Today we walk through metal detectors to get into courthouses, airports, and even concert venues. But back in the 1920s the first walk-through metal detectors weren’t invented for finding weapons (or nail clippers), they were invented for searching would-be thieves.
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An elementary school in the Philadelphia suburb of Warminster recently opened up a time capsule from 1968. Unfortunately for time capsule purists, this uncapsuling was a bit premature. You see, the McDonald Elementary School’s time capsule wasn’t supposed to be opened until the year 2068.
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Do you ever lie awake at night wondering what the world will look like in two or three hundred years? Ben Franklin did. And he thought that by the 21st century not only would humanity have some absurdly cool gadgets, men might live to be over 900 years old.
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There’s Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Hills in Austin and lately tech boosters in New Orleans have been trying to get the name Silicon Bayou to stick. Everybody wants their region to be the next destination for science and technology-oriented companies to set up shop. But guessing (and promoting) the next big tech region is nothing new. After the rise of Silicon Valley in the late 1970s, it was really anybody’s guess.
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When I was a kid, there was no image more closely associated with surveillance than the CCTV camera. Big Brother is watching, we were warned. The government is keeping tabs on you with video cameras on every street corner. Soon they may even install cameras in your home, they insisted. Honestly, that may have been preferable to what we ended up getting.
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When I was a kid, there was no image more closely associated with surveillance than the CCTV camera. Big Brother is watching, we were warned. The government is keeping tabs on you with video cameras on every street corner. Soon they may even install cameras in your home, they insisted. Honestly, that may have been preferable to what we ended up getting.
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You’ve almost certainly got a telephone in your pocket (or clutch), but don’t think for a second that it makes you any kind of pioneer. People were predicting—and using—pocket telephones more than a century ago, for reasons every bit as lethargic as your own.
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Uncle Sam might soon be spying on you with a vast, computerized network. At least that was the eerie prophecy of The Atlantic in 1967.
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Predictions that 3D movies would be the wave of the future are even older than the talkies
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When I was in middle school there was nothing I wanted more in the entire world than to learn how to program my own computer games. So, armed with Foundations of Mac Programming, I spent weeks chugging along sporadically, doing my best to understand the concepts. Ultimately, I gave up. And I don’t regret it one bit.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
