Aug 08
Aug 08
In 1906, novelist Upton Sinclair founded a cooperative community in Englewood, New Jersey, not far outside New York. It would exist for just six months before being completely consumed by fire, but Sinclair would spend the rest of his life dreaming about his time there. They called it the Helicon Home Colony. And despite sex scandals in the press and a policy that specifically excluded non-whites, Sinclair believed his little utopian experiment was nothing less than the future of American living.
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Aug 07
In the mid-1930s, sci-fi legend Hugo Gernsback predicted that manned flame tanks
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Aug 06
The internet’s Nikola Tesla obsession is in full force. There’s Tesla fanfic, endless blog posts rediscovering the great inventor, and of course, Matthew Inman’s tremendously popular webcomic about the man. But curiously, there’s one crucial thing missing: Any digitized film of Tesla.
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Aug 05
"Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." – Winston Churchill, 1932
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Aug 02
This week we have a time capsule of floppy disks that will be hard to read, a church that thinks microfilm is the best way to future-proof your capsule, and we finally get that royal baby time capsule I was wondering about last week. IT’S A BOY(sterous waste of media coverage)!
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Aug 02
Pre-dehydrated food processor? Non-functional sinks installed purely for style? A streamlined… baby? When it comes to midcentury visions of tomorrow, sometimes it’s hard to tell the spoofs from the earnest predictions. But what’s even more interesting is why the parodies popped up in the first place.
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Aug 01
The early 1980s was a time of serious dread for many people worried that the U.S. and the Soviet Union might start World War III. And it’s easy to understand why. One wrong move by either nuke-equipped country, and it was the end of civilization as we knew it. In fact, that’s nearly what happened on September 26, 1983 when a Soviet early warning system falsely detected U.S. missiles headed for Russia. Had Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov not been skeptical, there’s little doubt we’d have seen World War III. And a newly released speech written for the Queen of England gives a peek at what that alternate history may have looked like.
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Aug 01
Mashups, intellectual property laws, bootlegs, copyright. While those are all valid concerns today, they’re hardly anything new. Just ask Charlie Chaplin.
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Jul 31
Have you ever been to a movie so shocking that the theater management offered you a life insurance policy just in case you died of fright? Filmmaker William Castle devised a scheme that did just that for the release of his 1958 suspense/horror film Macabre. Thankfully, they never had to pay out.
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