Nicholas Surges

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

As you can see from the last page of the manual, vibrators were marketed as treating a wide range of ailments, both real and imagined. This included the sexist diagnosis of "hysteria", which was used to pathologize and control feminine behaviour that was deemed undesirable.

Today's odd museum find? A Hamilton Beach "Try-New-Life" Type F vibrator kit. This model was first patented in 1902. We were also fortunate enough to have a manual for the "Try-New-Life" vibrators in our Rare Trade Literature collection.

As you can imagine, this process was inconvenient and occasionally resulted in billing errors caused by mishandling the plates. As such, these chemical meters were eventually phased out in favor of more practical mechanical designs.

The meters contained glass jar electrodes containing a chemical solution and zinc plates. As load current passed through the meter, it would electroplate zinc onto the electrodes. By periodically weighing the plates, power companies could calculate the current consumed.

This is fascinating. It's one of the earliest types of wattmeter, designed by Thomas Edison. Instead of using a motor like later wattmeters, these early "chemical" wattmeters functioned through electrolysis.

A cardboard holding tray with various glass and ceramic insulators.

Working with more glass and ceramic insulators today. It's fantastic that even with insulators (which are well-represented in our larger collection), I'm still finding unique type samples.

Jewish Otherness in The Golem and Nosferatu Cultural representations have a plasticity to their meaning, which is ascribed rather than inherent and is thus informed as much by the viewer’s own subjectivities as by the creator’s intentions. For ...

I had been shopping this paper to journals during my MA, but now that I've graduated I figured it was time to upload it to a public repository and just get it out there.

It's a piece about antisemitic tropes in Weimar cinema, specifically "The Golem" and "Nosferatu".

I was reading one of Gerald Brown's guides on non-glass insulators, and he included a letter from Continental Rubber Works.

According to this letter, these rubber insulators were introduced in part because bored hunters in rural areas used to use glass insulators for target practice.

This is a formal parliamentary petition to move the Canadian government and associated agencies off of X. Well worth it for fellow Canadians to sign.

www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

Weekend trip to Quebec City. Outside the Chateau Frontenac.

A smartphone photo of a d'Arsonval galvanometer. It looks like a three-legged stand of black metal with two brass screw connections (where it would be wired into a circuit). The top is stacked with a series of nearly-circular magnets. The text "Queen D'Arsonval Galvanometer" is inscribed on the base.

Discovered some hitherto unnoticed markings on a galvanometer. This is a D'Arsonval-type, first developed in 1882. They utilized a stack of stationary magnets, which made the device less susceptible to stray magnetic fields.

A smartphone photo of a hand in a purple disposable glove holding a neon light bulb. The bulb has an electrode in the shape of a male saint holding a child. A handwritten tag dangles off the side.

Something we unpacked at Ingenium while doing collections review.

This is a neon glow lamp with the image of a saint inside (possibly Saint Christopher). My guess is that this is one of those glow lamps that has two plates positioned too close together so that it flickers like a candle flame.

Apologies for the asinine comment, but it's giving me JRPG vibes (like a world map from an early "Final Fantasy" game).

Funny how a shift in perspective can do that!

Naked Boys Reading: “And All That Jazz!” (The Musical Theatre Show) They get naked. They read. A different theme every month from Ottawa's trailblazing literary salon — since July 2017. (nakedboysreading.ca)

Tickets are now on sale for our next edition of Naled Boys Reading, coming up this Monday, January 20th at LIVE! on Elgin.

I actually curated this show. The readings are the original source material that inspired some of Broadway's biggest hits.

nbr64.eventbrite.ca

“Mystery Music”: Digital Strategies for Collections Research Canadian museums enjoy a strong reputation as authoritative and trustworthy sources of informatio

A short piece I wrote for Ingenium's channel blog detailing some of my takeaways doing collections research with their musical instruments.

ingeniumcanada.org/channel/arti...

Invisibility as LGBTQ+ Representation in the Canadian Air Force During a research placement at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, Ontario, I was struck by the seeming lack of visual sources c

Reposting this here.

It's a short piece I wrote for the online public history magazine Epoch about reading invisibility as a form of queer representation in institutional photography, specifically through an examination of the RCAF journal The Roundel.

www.epoch-magazine.com/post/invisib...

Hello folx!

My name is Nicholas. I'm an Ottawa-based museum professional currently doing collections research with Ingenium at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology.

In my spare time, I co-produce Ottawa's chapter of the international literary salon Naked Boys Reading.