The Paleofuture blog has had many different homes over the years. And, as of today, the site is independent again.
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.
History was made when the first in-flight movie was screened over Chicago in 1921. But it wasn’t until 1939 that passengers were treated to the first in-flight TV.
If you’re in Los Angeles and looking for something to do this weekend, I suggest heading down to the Petersen Automotive Museum
The October 1923 issue of Practical Electrics magazine included this peek at the future of motoring—a future when every car could turn into a boat with ease.
The 1945 magazine ad is for Detrola, a company based in Detroit, Michigan that made some absolutely gorgeous radio sets in the 1930s and 40s.
When prominent pilots were dying in the 1900s, some people started to wonder if aviation really had a future.
A time capsule sealed by a bank in 1916 was opened in Saratoga Springs, New York this week. And it has many of the things you’d expect—like some photos of the town, a letter from the president of the bank in 1916, and some old coins. But one artifact stuck out as peculiar to the onlookers of 2016: A 10-cent bill.
Alvin Toffler, arguably the most influential futurist of the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87 years old.
In the photo above we see a videophone (or picturephone as they were sometimes called at midcentury) being demonstrated at the International Radio Exhibition in Stuttgart, West Germany in 1965. The weird part? The woman in the photo is apparently not even bothering to look at the person she’s speaking with.
Forget baseball. America’s favorite pastime in the 1920s was electrocuting people.
The late 1930s were dark times for Britain. War was on the horizon, and things were about to get very, very tough. But some periodicals tried keeping things light with utopian visions of tomorrow. Like this March 5, 1938 cover of Modern Wonder which featured the streamlined transportation of the future
From supersonic jets to nuclear armageddon, the jokes from this 1966 joke book reveal plenty about our techno-phobic fears for tomorrow.
Eero Saarinen designed some of the most iconic American buildings of the 20th century. The arch in St. Louis? That was him. The TWA terminal at JFK airport? That was him too. And it wasn’t just buildings. Saarinen also designed the furniture that would define futurism of the 1960s, like the tables in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Time capsules are usually pretty boring. And most people would probably call the latest time capsule that was unearthed in Ohio pretty dull. It contained just a single photo of a middle school class in 1938 and some lists of students. But for one 93-year-old man, that capsule is a reminder that life can be pretty ok sometimes.
This Japanese-made, remote-controlled tank got tech nerds all excited in 1931. But it wasn’t just because they saw a new toy. Tech-minded folk of the early 1930s also saw a utopian solution to war. A solution where, ideally, fewer humans would have to die.
Tech-enthusiasts of the 1920s were obsessed with turning everything electric. They wanted electric mixing bowls, electric dishwashers, and even electric haircuts. It may seem like an obvious idea today, but back in the 1920s, an electric haircut was straight out of science fiction.
Janet Waldo, the voice actress who gave life to the original Judy Jetson in 1962, has died. Waldo was 96 years old.
New technology is scary. Just ask the people who think that their illnesses are caused by wifi. But blaming unfortunate things on newfangled technology has been happening for decades, if not centuries. Like when farmers of the 1920s used to blame too much rain, earthquakes, and droughts on the new technology of radio.
The July 20, 1958 edition of Arthur Radebaugh’s Sunday comic strip “Closer Than We Think” imagined the futuristic world of leisure, where every family not only owned their own car and home but also enjoyed a bizarre half-yacht that was powered by their automobile.
In 1894 the Wright Brothers’ first flight was still nearly a decade away. But people were obsessed with figuring out how to use powered flight for any number of applications. The May 5, 1894 issue of Scientific American featured one such idea—an aero-train that could zip across the country at 150 miles per hour.
On October 12th, 1983, Bill Landreth called his friend Chris in Detroit to chat. Chris frantically explained that the FBI had raided his house. “Don’t call me anymore,” Chris said in what would be a very short conversation. Bill didn’t know exactly what was happening, but he did know this: If the FBI had come for Chris, then he might be next.
“This is not a good commercial for Ziploc,” said one disgusted onlooker in Burke, South Dakota. And they weren’t wrong.
It’s the 2016 drone one.
It’s 15-year-old British pilot Luke Bannister at the World Drone Prix in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to be exact.
But! But....!
John Kasich held a town hall meeting in Mansfield, Ohio this weekend where he told a crowd the one thing we’ve been waiting to hear from a presidential candidate: The flying car is on its way.
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.
