John Ptak recently posted an interesting 1916 cover from Illustrated World magazine showing the futuristic "Electric Titan" robot fighter. Though rarely in humanoid robot form, the multi-soldier death machine of tomorrow was a surprisingly common idea during World War I. Why so outlandish? Because the military predictions of the time were rarely made by the actual military.
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Science fiction author Frederik Pohl
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In 1964, sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov penned a piece for the New York Times with his predictions for the world of 2014. Looking at the World’s Fair of 50 years hence, Asimov imagined 3D TV, underground cities, and colonies on the moon. Many people online have hailed this as an incredible example of prescient thinking, but what sticks out to me is just how shockingly restrained—unoriginal, even—his predictions were for the time.
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The videophone is one of those technologies that more or less snuck up on us. Promises that one day you’d not only be able to hear but see a person through your telephone are nearly as old as the telephone itself. The videophone spent nearly a century as every bit as much a "technology of the future" as the flying car and the jetpack. We were always this close to making our picturephone dreams come true. And then we did, in a way no one expected.
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Nothing sells the push-button leisure society of tomorrow better than a farmer with ample time to lounge. Or in this case, a rancher in a speedo, getting served a refreshing drink by a robot. Sure things may be difficult now, but when even farmers have plenty of leisure time and the majority of their work is automated, you’ll know that the future has arrived. At least that was the idea.
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America got a little bit smaller on the night of February 8, 1924. Or at least it felt that way. From a banquet hall at the Congress Hotel in Chicago one man could be heard simultaneously in New York, Jacksonville, Denver, San Francisco, and even Havana, Cuba (which was no longer technically controlled by the U.S. but was certainly a playground for American corporations at the time). This was the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast and it was accomplished less than a decade after the first coast-to-coast telephone call was placed in 1915. The future of broadcasting had arrived.
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Of all the buzzwords of the retrofuture, nothing tickled the imagination of midcentury Americans quite like "automatic." Sure, the word pops up here and there in 1930s advertisements for things like the house of the future. And the word was incredibly popular during the rise of the push button at the turn of the 20th century. But it wasn’t until after World War II that the word really kicked into hyperdrive. Cooking was going to be automatic
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Mental Floss recently wrote a short post about a cool British Pathe video showing off what fashion designers of the year 1939 imagined we’d be wearing in the year 2000. And though the film largely focuses on designs for women, it didn’t leave out the men!
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Today in our time capsule news round-up we have a mystery time capsule from 1927, some ideas for building your own back-to-school capsule, and former classmates in Connecticut who went looking for a time capsule but wound up finding each other. They didn’t find the capsule though. It’s nice they found each other, but I was really hoping they’d find the capsule. They didn’t though. No capsule. Just each other.
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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 always someone who did it first. And then there are those that someone tried a century ago that were never heard of again.
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