Concorde

Concorde was the Anglo-French supersonic airliner that, for 27 years, let paying passengers cross the Atlantic faster than the planet turned the morning into afternoon. Born of a 1962 treaty between Britain and France, it was a turbojet-powered delta-wing aircraft cruising at Mach 2.04 — a little over twice the speed of sound — carrying about 100 passengers from New York to London in roughly three and a half hours, less than half the time of a conventional jet. It first flew in 1969 and entered scheduled service on January 21, 1976.

From the start, Concorde was a triumph of engineering and a problem of economics. Only 20 aircraft were ever built, and just 14 entered commercial service, flown exclusively by British Airways and Air France after the original wave of airline orders from carriers around the world collapsed. The aircraft was magnificent and ruinously expensive: it burned enormous quantities of fuel, demanded intensive maintenance, and — because supersonic flight over land was banned in most countries to prevent sonic-boom damage — was effectively confined to transatlantic and a few other overwater routes.

For decades the two airlines kept it flying as a prestige product, charging premium first-class fares to executives and celebrities who valued the time saved and the cachet. But the underlying business was always fragile, and a cascade of blows in the early 2000s ended it. The only fatal Concorde crash, Air France Flight 4590 at Gonesse near Paris on July 25, 2000, killed 113 people and grounded the fleet for over a year. The post-September 11 travel slump and a downturn in premium traffic eroded demand, and Airbus, the manufacturer’s successor, decided to stop supporting the aircraft.

British Airways and Air France retired Concorde in 2003. Air France flew its last commercial service on May 31, 2003; British Airways operated its final scheduled flights on October 24, 2003, with a ceremonial retirement flight on November 26, 2003. No supersonic airliner has flown passengers in scheduled service since — a rare case of a technology that, having reached the future, was deliberately walked back.

LaserDisc

LaserDisc was the format that was right about everything except whether anyone would buy it. Introduced in 1978 as the first commercial optical video disc, it arrived two decades before the technology it pioneered became a mass-market phenomenon. It looked like a silver LP record, played a sharper picture than any tape could manage, and offered features that would not reach most living rooms until the DVD era. It also never sold in serious numbers, and it knew it almost from the start.

Developed jointly by Philips and MCA and launched under the DiscoVision name, the disc was a twelve-inch, double-sided platter storing analog video read by a laser. Its picture quality, roughly 425 lines of resolution, clearly outclassed VHS and Betamax, and later discs added digital audio, freeze-frame and chapter access, and the supplementary material that would define the format’s legacy: director commentaries, special editions, and curated transfers that film enthusiasts treasured.

The Criterion Collection, now a byword for serious home video, began on LaserDisc, releasing Citizen Kane and King Kong in 1984 and pioneering the commentary track and the carefully restored transfer. For a small but devoted audience of videophiles, collectors, and film buffs, LaserDisc was simply the best way to watch movies at home, and it held that crown for well over a decade.

But it could not record, the discs were heavy and expensive, the players cost a great deal, many films required a disc flip or side change partway through, and some discs fell victim to a degradation known as ‘laser rot.’ LaserDisc stayed a premium niche, strongest by far in Japan, while VHS owned the mainstream. Then the DVD, which LaserDisc had directly inspired, arrived smaller, cheaper, and eventually recordable, and the parent format had no answer. Pioneer made the last LaserDisc players in 2009.