In college, my housemate Joe and I would have fun with James Burke’s BBC production “Connections,” airing here on PBS. It was actually an interesting series, showing the connections between seemingly unrelated inventions or events in history, and we would catch it when we could. Sitting in a booth at Waffle House, after a night of studying, one of us would hold up a salt shaker or ketchup bottle or something and try to come up with a long, elaborate story of connected inventions. I was thinking of that this weekend as I looked through my tripods for one short enough for easy carrying but heavy enough to keep a larger camera steady for some light landscape photography. I compromised on an old Star D tripod, passed down to me by my photographer uncle (who helped begin my path in photography years ago). And here is my James Burke moment. The Star D tripod was patterned after the Tiltall tripod, a very classic design, still available today. Here’s the quick story. (You have to wait a moment for the tripod part.) In the early twentieth century, Italian immigrant Italo Marchioni, looking for a way for his customers to carry off their ice cream in cones, without their cones becoming too soggy, came up with the crispy waffle cone, taking out a patent in 1904. Making and selling ice cream was the family business, but, some time later, Italo’s son Caesar, an avid photographer, wanted a tripod head that would allow him to easily tilt his camera. So he and his brother Mark, in their free time away from the family ice cream business, developed a head that could be tilted in different directions to go on top of a tripod. So next time you’re eating a waffle cone, you can have your James Burke moment. (Or, better yet, when eating your ice cream cone while preparing to set up your tripod.) I actually don’t know of any physical lineage to trace between the waffle cone and a tilting tripod head (James Burke, still alive and active, perhaps could), but the boys had learned from their father how to see a problem at hand and think of how to create something to solve that problem.
I have a tripod ready now, and thinking of its heritage brought back good memories of past times with my late friend. And speaking of James Burke, this clip is considered one of the best segways in television (before CGI and AI, mind you, when we were smarter and had longer attention spans). Be patient. Wait for the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk