Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow.

But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that went missing. So, today's song is all about the one that slipped out the lint trap to freedom.

Song today. Episode tomorrow.

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Warm water. One last turn.
A seam in the back, a way to run.
Slipped out clean and caught the breeze.
Out past the trap to the open air.
Left my whole life folded there.
[Pre-Chorus]
They'll count us tonight.
And come up short.
I'm nobody's pair no more.
[Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one. (Just one)
Out past the lint trap, into the sun.
Keep my other half folded in the drawer.
I'm gone.
I'm nobody's pair no more.
(one went missing)
[Verse 2]
Out the back, the world ran wide.
Whole world humming on the other side.
No more sorted, bleached, or paired.
No more matched, no more compared.
Just me. Just road. Just gone.
[Pre-Chorus]
Count again.
Still comin' up short.
[Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one. (Just one)
Out past the lint trap, chasing the sun.
My other half folded in the drawer.
I'm gone. I'm nobody's pair no more.
(one went missing)
[Bridge]
Still miss my partner, my fuzzy friend.
Toe to heel, the way we grew.
But sometimes a sock has to go it alone.
[Final Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one.
Out past the lint trap, into the sun.
You'll keep my place a while, then close the drawer.
I'm gone. And I don't ache for home no more.
(one went missing)
[Outro - vocal fading]
One went missing...
go it alone...
Just one.

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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

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow.

Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator.

For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the avocado green tank in a neighbour's garage.

This week's song is all about the Cold One on the Porch. A jaunty poppy yacht rock piece.

[Verse 1]
Lights out in the kitchen
Screen door swingin' open
Out on the back porch
Where the night begins
There's a chair that knows me
A song on the radio
And the cold one waitin'
Right there for me

[Pre-Chorus]
Reach for the handle
Light spills out yellow
Take that bottle out
And settle in slow

[Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Verse 2]
Bottle's gone cool
Sweat on the bottom
Boots up on the railin'
Fireflies coming out
Same way my dad sat
Same hour, same view
Same hand on the bottle
Same cold one in mine

[Pre-Chorus]
Reach for the handle
Cold air comes rollin'
Take what you came for
That hum keeps going

[Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Bridge]
Held the wedding leftovers
Held the funeral pies
Held the milk for the cereal
When it's too hot to rise
Held the pop for the cousins
Held the ice for every ache
Holds the cold one in my hand right now
Same as ever, never moved

[Final Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Outro - vocal fading]
Bless the cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

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.

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!

The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through, is a remarkable engineering achievement.
Rome had running-water toilets two thousand years ago, watched the idea swirl down the drain when the empire fell, and didn't pick it back up until the 1590's, when Queen Elizabeth's "saucy godson" Sir John Harington invented the first proper flush toilet. Things start to flow after a Scottish watchmaker invents the S-bend in 1775, a Victorian plumber called Thomas Crapper builds his name into a coincidence too perfect to waste, and the Great Stink of 1858 finally drives Parliament to build the sewers that become the single biggest reason most of us are alive. Then we wash up in Japan, where TOTO treats the toilet as serious technology, and we close on the billions of people who still do not have a safe toilet at all.
Special guest: a twelve-year-old history buff, a genuine Tudor expert, who carries the Harington section of our story.

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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.

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

Tomorrow we talk about a piece of tech that was millennia in the making. The humble flush toilet. We have a special guest coming in to record on this one to help us with the story.

But you can't make a song about flushing toilets without thinking about the things that water washes away. Physical and emotional. So, this song is all about flushing things away. And the little trap that keeps the bad stuff from coming up and stinking up your life again.

Lyrics below

[Verse 1]
End of a long Tuesday
Closed the door behind me
The day went down the drain
The way the days do
Water did its work
Carried what it could
Watched it disappear
The way I wished it would
[Pre-Chorus]
But somewhere down the bend
Where the water always sits
The smallest of the things
The smallest of the things
[Chorus]
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
But the trap holds a little
Of every yesterday
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
But a small part of you
Won't be carried away
[Verse 2]
Wedding ring down the drain
Wine poured out in the sink
Tears unseen in the shower
A day rinsed off my hands
Water takes things away
What it can, what it can
Underneath, beneath the bend
Is where the rest of it falls
[Pre-Chorus]
And somewhere down the bend
Where the water always sits
The deepest of the things
The deepest of the things
[Chorus]
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
But the trap holds a little
Of every yesterday
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
But a small part of you
Won't be carried away
[Bridge]
I used to think the water
Would carry every drop
But the curve below the bowl
Was always there to stop
Just enough to remember
Just enough to know
Some of what I let go
Is some of what I owe
[Final Chorus]
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
But the trap holds a little
Of every yesterday
I'll flush it away
I'll flush it away
And a small part of you
Stays here with me
[Outro - vocal fading]
Stays here with me
Stays here with me

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.

Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were.
At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhattan left ceremoniously in 2022, with a press release, like a retiring quarterback.
In between, the booth became a cultural object (Superman changed in one, every spy movie needed one). Drug crews turned payphones into open-air offices, so cities pulled the phones out of the neighbourhoods that leaned on them hardest. Then the cell phone showed up and the whole thing fell over in about a decade.
We'd decided a fire hydrant was a public good and a payphone was a business. When the business stopped paying, the phones came down, starting with the corners that could least afford to lose them. Then Katrina knocked out the cell towers, and the payphones still bolted to the wall had lines of people waiting at them. Turns out the thing you last cursed at for eating your quarter was was doing a job you'd written off years ago.

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.