Wikipedia has a nice page about it : "Rue de l'Avenir" (Street of the future) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir
Scroll down to the photos and be momentarily surprised at the fact that some are in colour.
Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
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Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#22ZZ Top's name before it was ZZ Top was Moving Sidewalks
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#231900s MPEG compression was pretty intense.
Thankfully the second video contains a much more watchable film rip.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#24I like how people getting caught by the cameraman greet him with all little social niceties of that time.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#25I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway. We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
I believe it's to allow room for the handrail belt to wear down, which brings its speed closer to the stairs until it starts de-syncing in the opposite direction. If it started perfectly, you'd have to replace the belt more frequently to maintain the same level of tolerance.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#26> It’s fair to say that few of us now marvel at moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores. You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store, or a subway station for that matter.
There are at least some in the Paris subway, including one that went at 12 km/h but was decommissioned in 2011:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#27I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination. The Roads must roll — they are the arteries of the nation. When they stop, everything stops. Factories idle, food rots, men starve. The nation cannot live without its Roads. A thousand feet wide, level as a floor, strip after strip moving past in ordered procession. The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones f…
Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#28> It’s fair to say that few of us now marvel at moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores. You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store, or a subway station for that matter.
i've seen them in a few metro systems, there's definitely one for transfers in barcelona somewhere
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#29Time traveler: "No, in 120 years we won't have moving sidewalks almost anywhere" Tech enthusiasts: "Oh what a luddite, didn't you see the demo? This is the future!"
Cars really messed a lot of that up.
In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
It really makes me sad to see even old cartoons showing off the tram systems of the day. Those all got pulled up for "progress" thrusting us all backwards into bumper to bumper traffic.
Whats incredible is that happened almost immediately after expansion of personal vehicles.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#301900s MPEG compression was pretty intense.
i think it's a reupload of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Edison,_Panorama_o...
which links to https://lccn.loc.gov/00694271 , but that does not seem to have a digital copy available
edit: well here's an archive but it's not any better https://web.archive.org/web/20231016184047if_/http://memory....