For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed.

Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answer was a lacquer made from nitrocellulose, the guncotton left over from First World War explosives. The same chemistry runs through early film, the first plastics, the paint on a model kit, and the resin in a 3D printer. Marc and Renee trace it from a mark of royalty to a shelf at the local salon.

Shout out to Lilly's in Maidstone - https://www.instagram.com/lillysnailsmaidstone or https://lillysnailsmaidstone.mytreatwell.co.uk/

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry.

Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose.

Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish.

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Slow it down
Colour runs
Leave it now
Leave it once
A line bends out
Into light
The wet says wait

[Pre-Chorus]
I want to move
I want to know
The wet says wait
So I let go

[Chorus]
Level out
Just level out
Every mark I make
Goes soft somehow
Level out
Just level out
Leave it still
And watch it glow

[Verse 2]
Quiet room
Nothing said
Colour settles
On its own
Someone knew
Long before
The wet says wait
And so I wait

[Bridge]
I rush
I pull
I break
I know
Hold me here
Hold me slow
Maybe I
Could learn to glow

[Final Chorus]
Level out
Just level out
Every mark I make
Goes soft somehow
Level out
Just level out
Leave me still
And watch me glow

[Outro]
The wet says wait
The wet says wait
Level out...

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet.

Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to cool yellow fever patients in 1840s Florida and died bankrupt. Jacob Perkins patented the first vapour-compression machine in 1834 and nobody cared. And Thomas Midgley Jr., who invented the safe refrigerant Freon that finally put a fridge in every kitchen, also invented leaded gasoline (poisoning the entire planet), and was eventually strangled to death by an elaborate pulley system he'd built to help himself out of bed. He is, by most measures, the single human being who has done the most environmental damage in history.

The thing they built sits in your kitchen holding a thermodynamic wall between food and not-food. You don't think about it because it works.

This is the story of how cold became cheap.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.