Today’s modern automobile often comes with high-tech crash-avoidance systems. Parallel parking is a breeze when your car beeps to let you know when you’re about to hit something. The people of yesteryear couldn’t have imagined something like that, right? Think again.
Think of it like music, but for your taste buds. Confused? Well, the people in this illustration from 1926 probably were too.
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Sick of shoveling the snow off your sidewalk? Well, the good folks of 1925 have a brilliant idea for you: just set it all on fire.
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Coal has been keeping our lights on and our houses warm for centuries. But coal’s inherent messiness — both in mining it and burning it — has always been a problem. So it’s no surprise that many people today advocate for cleaner alternatives. What may come as a surprise, however, is that some people were dreaming of a cleaner energy future nearly a century ago.
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New York City at the turn of the 20th century was a pretty pungent place. Piles of garbage, millions of people cooking food, and about 2.5 million pounds of horse manure emptied into the streets per day will do that to a city. And don’t forget the 420,000 gallons of horse urine flowing through the streets each week. But some forward-thinking New Yorkers had an idea to clean up the city: establish a citywide central vacuum system.
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If you were a psychic, astrologer, spiritualist or any other kind of charlatan in the 1920s, you had no greater enemy than the science and technology magazines of the era. Many publishers of the 1920s saw calling out bullshit peddlers as a natural part of their broader mission. And they did so in glorious fashion — by giving away the pseudo-supernatural secrets of countless frauds.
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The American kitchen has always been a battleground for competing visions of the future. But one of the most radical ideas for the kitchen of tomorrow wasn’t some Space Age design with all the bells and whistles — it was actually having no kitchen at all.
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At the turn of the 20th century, middle and upper-middle class technologists were obsessed with the "servant problem," which you might know better as the old adage: It’s so hard to find good help these days. These were the technological leaps that would to make unreliable human assistants as obsolete as broken butter churns.
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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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The September 1928 issue of Science and Invention magazine included an illustrated cover that dared readers to find all of the scientific errors they had planted. Forty-eight scientific errors, in all. And $500 in prizes to the winners who submitted the correct answers.
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