realistic. But I don't really have much place to put it here and the motor noise is also a downside, so I decided against it.
Thanks for showing us this die-orama picture. Hot stuff!
This reminds me of some beer advertising signs that my uncle would bring home from the tavern he worked at in the 60’s. They made great night lights for the main living area of the house.
my grandmother had several "forest fire" diorama drums in her living room, I guess those were similar in concept but quiet and IIRC They weren't motorized and the movement came from hot air rising from the 40 or 60 watt incandescent bulb inside, and on the top there was sort of a fan connected to the moving part of the drum.
it might be interesting to see the diffuse light source of the fluorescent tube in your flat diorama replaced with a finer beam type light such as a clear argon display tube.
I always enjoyed these. I'm guessing the wires are to keep the clear plastic belt from rubbing the back of the image off. I wonder how much static electricity you could build up inside one of those if things aren't quite right.
Also, they definitely need the fluorescent light. Leds are good, but even the cold white doesn't get the right tone.
I fondly remember those. A pleasing effect when not bursting into flames.
If they had ever made one with a bonfire theme, that would cause confusion, sitting watching the pretty flames, "never seen that smoke effect before,
even smells like real smoke,
wonder how they achieved that?"
We "inherited" a bunch of craptastic decorations for a bar in the finished basement, and one of them was a b33r glass, one of those tall conical ones, that was always being endlessly filled by an apparently limitless bottle. Noisy af, though.
Oh, I should add that the decoration was pre-1970.
I have a guess, the wire across the conveyor might have the purpose, apart from holding the foil down to provide a bit of earthing, to ground possible static electricity. These plastic foils are prone to stick quite nastily to the glass when statically loaded otherwise and generate a lot of friction.
These things seemed to be hanging in every Chinese restaurant in the 1980s and I was curious how they worked.
Similar to the effect on my electric fire, just orange LEDs inside a rotating metal tube with random flame shaped cutouts in it, projected onto the back of a black plastic sheet with translucent random stripes on it, the 2 mesh together, it's a nice effect with the glowing coal and embers 😊 I like the newer smokey type coal, flame fx nowadays though. I seem to remember a really big version of the waterfall in a Chinese takeaway in the 80s.
neat, really wish i had kept some of the tacky décor we had when i was a kid. kinda miss the look of the old fiberoptic flowers, rain lamps etc. they would be cool to modernize.
I'd expected it to use some kind of polarized filters with a rotating polarized disc, etc. But as always, the simple approach seems to work best.
Now Clive, can you do the LED upgrade, possibly even moving the light source into a little sidecar for better ventilation?
And most importantly, will that waterfall carbonate?