The Paleofuture blog has had many different homes over the years. And, as of today, the site is independent again.
Guy Sims Fitch had a lot to say about the world economy in the 1950s and 60s. But he was invented by the U.S. government.
In a newly uncovered proposal for Epcot’s computer and communications system in 1968, we can see what might have been.
Director Mike Judge and actress Maya Rudolph will be hosting a special screening and Q&A in Los Angeles on October 4th.
Researchers in Poland have uncovered a time capsule, dating from 1934. But this isn’t some ordinary time capsule with the run of the mill items you might expect.
Janet Knox’s Baton Rouge home is now just a shell of its former self.
Apple CEO Tim Cook did an interview this morning on Good Morning America where he said that he’s much more optimistic about augmented reality than VR.
Do you remember Myst? That mysterious 3D computer game from the 1990s where you walked around solving puzzles? Well, believe it or not, the folks over at Disney were in talks with the creators of Myst to turn it into a theme park down in Florida.
The largest batches of photos from the Cheyenne Mountain facility appear in just two spots: a 1966 official NORAD report by David W. Shircliffe, which is available online, and a 1970 book titled NORAD Command Post: The City Inside Cheyenne Mountain by Henry W. Hough.
Christie’s is hosting an auction of President Ronald Reagan’s personal items later this month online from September 19-28th. And there are some genuinely interesting pieces of history for sale. And some rather goofy ones.
The metal tube, safely tucked inside a boulder in 1968, contained a lot of things you’d expect in your average 20th century capsule—like photos and newspapers. But the most interesting thing inside might be the questions that the people of the 1960s had for 2016.
X-ray imagery is obviously taken for granted in medicine here in the 21st century. But at the turn of the 20th century, x-rays opened up an entirely new world.
While most of Gough Whitlam’s CIA report is about what we’d expect, there’s one redaction that leaves an air of mystery: “The pragmatic [long redaction] Whitlam exudes self-confidence [...]”
Thus, the first year of the 21st century was not the year 2000. It was the year two-thousand-and-one.
“I didn’t want Idiocracy to get popular by the world getting stupider faster,” Mike Judge told the Daily Beast.
The U.S. government considered establishing a nuclear weapons storage site in Iceland during the 1950s. But the U.S. wasn’t going to tell Iceland.
In the 1950s, fish sticks were invented as a new way to sell Americans seafood.
In the 1920s, inventor Fletcher E. Felts wanted to suspend railway cars above the automobile traffic in Los Angeles and cut everybody a little slack.
Kent gives the example that when he screens films in poorer countries they get a particular vision of what the United States must be like—a vision filled with skyscrapers, enormous homes, and cars. And in turn, that drives a desire in those countries for such things. Especially cars.
This “electric carriage,” which appeared in the July 27, 1889 issue of Scientific American, was way ahead of its time.
From the late 1950s until the late 1980s, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union were working on computer networking in one form or another. Why did the US succeed where the Russians failed?
Phones of the 1930s were nothing like the smartphones of today, of course. But the people who wanted to get Myrna Loy’s personal contact information to harass her used many of the same tactics that are used by hackers here in the 21st century.
For decades, Ray Kurzweil has consistently been wrong about the future. But people still listen to him for some reason.
Donald Trump stood up last night in front of the American people and shouted at us for an hour and 15 minutes that things are terrible and that he’s going to make them better. Daddy’s here.
The Cold War-era boxes all had food rations—everything from cans of blackberries and peaches to graham crackers. And for some reason they decided to give some of the foods a taste test.
Today, we present choice excerpts from a little tape titled Computer For Grannies, which was released in 2001.
The “flaming” log sign was patented in 1922 by Jose De Elorza of Madrid, Spain, and it worked by using “logs” of wood that were actually made of amber-colored glass.
Magazines like Electrical Experimenter, Practical Electrics, and Science and Invention, all heralded the new age of technology that was emerging in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. And in pulpy rags like these a photograph of Edison’s hands was a treasured exclusive.
The June 1924 issue of Practical Electrics magazine included an article that predicted the rise of robots in public settings like stores, train stations, and office buildings.
It’s no secret that my favorite comic strip of all time is Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh. The strip is largely forgotten today, but it featured the very best of flying cars and jetpacks from the Golden Age of futurism.
Check out Matt Novak’s other projects: All the Presidents’ Movies, the Movie Liberator Project, and the Novak Archive.
From 1968 until 1973, the US military spent about $1 billion a year on a new computer-powered initiative intended to end the war in Vietnam. It went by many names over the years — including Practice Nine, Muscle Shoals, Illinois City and Dye Marker. But today it’s most commonly known as Operation Igloo White.
In 1973, Norway became the first nation outside the US to get online through DARPA’s packet-switched network, the ARPANET. Americans had decided to connect the proto-internet to such a distant country for one reason. They were trying to keep tabs on Soviet nuclear tests.
The common mythology about the birth of the internet is that it evolved organically to produce this new frontier filled with hackers and geeks and new opportunities. The part everyone forgets to mention? The intelligence community, and specifically the NSA, was there from the beginning. The connections between the birth of our modern internet and the military community have long been established. But the part of the story that deserves further exploration is the ties to the intelligence community.
Jetpacks, meal pills, flying cars — they were all there, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Radebaugh, a commercial artist based in Detroit best known for his work in the auto industry. Radebaugh would help influence countless Baby Boomers and shape their expectations for the future. The influence of Closer Than We Think can still be felt today.
One of the greatest media experiments of the 1930s and 40s was the faxpaper. Almost entirely forgotten today, it was a technology that could deliver newspapers over the radio waves, then print them instantly right in your home.
The February 17, 1962 issue of the Sunday comic strip Our New Age (in this case, run on a Saturday in the Chicago Daily News) envisioned the fantastic advancements that the introduction of satellites would allow. Everything from the decline of "old fashioned mail" to the rise of video-conferencing from home was predicted by Athelstan Spilhaus, dean of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and author of the comic strip.
Over the course of six weeks during the height of the Cold War, almost three million Soviets visited an exhibition that celebrated America. American kitchens, American art, American cars, and most especially American capitalism. The American National Exhibition in Moscow was a full-court press to convince the Soviet people of American superiority.
Frank Lloyd Wright was arrogant, stubborn, and brilliant. But above all, he was a shrewd businessman who understood the importance of spectacle in keeping his business afloat. Wright put on many shows over the course of his lifetime, but arguably no performance was greater than his utopian plan to create the perfect community: Broadacre City.
In 1970, George Lucas needed dozens of actors with shaved heads for his sci-fi dystopian movie THX 1138. He had trouble filling the roles at first, since so few actresses wanted to cut their locks, but Lucas eventually found the extras he needed in a strange utopian community where everyone worshipped sobriety and expressed solidarity by shaving their heads. It was called Synanon, and over the course of three decades it would become one of the weirdest and most vindictive cults of the 20th century.
From 1934 until 1948 long-playing records (LPs) were almost exclusively the domain of the visually impaired. But they weren't being used for music. Instead, they helped blind people listen to a brand new invention—the audiobook.
