Popular Science (film series)

Popular Science is a 1935–1949 American series of short educational films produced by Jerry Fairbanks. The series, comprising 72 10-minute episodes, was photographed in Magnacolor and released by Paramount Pictures.
Produced with the cooperation of Popular Science magazine, the series featured advances in medicine, aviation, science and technology, television, home improvement, planes, trains and automobiles, as well as an assortment of strange and whimsical inventions.

Series contents

Each episode comprises a set of unrelated topics. For example, in episode L7-6 :

frozen TV dinners
mechanical brain at UCLA
the Northrop "Flying Wing"

The following are examples of topics covered across the series:

building Hoover Dam
telephone answering machine
building the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge
contact lenses
the world's first full-scale X-ray technique
the birth of Plastic Surgery
Rust Heinz and his Phantom Corsair car
tour of Fleischer Studios in Miami which produced animated cartoons for Paramount
Philo T. Farnsworth, "the father of television"
the Electron Microscope
Frank Lloyd Wright and his architectural school
Jet Aircraft
the Academy Award-nominated Moon Rockets
fuel from corn cobs

Accolades

During its 14-year theatrical run, the series was honored with numerous awards and acclaim, including two Academy Award nominations. The series also received a Special Commendation from the US Department of War in 1943 for its unparalleled coverage of American military technology involved in World War II.

Television and home media

The series was first acquired on American television in 1951, and has been shown on the American Movie Classics cable network, hosted by Nick Clooney and Bob Dorian. The series, as well as the rest of the Jerry Fairbanks film library, is owned by Shields Pictures, which released a DVD in 2008 of some of the original Popular Science sequences.