This week in our time capsule news round-up Harvard buries a first-gen iPhone, an animal park in the UK hopes to raise awareness about elephants, and the Sunshine State seals dozens of capsules in celebration of Florida’s "discovery" 500 years ago.
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Anytime someone online writes about internet history, the comments inevitably fill up with jokes about Al Gore. There’s a popular myth that Gore once claimed to have invented the internet, which means many people think that "Al Gore" works as both a set-up and a punchline. What these jokesters might be surprised to learn is that Gore actually deserves some credit.
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The high-end appliance company Miele recently commissioned an interesting study about the kitchen of the future. It projected that in 50 years our food will be 3D-printed, walls in our homes will grow food, and we’ll even have mini-fish farms right in our kitchens. But you’d be forgiven for feeling like you’ve heard this all before. Specifically, from Martha Stewart back in 1996.
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IBM’s Watson
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Remember Webvan.com? A lot of people do, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone with anything nice to say about it. At the dawn of the internet retail revolution, Webvan was supposed to do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. The site failed miserably. But that’s not what futurists of the year 2000 predicted for it.
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At the end of World War I, tens of millions of people died in just a few short years. But these deaths had nothing to do with the bullets and bayonets that had taken so many lives in battle. It was, instead, the Spanish Flu, which killed off about 5% of the world’s population from 1918 until 1920. Were a similar pandemic to hit today, one of the things we’d need to rethink is how we use our phones.
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Our weekly round-up of time capsule news includes a McDonald’s capsule from 1970 that hasn’t aged well, a Vietnam War-era capsule in Virginia Beach that "smells like rotten eggs," and more church time capsules than you can shake a hymnal at.
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Robots are stealing our jobs. Again. In fact, they’ve been stealing our jobs in one way or another since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
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The 1920s was a thrilling decade for aviation. Daredevils were just beginning to hop across the Atlantic, and at least one airline was even experimenting with in-flight entertainment.
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The American kitchen has always been a battleground for competing visions of the future. But one of the most radical ideas for the kitchen of tomorrow wasn’t some Space Age design with all the bells and whistles — it was actually having no kitchen at all.
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