Mar 05
In 1930 Arthur Fields and Fred Hall recorded a song about the futuristic world of 1992. And if you can believe it, they didn’t mention a single grunge band. Not even once.
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Jan 28
After alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, many American distillers had a problem: they didn’t have enough old booze lying around. It’s possible to churn out a barrel of whiskey in just a few days, but you need at least 3 years of aging for many people to consider it any good. The "time traveling" scientists of the Great Depression were going to fix all that.
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Jul 24
Humans love to get high. So much so that people were recreationally using nitrous oxide (commonly called "laughing gas") for nearly a century before it was used as an anaesthetic. So when chemists in the 1930s started proposing the use of nitrous oxide in consumer products like whipped cream canisters, some people naturally assumed that the end result would be rampant casual drug use.
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Jul 15
TV advertisers imagine that one day soon you might see a product on screen — say Don Draper’s whiskey glass or Daenerys Targaryen’s dress—and pause the program, click on the product and then instantly purchase it. Relatively primitive versions of this technology already exist, but the idea is far from new. Long before most people had even seen a TV set, this type of instant-purchase tech for television was already being imagined in the "radio" of the future. A radio set that also included TV with a swivel head, instant newspapers printed right at home, and a telephone that could reach the family car.
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Jun 28
In 1935, an inventor from Indiana devised a new way to build what he believed was the motel of the future. If William E. Urschel had had his way, tourists around the world would all be relaxing in these concrete golf-ball-looking structures by now. It’s a good thing he didn’t get his way.
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Jun 25
The family of a Phoenix man who committed suicide this past September has filed a lawsuit against Fox News over the live broadcast of the event. Understandably, the family says that they suffered emotional distress after the broadcast, which was seen on TV sets and computer screens all over the world. Anchor Shepard Smith apologized immediately after airing the suicide, but a national debate about the disturbing voyeurism of televised police chases
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