Matt Novak

This Week in Time Capsules: Disappointed Students Boo Boring Capsule

Time capsuling is hard. Everybody wants to find that ancient capsule with the dozens of gold bricks or the mummy or whatever. But more often than not, they’re quite boring. Your average 20th century capsule generally has just a handful of old pennies and an American flag. But we keep searching. Because sometimes, we find…

7 NSA Patents: Cyber Manholes, Super-Shredders and More

The National Security Agency has access to the world’s most incredibly sophisticated spy technology. But did you know that the NSA sometimes patents its own creations? The NSA has been granted patents for everything from advanced paper shredders to specific methods of location tracking on the internet. There’s even a super-secure manhole designed to protect…

December 21, 1936: People dressed as robots at a Toronto children’s festival. Photo by Arthur Goss via the City of Toronto Archives.

Thanks Comcast, I Was Worried Prices Might Go Down

A Century-Old Prosthesis So Advanced Even an Expert Thought It Was Fake

In our quest to rid the world of fun and joy, we’ve done a number of posts fact-checking viral images. Sometimes we’ll come across an image that just doesn’t smell right, and enlist the help of experts to determine its authenticity. And sometimes, even the experts aren’t quite sure. That was the case recently with…

First Video of the Steve Jobs Time Capsule Being Unearthed

This past September one of the most sought after “lost” time capsules of the 20th century was finally found. After years of various people searching for the thing, the so-called Steve Jobs capsule was finally unearthed in Aspen by a team of excavators from the National Geographic Channel show Diggers. And now we have video…

A 1986 World Future Society report predicted a shortfall of 50 million jobs in the U.S. by the year 2010, thanks to increased automation. The report even had a name for the millions of unemployed. They were called MADMUPS: Middle Aged Downwardly Mobile Underemployed Professionals.

The Automatic Lumberjack of the Future

In the 1950s Americans were obsessed with push-button convenience. The future promised push-button meals, push-button cleaning, and even push-button schools. But this 1955 ad for ball bearings imagined something even weirder for the world of tomorrow: the push-button lumberjack. And amazingly, it was a vision that was delivered on. From the March 1955 issue of…

According to the experts the population will reach its peak 50 years hence, in 1988. Thereafter it will dwindle and we will eventually degenerate largely into old or middle-aged. The reason: Birth control. — July 11, 1938 Connellsville Daily Courier in Pennsylvania

Tell Me You Wouldn’t Buy This Snow-Fighting Fire Plow

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. The cover of the January 1925 issue of Science and Invention magazine included the illustration above, proposing a new way to minimize the drudgery of snow shoveling. The accompanying…

Artist Ray G. Scarfo’s illustration of a semi-permanent moon base in the future. Published in the May 1969 issue of Science Journal, just two months before humans would first set foot on the moon.

This Week in Time Capsules: Optimistic Girl Scouts Bury 200-Year Tube

This week in our time capsule news round-up we have 100-year-old papers that look like they were printed just yesterday, a Girl Scout capsule that won’t be opened until the year 2214, and some artifacts in Florida from the ancient Age of Videotape. Girl Scouts bury 200-year time capsule at birthplace of founder In 1912,…

The FDA Just Approved a PillCam The Jetsons Predicted 50 Years Ago

The Jetsons was one of the most important cartoons of all time, having helped shape the way that we talk about the future here in the 21st century. The show predicted many of the technologies we have today. And this week, Americans can check another crazy Jetsonian prediction off the list. After nine long years,…

Nearly all experts agree that bacterial and viral diseases will have been virtually wiped out [by the year 2000]. Probably arteriosclerotic heart disease will also have been eliminated. — February 25, 1966 issue of Time magazine

8 Viral Sochi Olympics Photos That Are Total Lies

Thousands of images are pouring out of Sochi in the lead-up to the Olympics. And things don’t look great. There are unfinished buildings, a lack of winter weather, and an abundance of trash. But don’t believe every image you see. Like so much of what gets passed on social media these days, a lot of…

1990: Pop Music Will Just Be Musical Orgies By 2010

Back in 1985 Tipper Gore testified in front of a Senate committee warning that children were being exposed to all kinds of naughty stuff in modern music. Sex, heresy and violence were destroying good old-fashioned American values. Won’t somebody think of the children! Gore’s testimony and the outrage of finger-wagging parent’s groups led to the…

That Coke Super Bowl Ad Would Have Been Illegal in 1910s Iowa

Idiots, racists, and old-fashioned xenophobes took to social media this past weekend to express their disgust with Coca-Cola. The international beverage company had the audacity to run an ad during the Super Bowl that featured people singing “America the Beautiful” in different languages. This, of course, was unacceptable to those who believe that the U.S.…

Inside the Fakes Factory: My Chat With a Viral Image Creator

It’s an astounding sight: Buddha carved into a tall rock formation at the Ngyen Khag Taktsang Monastery in China. People talked breathlessly about how they visited the place, saw it with their own eyes. Except that they didn’t. Because it’s a fake. And this is the guy who faked it. The creator of this photoshopped…

This Ridiculous Victorian-Era Rocking Bath Wasn’t Just For Fun

Hydrotherapy was all the rage in the 19th century. Inventors devised countless contraptions to immerse people in water, hoping to restore them to health using nature’s favorite liquid. But none were quite as awkward as the invention above: the “rocking bath tub” of 1891. Hydrotherapy was thought to be able to cure all kinds of…

When a Bar Full of Women Was a Nightmarish Dystopia

Harry Grant Dart had quite an eye for the future. The early 20th century illustrator imagined women driving flying machines, the airmail of the future dropping from the sky, and even a world of robot butlers long before the word robot had even been coined. But one of Dart’s illustrations from 1908 was perhaps the…