Apr 13
In addition to the long curly cords, and the part where they are permanently attached to a wall, old-fashioned landlines have something else that we’ve lost in the cell phone revolution: a dial tone. What happened to that thing? More »
Apr 12
It’s funny how fondly we look back at classic ads—print, commercials, anything—compared to how we react to ads today. That Apple 1984 commercial? Perfection. Those old VW Bug print ads? Soooo cute! Today? Ew banner ads. Ugh Flash. ZOMG what happened to my ad block!? There’s no room for art in advertising anymore because we’ve all been conditioned to ignore the pixels dedicated to advertisements. Or from another perspective, ads are so tainted because they’re all plastered with social media links that we can’t take them seriously anymore. More »
Apr 10
I wish I could live during a time when we believed creatures and aliens and things lived on the Moon. My imagination would have had so much fun! But alas, real life is too boring for that kind of fun. Still, in 1836, people believed that astronomers had found life on the moon. They imagined a world of hairy men with wings, unicorns and naked insect ladies. More »
Apr 09
During NASA’s Apollo 10 moon mission in 1969, not quite everything went to plan. But we’re not talking Apollo 13-style disasters here—instead, we’re talking about some toilet-based issues. More »
Apr 08
There are plenty of reasons to be thankful that you don’t live in the early 1900s (child labor laws, air conditioning, what have you), but just in case you’ve been feeling nostalgic for simpler times, new research from the University of Detroit Mercy should put those wistful fantasies to rest. After chemically analyzing several dozen patent medicines from around the dawn of the 20th century, chemist Mark Benvenuto found that many of these completely unfounded “miracle cures” contained toxins such as lead, mercury, and even arsenic. More »
Apr 04
Nobody likes arriving at an empty coffee pot. Especially computer scientists at Cambridge University—which is why, back in 1991, a team of them invented the world’s first webcam to keep an eye on coffee levels from their desks. More »
Apr 03
Holy Crap, Is This Mark Zuckerberg’s Embarrassing Childhood Angelfire Website?
Posted in: Today's Chili
The word on the interwebs today is that this 1999 Angelfire page belongs to one Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg, which means this could be the very first website that the hoody that made Facebook ever created. If true, it’s a time machine into the 15-year-old brain of the most powerful man on the Internet. More »
Apr 03
Transitioning back to normal life after WWII had its fair share of challenges for soldiers, one of which was a housing shortage. Lustron houses—prefabricated enamel steel homes—were a direct response to the dearth. This is a 1949 picture of all of the components of one of the cookie cutter abodes laid out like puzzle pieces. More »
Apr 03
What with today’s fancy Doppler radars and forecast graphics and fear mongering, it’s refreshing to get a glimpse of the relative simplicity in man’s very first attempt at remotely monitoring the shifts in Earth’s climate. More »
Apr 03
As of today, shocking as it may be, we as a species have been desperately clutching cell phones like our lives depended on it for the past 40 years. And it’s hard not to get a little nostalgic. Because regardless of whether your first handset was a massive grey brick from the 80s, a black, slightly smaller brick from the 90s, or a sleek, silver flippy thing from the dawn of the new millenium, your phone has undoubtedly seen a few upgrades. More »
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