This 1952 television broadcast at The Johns Hopkins University looked back, with dreary optimism, at Abraham Flexner‘s essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”. Flexner’s essay appeared in the October 1939 issue of Harper’s magazine [you can download that essay here.] Recently, Brainpickings took an appreciative look at Flexner and his musings.
Click on the image, and be transported via the magic of the internet to the Internet Archives, where the TV broadcast now, in a sense, lives:
(Thanks to investigator Zeke Hand for bringing the broadcast to our attention.)
BONUS: In somewhat, but nto quite, the same spirit, Kenji Kawakami’s books on Unuseless Inventions.