This week we have a school in England that filled its new capsule with the latest in tech, a casket from the Reagan administration that for some reason includes biscuits and gravy, and a public ceremony in Florida which will show off a capsule for the retired space shuttle Atlantis. And a town that hates fun. Like, really hates fun.
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The ARPANET made its first host-to-host connection
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Welcome to the future! a Samsung rep proclaimed during the company’s new product presentation in Berlin yesterday. Yes, something out of sci-fi! he beamed. The rep was wearing the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, proudly showing it off for the journalists in the room and the tech geeks watching along at home. The future has arrived… again, I suppose.
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Do you ever look at the ancient pyramids in Egypt and think, "Why isn’t there a gigantic carnival ride on top of those?" Well, you wouldn’t be alone. Because somebody asked that very question in 1931.
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John Ptak recently posted an interesting 1916 cover from Illustrated World magazine showing the futuristic "Electric Titan" robot fighter. Though rarely in humanoid robot form, the multi-soldier death machine of tomorrow was a surprisingly common idea during World War I. Why so outlandish? Because the military predictions of the time were rarely made by the actual military.
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Science fiction author Frederik Pohl
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In 1964, sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov penned a piece for the New York Times with his predictions for the world of 2014. Looking at the World’s Fair of 50 years hence, Asimov imagined 3D TV, underground cities, and colonies on the moon. Many people online have hailed this as an incredible example of prescient thinking, but what sticks out to me is just how shockingly restrained—unoriginal, even—his predictions were for the time.
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The videophone is one of those technologies that more or less snuck up on us. Promises that one day you’d not only be able to hear but see a person through your telephone are nearly as old as the telephone itself. The videophone spent nearly a century as every bit as much a "technology of the future" as the flying car and the jetpack. We were always this close to making our picturephone dreams come true. And then we did, in a way no one expected.
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Nothing sells the push-button leisure society of tomorrow better than a farmer with ample time to lounge. Or in this case, a rancher in a speedo, getting served a refreshing drink by a robot. Sure things may be difficult now, but when even farmers have plenty of leisure time and the majority of their work is automated, you’ll know that the future has arrived. At least that was the idea.
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America got a little bit smaller on the night of February 8, 1924. Or at least it felt that way. From a banquet hall at the Congress Hotel in Chicago one man could be heard simultaneously in New York, Jacksonville, Denver, San Francisco, and even Havana, Cuba (which was no longer technically controlled by the U.S. but was certainly a playground for American corporations at the time). This was the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast and it was accomplished less than a decade after the first coast-to-coast telephone call was placed in 1915. The future of broadcasting had arrived.
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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.
