Aug 06
In its early days, radio technology was often called wireless telephone. The Xbox was almost called the MEGA
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Aug 05
"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
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Aug 02
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)!
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Aug 02
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.
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Aug 01
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 on September 26, 1983 when a Soviet early warning system falsely detected U.S. missiles headed for Russia. Had Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov not been skeptical, there’s little doubt we’d have seen World War III. And a newly released speech written for the Queen of England gives a peek at what that alternate history may have looked like.
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Aug 01
Mashups, intellectual property laws, bootlegs, copyright. While those are all valid concerns today, they’re hardly anything new. Just ask Charlie Chaplin.
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Jul 31
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.
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Jul 30
On Wednesday there’s an enormous animation art auction in L.A. that includes some gorgeous pop culture history. It will include original animation cels from Fleischer Studios, concept art from Disney legend Mary Blair, and an original production drawing from Winsor McCay’s classic 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur. There’s even some 1970s and 1980s Jetsons art that should pique the interest of any retrofuture fan. But there’s one thing noticeably absent among the Jetsons pieces: any production cels from the 1962-63 iteration of the show
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Jul 30
There are surprisingly few documents from 1969 that mark the birth of the internet. We have some notes scribbled on a pad of paper, and a few newspaper articles after the fact. But there weren’t any reporters parked outside of 3420 Boelter Hall at UCLA on October 29, 1969 to witness that historic moment when the ARPANET gasped its first breaths. In fact, it wasn’t even above-the-fold news.
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Jul 29
Air Travel Today is a Damn Bargain
Posted in: Today's Chili
It might not feel like it, but air travel’s a steal compared to what it was a half century ago. Since the American airline industry was deregulated in 1978, ticket prices have fallen by about 40%. Of course, air travel isn’t quite as luxurious as some postwar dreamers imagined
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