During his 1984 State of the Union speech, President Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a new permanently manned space station within a decade. The Space Shuttle program was underway, and a permanent space station seemed like the next logical step in our bold push into the final frontier. It didn’t hurt that the Russians were already working on Mir, and America didn’t want to look like it was resting on its laurels.
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This week’s time capsule round-up includes an arson investigation that turned up a Jazz Age time capsule, a beer keg filled with kids’ predictions for the future, and a town of retirees that must be worried paperweights could become extinct.
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It seems every six months or so these photos of Marilyn Monroe from World War II make the rounds on the good ol’ internet machine. At the time they were captured in 1944 she hadn’t yet taken the name Marilyn Monroe, nor had she dyed her curly locks blonde. She was simply known as Norma Jeane Dougherty and worked in a factory in Van Nuys, California. David Conover, the Army photographer who snapped these shots is credited with "discovering" her, as she soon went on to fame and fortune. But there’s one detail about these photos that rarely seems to gets mentioned: Marilyn Monroe, the future sex symbol that would set a generation’s heart aflutter in the postwar era, is assembling a drone.
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When was the last time you read Shakespeare for pleasure? I’m sure a few of you can truthfully answer that it was last night or maybe just last week. But I’d dare wager that for most American adults (myself included) it was some high school English class. William Shakespeare’s popularity has endured over four centuries. But can it last four centuries more? Not according to one futurist from the 1960s.
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The September 1928 issue of Science and Invention magazine included an illustrated cover that dared readers to find all of the scientific errors they had planted. Forty-eight scientific errors, in all. And $500 in prizes to the winners who submitted the correct answers.
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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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In the 1970s, civilian researchers at places like IBM, Stanford and MIT were developing encryption to ensure that digital data sent between businesses, academics and private citizens couldn’t be intercepted and understood by a third party. This concerned folks in the U.S. intelligence community who didn’t want to get locked out of potentially eavesdropping on anyone, regardless of their preferred communications method. Despite their most valiant efforts, agencies like the NSA ultimately lost out to commercial interests. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
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In 1986, legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book that explored what the world might look like in the year 2019. Titled July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, the book has predictions about everything from transportation to sex. But it’s his predictions about sports of the future that may raise a few eyebrows for baseball fans here in the year 2013. Bionic shoulders, 57-year-old third basemen, and open steroid use? Just a regular day for Major League Baseball in the year 2019, according to Clarke.
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Imagine a world where nearly every book ever published could be delivered to you electronically in the blink of an eye. Imagine a world where all of your banking is done without having to visit a bank teller. Imagine a world where paper doesn’t need to be shuttled around to exchange ideas. I know, I know, I’m basically describing right now. But in the year 1972, when the ARPANET (the precursor to our modern internet) was just beginning to take its first baby steps, these ideas were all a fantasy. In the minds of these men, specifically.
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The mechanical computers of yesterday may have been enormous, difficult to program, and amazingly clunky—but they sure were beautiful to watch in action. Released theatrically by Popular Science on August 6, 1948, this short film played before Paramount Pictures movies and demonstrated to the public how computers were freeing "research of old limitations" and provided "stimulus for unprecedented technical advancements." For those watching in darkened theaters, though, it was mostly just gorgeously choreographed machinery.
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