paleofuture

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

People Movers: The Great Transportation Promise of the 1970s

In the 1970s, personal rapid transit (PRT) was supposed to be America’s great transportation savior. It combined the privacy of a privately owned car with the efficiency of mass transit. But despite a great deal of hype, this futuristic transportation tech is still mostly relegated to the future that never was. Serious research on PRT…

Depression-Era Teachers Predicted Online Schools Would Look Like This

In 1934 the president of Northwestern University, Walter Dill Scott, predicted that technology would radically change the college experience. Distance learning would be more common thanks to TV, radio, and fax. And commuting students would change the physical landscape of the surrounding school. President Scott wasn’t altogether wrong, but the future didn’t arrive quite like…

Intel Coined the Term iPad Back in 1994

Apple is notoriously protective of their intellectual property. Even going so far as suing Samsung in a high-profile fight over the iPhone and iPad designs. But what if Apple didn’t coin the name for one of their most celebrated products? Namely, the iPad. Predictions for iPad-like gadgets predate Apple’s device by decades. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968…

Time Traveling Scientists Were Going to Save Liquor After Prohibition

After alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, many American distillers had a problem: they didn’t have enough old booze lying around. It’s possible to churn out a barrel of whiskey in just a few days, but you need at least 3 years of aging for many people to consider it any good. The “time traveling”…

This 1998 Video Sends You Inside The Web to Learn About Evil Cyberpunks

Websploitation videos of the 1990s had it all: sex, violence, and crudely animated viruses chasing you in a Tron-like hellscape from which you’ll never escape. This 1998 video, edited down to its most ridiculous bits by the folks over at the Found Footage Festival, mashes together every cyberphobia a parent could have. Think your daughter…

What Time Is the Zero-Gravity Super Bowl?

Football and jetpacks have a long history together. But what if you actually strapped the jetpacks on the players? That was the idea in this illustration from a 1981 kids’ book that promised “zero-gravity” football played in space colonies of the future. https://gizmodo.com/the-super-bowls-love-affair-with-jetpacks-512620603 Back in the 1970s and ‘80s there was a sense that as…

2003’s Soul-Crushing Office of Tomorrow Tracked Your Every Move

Sometimes the most accurate visions of the future are also the most terrifying. Like this employee-tracking system imagined in a 2003 concept video by Accenture. Strategically placed cameras monitoring employees? Check. Mandatory name badges tracked by infrared sensors? Check. It would all be pretty humorous in that darkly dystopian way if it weren’t actually happening…