Mar 25
"The biggest thing of all in research is the mental effect," Willis Whitney wrote in 1921, "the projecting of a beam of light into the infinite and the growth of man’s appreciation."
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Mar 24
Getting people to the airport via train is a natural priority for cities around the country. When Minneapolis built its first light-rail line back in 2004 it had two major stops: the airport and downtown. But despite over two decades of modern Los Angeles embracing subways, there’s still no train to LAX. And even if the city does build one, it probably won’t look as cool as Goodell’s sleek 1963 proposal above.
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Mar 21
This week in our round-up of time capsule news we have a 20-year-old McDonald’s capsule that only 90s kids will understand, a "time barrel" in Maine, and kids in the UK who learn that we eventually get old and die.
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Mar 20
With the nation focused on World War II, Americans of the early 1940s understood that they’d have to wait until peacetime for all their shiny new futuristic gadgets to arrive—including the TVs of the future, shown above in illustrations from the Emerson Radio and Phonograph Corporation. If you can believe it, these were the big screen models.
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Mar 19
In the sixth chapter of his 2010 book The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan L. Ensmer looks back at the 1957 movie Desk Set within the context of 1950s computing and the fear that one day we’d all be replaced by machines:
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Mar 19
Remember 1996? Bill Clinton was president, they finally nabbed the Unabomber, and Alanis Morissette was blowing up the charts with a fundamental misunderstanding of the word ironic. Simpler times, really.
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Mar 17
Think Facebook invented the Like button? Think again. Back in the 1930s one man hoped to create a device that could send feedback to radio stations with the push of a button. He called it the "radiovota." Get it? The radio… voter.
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Mar 13
Hadley Freeman over at The Guardian has declared that Back to the Future is this season’s big fashion trend. Which makes complete sense, right? It’s almost the year 2015—the very year that Marty visits in the BTTF sequel—so bring on those Nike powerlaces
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Mar 12
Every new communications technology has that honeymoon period where a select group of people embraces it as the key to utopia. And then come the trolls. Even early radio had miscreants who would send out false distress signals
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Mar 07
It was a particularly weird week for time capsules. Everybody’s trying to figure out where those 19th century coins came from, a town in Australia is debating whether they should open a 1994 capsule with old photos of Keith Urban, and one Redditor is trying to bury some dogecoins. Seriously.
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