Roundhay Garden Scene is the Oldest Surviving Motion Picture

Yes, that's it. All two seconds of it. It was shot at the home of Joseph and Sarah Whitley, in Roundhay, Leeds, on October 14, 1888 by inventor Louis Le Prince.
Not a lot to look at maybe, but it's kind of fascinating nonetheless. What did the people taking part think of it? There's a look of innocence about the whole thing; but then, there always is in cine films, isn't there?
Interestingly, Le Prince disappeared shortly after, on September 16, 1890. He was on his way to patent his invention in London and to perform his first official public exhibition in New York. He mysteriously vanished in a train between Dijon and Paris. Then, twelve years later, his son (who features in this film) was found dead of a gunshot wound in New York.
All very mysterious. If only Sherlock Holmes had been real.

'Transport' is Beautiful

When I came back from hitch-hiking in Europe in the early nineties, I got to Dover and bought a coffee. I was given change, including a 50p. The weight of that old 50p told me I was home. After the small, tinny Francs, it felt like a familiar, well-worn worry stone.

Similarly, the weight and reassurance of the font used on road signs in Britain is like a comfort blanket to the British. No nonsense, like a stern but kind parent, the font points us in the right direction with a minimum of fuss. Although it feels ageless, it's actually quite modern. Originally commissioned in the fifties for the first motorways, the new signs were intended for the new breed of motorist who would be hurtling along in their Morris Minors at untold velocities - in excess of 60mph. They didn't have time to decipher the clunky, confused mix of signs that existed up until that point. They wanted a clear, quick explanation of their choices.

Jock Kinneir was commissioned to design the signs, and he recruited a design student, Margaret Calvert, to help him. As The Guardian points out, the choices they made were modern, yet reassuring for the essentially conservative British:

'The "Britishness" came from the gentle palette - creamy white on blue - and the earthy curves of the letters and symbols. Kinneir and Calvert designed a rounded version of the modern movement typeface Aksidenz Grotesk, which they named Transport. Rather than adopting the capital letters of most continental signs, they plumped for a mix of upper and lower case, believing that the British would find that friendlier and more legible. Look at one of their motorway signs and you'll see that even the tiniest details - from the curved corners of the rectangular frame to the rounded joints of the road "arrows" - were chosen to make the modernist rigour of Kinneir's rules more palatable to conservative British taste.'

Similarly, the pictorial signs were not harsh, but reassuring and strangely familiar.

'Calvert drew most of the pictograms in the friendly, curvaceous style of Transport. Many of her illustrations were inspired by aspects of her own life. The cow featured in the triangular sign warning drivers to watch out for farm animals on the road was based on Patience, a cow on her relatives’ Warwickshire farm. Eager to make the school children crossing sign more accessible, she replaced the image of a boy in a school cap leading a little girl, with one of a girl – modelled on a photograph of herself as a child – with a younger boy. Calvert described the old sign as being: “quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton… I wanted to make it more inclusive because comprehensives were starting up.''

Transport is, to use that hackneyed phrase, a 'design classic'. Hackneyed and inappropriate elsewhere, here it is true. It's design that works.

For more on Calvert, who's still alive, have a read of this Frieze interview, or click on the somewhat shallow Top Gear interview, below:

Eliot Wrote 'The Wasteland' in a Shelter in Margate

Well, not all of it. Rather, part of Part III: "On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/Nothing." He was in Margate in 1921 recovering from a nervous breakdown. He spent three weeks in the autumn there, staying in the Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville. The shelter where Eliot mused and connected nothing with nothing is the Nayland Rock Promenade Shelter. A recent campaign spearheaded by Alan Bennett and Andrew Motion resulted in it getting listed status in 2009. Motion called the shelter 'a shrine, a temple, a small monument to a great genius.' Come worship!
If you can't make it in person, you can walk in the virtual footsteps of someone who has, via this YouTube video. Perhaps too much of the bloke's feet. But hey, you get the idea.

The Letters at the Beginning of Number Plates Mean Something

Driving along, I'm one of those inveterate wonderers. Why are central barriers at exactly that height? Who designed and drew the images used in road signs? Why aren't lorries designed to be more aerodynamic? One of the triggers for my wondering are number plates. I'm fascinated by those foreign ones you see flitting through Kent, but I'm also interested in our own.

Now you might think that these are just random jumbles of letters and numbers, but there is some method in the apparent madness. As you can see from the diagram above, the first two letters are geographic tags, and the first two numbers are date codes. So, like some twisted alphabet primer, here's a list of what all those geographic tags stand for:

• A is for Anglia: Peterborough (AA-AN), Norwich (AO- AU) and Ipswich (AV-AY)
• B is for Birmingham
  
• C is for Cymru (Wales): Cardiff (CA-CO), Swansea (CP-CV) and Bangor (CW-CY)
• D is for Deeside: Chester (DA-DK) and Shrewsbury (DL-DY)
• E is for Essex
• F is for Forest & Fens: Nottingham (FA-FP) and Lincoln (FR-FY)
• G is for the Garden of England: Maidstone (GA-GO) and Brighton (GP-GY)
• H is for Hampshire: Bournemouth (HA-HJ) and Portsmouth (HK-HY). HW is for the Isle of Wight.
• K is for Luton and Northampton (yes, go figure): Luton (KA -KL) and Northampton (KM-KY)
• L is for London: Wimbledon (LA-LJ), Stanmore (LK-LT) and Sidcup (LU-LY)
• M is for Manchester and Merseyside: Manchester (MA – MY) and Merseyside (MN). MAN is for the Isle of Man.
• N is for the North: Newcastle (NA-NO) and Stockton (NP-NY)
• O is for Oxford
  
• P is for Preston: Preston (PA -PT) and Carlisle (PU-PY)
• R is for Reading
  
• S is for Scotland: Glasgow (SA-SJ), Edinburgh (SK-SO), Dundee (SP-ST), Aberdeen (SU - SW) and Inverness (SX-SY)
• V is for the Severn Valley: Worcester (VA – VY)
• W is for the West of England: Exeter (WA-WJ), Truro (WK WL) and Bristol (WM -WY)
• Y is for Yorkshire: Leeds (YA- YK), Sheffield (YL - YU) and Beverley (YV-YY)

The age identifier is simpler, with 5x being used for the second half of the year, (Sept-Feb), and 0x being used for the first half (March-Aug). So 51 would be between Sept 2001 and Feb 2002, and 02 would be March-Aug 2002. From Sept 2010, this changed to 6x and 1x.

So, at a glance, you can see where and when a car was born - or at least first registered.

Feet are Measured in Barleycorns

Ah, the imperial system: don't you just love it? Turns out our feet are still measured in an Anglo-Saxon measurement equating to (roughly) a third of an inch. But hang about, you might say: I've got size nine feet, but my feet aren't 9 x 1/3 inch = 3 inches long. Well, as with everything relating to the imperial system of measurement, it's not that simple. See, Anglo-Saxons had obviously never seen a foot larger than 13 inches. So that they used as their base measurement - as size 13. From there they worked backwards, taking 1 barleycorn (1/3 inch) off for size 12, 2 barleycorns off for size 11, and so forth.

Helpfully, Wikipedia has supplied a chart showing how all those cra-zee imperial measurements fit together.

So there's 20 twips in a point, 6 points in a line, 1 line in a poppyseed, 4 poppyseeds (of course!) in a barleycorn, 3 barleycorns in an inch, 2 inches in a stick, 2 sticks in a hand, and 3 hands in a foot.

You can't argue with that.

Although it seems crazy to modern, SI-calibrated minds, I like the humanity of the imperial system. For instance a league is 3 miles, becuase they reckoned that's how far you could walk in an hour. Similarly a cubit is the length (roughly) from your fingertips to your elbow, and a yard from your fingertips to the middle of your body, and a fathom from outstretched fingertips to outstretched fingertips (18 inches, 3 feet and 6 feet respectively).