Cinema
Film, editing and the tricks of the screen.
A Hollywood star patented a secret radio system
In 1942 the film actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping system for guiding torpedoes. The Navy shelved it, but its principle lives on in modern wireless technology.
Chekhov’s gun: what the quote really said
Every writer knows the rule that a gun on the wall must go off. The sources say it was spread across three different remarks.
Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson”
The most famous line in detective fiction is not in any of Conan Doyle’s stories, though both halves of it are.
The Bechdel test began as a joke in a comic strip
Three simple questions about a film started life in 1985, and the woman who thought of them wasn’t Alison Bechdel.
The same face, three different emotions
A 1920s Soviet experiment showed that audiences read emotion into an actor’s blank face, depending on the shot that came before it.
The Sator Square
A five-word Latin puzzle scratched on a wall in Pompeii reads the same in four directions. Nobody agrees on what it means.
The scream that has been in hundreds of films
One man’s scream, recorded for a 1951 western, turns up in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is named after a character who barely appears.