Tag: experiments

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Ancient Web: Orville the Mouse Became the Internet’s First Electronaut

On January 8, 2003, a mouse named Orville took two short flights aboard a homemade high-voltage lifter and was promptly awarded one of the better job titles in Internet history: electronaut.

Meet Orville the Electronaut

The page belongs to Jean-Louis Naudin’s sprawling collection of experiments with so-called lifters: lightweight asymmetric-capacitor devices that can produce thrust in air using high voltage and ion movement. The mechanism is generally discussed in terms of electrohydrodynamic or ionic-wind effects, although old pages around the subject often used much more ambitious language such as “electrokinetic” or even “antigravity.”

Orville’s page is memorable because Naudin did not stop at lifting bits of foil and balsa wood. The Maximus lifter was built large enough to carry a mouse as payload. Contemporary copies and references to the experiment describe Orville completing two tethered flights and returning in good health. The power source remained external; this was not a tiny self-contained spaceship. It was, however, a mouse in a handmade flying high-voltage contraption, which is already enough Internet for one day.

The experiment became widely linked. Physics-education writing later referenced Orville when discussing ion-powered flight, and old forum threads kept passing the page around years after the original test. The reason is obvious: a technical phenomenon that might otherwise remain an abstract diagram suddenly has a pilot.

The page is also a perfect artifact of its era. Early experimental Web culture was full of people publishing photographs, test notes, schematics and increasingly strange demonstrations directly from personal pages. There was no need to package the work into a video channel, build a personal brand or wait for a platform to decide whether the subject had engagement potential.

There is a useful skepticism lesson here too. The lifter visibly produces thrust, but that does not establish exotic propulsion or gravity control. The interesting part is the documented home experiment, not the grandest interpretation anybody attached to it afterward.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of these garage-laboratory pages. They are messy, occasionally overexcited and often far more interesting than polished corporate science communication.

Orville’s flight survives because somebody bothered to make a page for the mouse.

Return to Orville’s flight page

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Ancient Web: Stinkymeat2 Left Six Kinds of Meat to Rot in Public

The old web had no shortage of ambitious projects, but few began with a $12.03 grocery bill and a plan to leave meat outside until it became unbearable.

Visit Stinkymeat2

Stinkymeat2 is the sequel to an earlier rotting-meat experiment. On Day 1, the author and his “stinkymate” buy six subjects: sausage, canned oysters, salmon, a whole young chicken, canned dog food, and a fast-food burger.

The tone is half mock science report, half gross-out diary.

Then the project gets worse.

Bring stinkymeat to the public

On Day 2, the author decides that “true science” should not be hidden in somebody’s backyard. The meat gets split between public locations, including a park and a mall planter.

That turns the site into something more than pictures of decomposition.

Each day documents what changed, what disappeared, what smelled worse, how animals or people interfered, and how the author reacted to increasingly revolting conditions. The photographs are presented directly in the page flow with optional high-resolution versions, which was a perfectly reasonable way to build an Internet spectacle before video platforms swallowed this kind of stunt.

The project runs to Day 18.

By then most of the experiment has been disrupted or removed, and the remaining chicken has hardened on top while staying unpleasantly wet underneath. The cleanup report describes gloves, a filter mask, beetles, a biohazard bag, and the unmistakable realization that the smell has penetrated the mask anyway.

There is no polished documentary voice here. The pages work because the author keeps narrating the stupid practical details: grocery prices, security guards, public placement, missing meat, nausea, and the moment a decomposing chicken makes a Velcro-like sound when lifted from the ground.

That specificity is why it survives as Internet history instead of just a joke.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes projects like this because the early web gave people room to turn one ridiculous idea into eighteen manually linked pages and assume strangers would follow along.

They did.

Apparently all it took was meat, a camera, and very poor judgment.

Return to Stinkymeat2

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Ancient Web: Project GREAT Took Atomic Clocks on a Family Trip to Mount Rainier

General relativity becomes easier to love when somebody loads atomic clocks into a vehicle, brings the kids, and drives up a mountain to see whether Einstein was serious.

Visit the Project GREAT 2005 tour

That is essentially what happened in September 2005.

Tom Van Baak, a longtime atomic-time hobbyist, took several cesium clocks from home to the Paradise area of Mount Rainier and left them at higher elevation for roughly 42 hours.

The point was simple enough to explain at a kitchen table: clocks higher in Earth’s gravitational field should run slightly faster than clocks lower down.

The expected difference was tiny.

Nanoseconds tiny.

A physics experiment with camping-trip energy

Van Baak later described the net elevation difference between home and the mountain site as about 4,400 feet, or roughly 1,340 meters.

Using the standard low-altitude gravitational time-dilation approximation, that predicts a clock gain on the order of a few dozen nanoseconds over the duration of the stay.

The measured result was about 22 nanoseconds.

The interesting part is not that this replaced laboratory relativity experiments. It did not.

The interesting part is that precision equipment had become accessible enough for an obsessive hobbyist to turn one of physics’ strangest effects into a family-scale experiment.

The accompanying web material preserves the whole spirit of it: hardware, clocks, travel, photographs, calculations, and the slightly deranged confidence required to bring cesium standards on a road trip because altitude changes time.

Later discussions in the timekeeping community kept pointing back to the experiment precisely because it makes an abstract result tangible.

Nobody has to imagine a spaceship moving near light speed.

You can drive uphill.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes experiment pages like this because the old web was unusually good at preserving the entire notebook around a weird personal project—not only the final result.

A family went camping.

The clocks came back older than expected.

By about twenty-two billionths of a second.

Return to Project GREAT 2005

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Ancient Web: The $39 Experiment Mailed 100 Weird Letters to Corporations for Free Stuff

In February 2006, somebody spent two days writing 100 letters to 100 companies for one reason: to see which corporations would send him free stuff.

Visit The $39 Experiment

The name came from the cost of a roll of 100 stamps: $39. The author later admitted the real cost was closer to $52 after envelopes, paper, and the domain name, but by then the title had already won.

All 100 letters went into the mail on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 9:00 AM.

Then the website became the scoreboard.

Corporate customer service as an Internet spectator sport

The experiment lists every company, the product involved, whether a response arrived, what the company sent, and the actual letter used to provoke it.

Some letters are ordinary compliments or requests. Others get progressively stranger as the author realizes that writing 100 polite corporate letters would be unbearable.

Companies included food brands, hotels, rental-car firms, manufacturers, restaurants, and household-product companies. The author later singled out letters to Carmex, Nylabone, PowerBar, Energizer, Long John Silver’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken among his favorites.

The first freebies started arriving March 2.

By the time the experiment officially ended on May 18, the site reported more than 60 responses, with 35 companies sending free products worth roughly $275.

Financially, this was not genius once the author’s time was included.

As a web artifact, it is excellent.

The whole project belongs to a particular Internet era when the natural response to a dumb personal question was not to make a five-second video about it. You bought a domain, made a table, documented every result, and left the entire experiment online for strangers twenty years later.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of sites created from exactly that impulse: I wonder what happens if I do this?

The $39 Experiment answered its question with envelopes, stamps, coupons, dog toys, snacks, and one beautifully unnecessary website.

Return to The $39 Experiment

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Ancient Web: Fourmilab Shows How to Bend Spacetime in the Basement

The project title is “Bending Spacetime in the Basement,” and remarkably, the page does eventually deliver on it.

Visit Bending Spacetime in the Basement

Fourmilab’s experiment starts with a problem that is easy to state and difficult to feel: every object with mass attracts every other object with gravity, yet two ordinary objects sitting near each other do not visibly lunge together.

Gravity is simply too weak compared with electromagnetic forces.

The page turns that weakness into a basement experiment.

Cavendish without the laboratory budget

The core instrument is a torsion balance, a simplified descendant of the apparatus Henry Cavendish used in 1798 to measure gravitational effects.

Instead of attempting precision metrology, the Fourmilab project aims at something more approachable: make the attraction between human-scale masses visible at all.

The article walks through Newtonian gravitation, the gravitational constant, comparisons between gravity and electromagnetism, differential measurement and the reason a torsion balance can cancel the overwhelming constant pull of Earth while remaining sensitive to much smaller changes from nearby masses.

It even includes interactive calculations for gravitational force and translates tiny forces into more imaginable equivalents.

The tone is part of why the page survives as good web writing. It is technically serious without pretending experiments are sacred rituals available only to institutions. The opening joke is about finally being old enough to go into the basement and bend spacetime without somebody calling Mom.

That combination matters.

A textbook can present the formula. Fourmilab tries to make the formula physically annoying enough that you build something.

The page also quietly demonstrates an old-web strength: one author can move from history to equations to apparatus design to jokes without waiting for a content strategy meeting.

This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The experiment is not a substitute for a precision laboratory. It is better in another way: it makes universal gravitation feel like something happening between objects you can touch.

Return to Fourmilab’s gravity experiment