Hasta La Gadget!

Before the invention of the car, jaywalking wasn’t a recognized concept. Want to get across the street? Then just walk across the street—nobody’s going to stop you. But the rise of the automobile posed a new problem for people of the early 20th century. While the median state-designated speed limit for American cities was just 10 miles per hour in 1906, the pace of American streets soon increased enough that people who wanted to cross them were suddenly putting themselves in harm’s way. So cities across the U.S. started to regulate where and when pedestrians could cross. You can see the faint pedestrian crosswalk lines painted on the street in the scene below from Detroit circa 1917.

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It all sounds so Jetsonian. A new 600 mph "Hyperloop" method of transportation connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco? That’s the buzz around the internet water cooler as people guess what Elon Musk has in store for the transportation of tomorrow. I say, sign me up! But if we take any lessons from past visions of futuristic transportation (as we are wont to do here at Gizmodo) we can probably guess the Hyperloop’s greatest hurdle: tunnels.

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Mechanically-powered flashlights — be they shake, crank or squeeze varieties — are one of those must-have items for every emergency kit. When a tornado knocks out power, or the Big One hits, it’s nice to know that you won’t be fumbling around in the dark looking for batteries. But you might be surprised to learn that mechanically powered flashlights have been around for nearly a century.

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The next time you’re frantically rushing to plug your parking meter, you can curse Carl C. Magee. Because it was on this day in 1935 that Magee’s parking meters made their world debut, much to the chagrin of future drivers everywhere.

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TV advertisers imagine that one day soon you might see a product on screen — say Don Draper’s whiskey glass or Daenerys Targaryen’s dress—and pause the program, click on the product and then instantly purchase it. Relatively primitive versions of this technology already exist, but the idea is far from new. Long before most people had even seen a TV set, this type of instant-purchase tech for television was already being imagined in the "radio" of the future. A radio set that also included TV with a swivel head, instant newspapers printed right at home, and a telephone that could reach the family car.

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