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Tech NewsThis Tricycle Printing Press Was the Hot New Advertising Stunt of 1895
In an effort to stick out from the crowd, advertisers often come up with clever ways to reach consumers outside the traditional world of media. These efforts come in many names and varieties: experiential, guerrilla, wild postings, the list is seemingly endless. But despite how clever many of these marketing tactics may seem, there’s almost … Continued
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Tech News
This Space Age Bathroom Had Everything (Except Toilets)
The Sunday comic strip “Closer Than We Think” was launched in 1958 at the dawn of the Space Race. But the strip’s mission wasn’t just to show Americans what would soon be happening on the moon and beyond. No, the space age would touch every part of American life — from the fuel that would … Continued
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Tech News
1980s College Dean: Universities Will Collapse Because of Liberals
It’s a perennial question that gets people on both sides of the debate pretty riled up — should everyone go to college? With the cost of higher education continuing to climb since the postwar era — a time when many people were able to pay for college with part-time jobs and generous government assistance like … Continued
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Tech News
JFK’s Retro-Futuristic Pan Am Terminal Is Slowly Being Demolished
Despite some last ditch efforts to save it, the JFK airport’s 1960 Googie-style Pan Am terminal is currently being destroyed. Once an important symbol of tomorrowism, this iconic Worldport™ will soon find itself a pile of retro-futuristic rubble. https://gizmodo.com/googie-architecture-of-the-space-age-512620908 First opened to the public on May 24, 1960, Terminal 3 was designed by the firm … Continued
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Tech NewsRare Photos of Paris’s Mechanical Moving Sidewalks from 1900
It may not be quite as fast as Elon Musk’s plan for the Hyperloop, but back at the turn of the 20th century the moving sidewalk was The Future™! I was doing some research on World’s Fairs at the L.A. Library this past weekend when I found an absolutely gorgeous rare book from 1900. Paris … Continued
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Tech News
This Depression-Era Carphone Was Way Ahead of Its Time
Today if your car breaks down or you’re in an accident, help is little more than a phone call away. It’s something that many drivers of the 21st century take for granted, what with our Space Age smartphone technology. This automotive safety net, of course, wasn’t available in the 1930s. But one visionary who was … Continued
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Tech News
Dogs Listening to the Radio Will Cure Your Case of the Mondays
Not to go all Garfield on you, but the only thing worse than morning is a Monday morning. You wake up and for three blissful seconds you’re not sure what’s in store. The world is your oyster. For one fantastic, fleeting moment you think that maybe you’ll take a walk in the park or go … Continued
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Tech News
This Week In Time Capsules: Would You Eat 65-Year-Old Capsule Cake?
This week’s round-up of the hottest in time capsule news includes discreetly hidden invitations for any real-life time travelers, memories from the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, and a slice of cake found in a time capsule from 1948. Canadian Construction Crew Cracks Cornerstone Capsule Cake Funeral home owners on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls … Continued
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Tech News
The Futuristic Automated Warehouse of 1956 Was All Smiles
Is this the wonder warehouse of 1962? And if so, why is everyone so… happy? That was the question in 1956 when this ad for New Departure ball bearings proclaimed, “TOMORROW: Use no hands! For in this magic warehouse, orders fill themselves in seconds — electronically.” This vision of the completely automated warehouse is floating … Continued
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Tech News
How Upton Sinclair Turned The Jungle Into a Failed New Jersey Utopia
In 1906, novelist Upton Sinclair founded a cooperative community in Englewood, New Jersey, not far outside New York. It would exist for just six months before being completely consumed by fire, but Sinclair would spend the rest of his life dreaming about his time there. They called it the Helicon Home Colony. And despite sex … Continued
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Tech News
The Robot Tanks of WWII, Both Real and Imagined
In the mid-1930s, sci-fi legend Hugo Gernsback predicted that manned flame tanks would one day become a reality. A decade later, Gernsback would revisit his prediction with one important twist—the flame tanks of tomorrow would drive themselves. https://gizmodo.com/the-horrifying-flame-tank-of-the-1930s-meant-to-end-all-508800377 Controlled by wireless signals, the “radio robot flametank” of the future was featured on the cover of … Continued
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Tech News
Why Is There No Footage of Nikola Tesla Online?
The internet’s Nikola Tesla obsession is in full force. There’s Tesla fanfic, endless blog posts rediscovering the great inventor, and of course, Matthew Inman’s tremendously popular webcomic about the man. But curiously, there’s one crucial thing missing: Any digitized film of Tesla. Despite a wave of revisionism that has washed over the internet in recent … Continued
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Tech NewsMicrosoft
The Internet Was Almost Called the Catenet
In its early days, radio technology was often called wireless telephone. The Xbox was almost called the MEGA. But did you know that the internet nearly wound up with a different name too? Indeed, the internet was almost called the catenet. https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-actually-considered-these-idiotic-names-for-t-708779004 Just as the internet derived its name from the word internetworked, the term … Continued
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Tech News
Synthetic Hamburgers Are the Future–And Have Been for Decades
“Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” – Winston Churchill, 1932 Would you eat a lab-grown hamburger? It’s not a question you have to worry too much about today, unless you have … Continued
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Tech News
This Week in Time Capsules: Royal Baby Edition
This week we have a time capsule of floppy disks that will be hard to read, a church that thinks microfilm is the best way to future-proof your capsule, and we finally get that royal baby time capsule I was wondering about last week. IT’S A BOY(sterous waste of media coverage)! Royal Baby Gets Time … Continued
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Tech News
The 1940s Kitchen of Tomorrow Was Difficult to Parody
Pre-dehydrated food processor? Non-functional sinks installed purely for style? A streamlined… baby? When it comes to midcentury visions of tomorrow, sometimes it’s hard to tell the spoofs from the earnest predictions. But what’s even more interesting is why the parodies popped up in the first place. Back in the 1940s, designers promised Americans that once … Continued
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Tech News
What Queen Elizabeth II’s Speech Would Have Been If WWIII Had Happened
The early 1980s was a time of serious dread for many people worried that the U.S. and the Soviet Union might start World War III. And it’s easy to understand why. One wrong move by either nuke-equipped country, and it was the end of civilization as we knew it. In fact, that’s nearly what happened … Continued
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Tech News
The 100-Year-Old Charlie Chaplin Mashups That Are Lost Forever
Mashups, intellectual property laws, bootlegs, copyright. While those are all valid concerns today, they’re hardly anything new. Just ask Charlie Chaplin. Peter Decherney’s 2012 book Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of intellectual property. Decherney covers everything from the rampant duping that early … Continued
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Tech News
From Shock Chairs to Smell-O-Vision: The Movie Gimmicks of Yesteryear
Have you ever been to a movie so shocking that the theater management offered you a life insurance policy just in case you died of fright? Filmmaker William Castle devised a scheme that did just that for the release of his 1958 suspense/horror film Macabre. Thankfully, they never had to pay out. Hunter Oatman-Stanford over … Continued
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Tech News
New York’s Underground Moving Sidewalk That Never Was
At the turn of the 20th century, the moving sidewalk was the future of urban transportation. As much as airplanes soaring in the sky and automobiles rumbling on the streets, the moving sidewalk represented a bold new vision for tomorrow. This idea of rolling pavement appealed to people in major cities who didn’t yet see … Continued
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