Will the year 2000 be filled with flying cars or polluted air? Push-button lunches or the start of World War III? These were just some of the predictions made by fourth grade kids in 1976, who had trouble deciding if the future was going to be filled with high-tech gadgets or nuclear war. Or maybe both.
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What would you do if your boss handed you a mysterious box and said that if anything weird started happening with it, to just ditch the thing and run as fast as you can? Well that’s exactly what happened to a poor courier working for the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s — a courier who, as it turns out, was probably carrying a plutonium core that was used in the development of nuclear bombs
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Faster than a speeding dirigible! More powerful than a horseless carriage! Able to leap short cottages in a single bound! It’s a bird! It’s an aeroplane! It’s a… jumper balloon?
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In the summer of 1927 a new fashion craze swept the nation. Called the "Lucky Lindy Lid," it was a ladies’ felt hat that came in a variety of sizes and colors. Adorned with a small propellor on the front and two miniature wings darting out on each side, it may have looked a bit ridiculous, but it celebrated an important moment in aviation history — Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.
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This week in our time capsule news round-up Harvard buries a first-gen iPhone, an animal park in the UK hopes to raise awareness about elephants, and the Sunshine State seals dozens of capsules in celebration of Florida’s "discovery" 500 years ago.
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Anytime someone online writes about internet history, the comments inevitably fill up with jokes about Al Gore. There’s a popular myth that Gore once claimed to have invented the internet, which means many people think that "Al Gore" works as both a set-up and a punchline. What these jokesters might be surprised to learn is that Gore actually deserves some credit.
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The high-end appliance company Miele recently commissioned an interesting study about the kitchen of the future. It projected that in 50 years our food will be 3D-printed, walls in our homes will grow food, and we’ll even have mini-fish farms right in our kitchens. But you’d be forgiven for feeling like you’ve heard this all before. Specifically, from Martha Stewart back in 1996.
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IBM’s Watson
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Remember Webvan.com? A lot of people do, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone with anything nice to say about it. At the dawn of the internet retail revolution, Webvan was supposed to do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. The site failed miserably. But that’s not what futurists of the year 2000 predicted for it.
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At the end of World War I, tens of millions of people died in just a few short years. But these deaths had nothing to do with the bullets and bayonets that had taken so many lives in battle. It was, instead, the Spanish Flu, which killed off about 5% of the world’s population from 1918 until 1920. Were a similar pandemic to hit today, one of the things we’d need to rethink is how we use our phones.
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