quickies

Storyboard illustration for the May 14, 1958 episode of the Disneyland TV show, “Magic Highway, USA.” [via anonymous email contributor]

Grandpa had a horse. Father, a horseless carriage. Today —and tomorrow— you will have wings. — Print ad circa 1946 for Alcoa Aluminum via X-Ray Delta Too bad many of those postwar dreams — from personal flying machines to miracle houses — weren’t delivered on.

Betamax and chill but one of you is a robot and the other is a seal

1984: The Tot robot, manufactured by the now-defunct company Comro, puts a California sea lion through a series of tests during a demonstration at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. The aquarium said at the time that they had plans to study the feasibility of incorporating a robot into its marine mammal shows. [Associated…

1964: By the year 2014, it is anticipated, our population will have doubled and Congress, instead of curbing farm output, may be offering incentives for increase in production. Even so, the mellow independence and freedom of the old days of the small family farms is something we are not likely ever to see again. [August…

An artist’s impression in 1958 of the future of commuting: a futuristic monorail to transport people to and from suburbia and their waiting families. Oh, how those monorails never quite arrived as promised. [Getty Images]

“By the time the year 2000 arrives, the list of electrical appliances will be endless… non-pollution electric cars on safe magnetic highways, electric beams for metalworking, laser beams for digging tunnels, robot vacuum cleaners and dry cleaning installations in the close, adjustable total illumination for all homes, completely automated hospitals, recycling of waste and widespread…

How fires will be extinguished in the skyscrapers of the future, according to the March 1927 issue of Science and Invention magazine.

The home office of the future, as imagined in the 1967 short film, 1999 A.D.

1996: “IDC predicts that by January 1997, up to a fifth of America’s top 500 companies boasting Web sites will have either closed them down or frozen their growth. Although more people are expected to peek at the Web this year, many will cancel their subscriptions and go back to watching television.” [Times of London]

“The images most of us conjure up when we hear the words ‘virtual reality’ were drawn against the backdrop of science fiction from the 1980s and ’90s. By calling Oculus Rift a ‘virtual reality headset,’ Oculus VR has implicitly linked its product back to the Holodeck, The Lawnmower Man, and William Gibson’s descriptions of near-bodily…

1995: Artist’s concept painting of a future expedition on Mars’ moon Phobos. The explorer on the left is using a personal spacecraft which is anchored to the soil, while the explorer on the right examines a boulder that might weigh 1,000 pounds on Earth, and just a pound on Phobos. [Illustration by Pat Rawlings for…

New York to Chicago — In Just 12 Hours!

Regular air line passenger and freight transportation between the larger cities, particularly New York and Chicago, promises to become an accomplisht fact this spring. All the usual conveniences will be available to passengers, besides wireless communication, mail service, sleeping quarters and aerial promenade. Not to mention the most wonderful scenery ever presented to alpine tourists,…

Is it beyond the bounds of reason, in view of our recent progress, to imagine that the day is coming when, by touching a button on some convenient part of our anatomy, we may get in tune with a central wireless, typeless, inkless, pulpless, paperless, newsless distributing agency that will telepathically convey to us the…

As animal food will have been wholly abandoned before the end of this century, the debris of the kitchen will be much more manageable than at present. — January 11, 1914 Anaconda Standard newspaper in Montana

And Yet the Hamburglar Remains At Large…

On September 24, 1996 the mayor and police chief of San Jose, California swore in Officer Mac, a McDonald’s-sponsored robot. Officially, Officer Mac’s duties were limited to educating Bay Area citizens about crime prevention. But we all know Mac was deputized for one purpose, and one purpose only: to teach kids how delicious McDonald’s food…

“When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction—like space travel—the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.” — Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek You can read the entire interview over…

Men such as IBM Economist Joseph Froomkin feel that automation will eventually bring about a 20-hour work week, perhaps within a century, thus creating a mass leisure class. Some of the more radical prophets foresee the time when as little as 2% of the work force will be employed, warn that the whole concept of…

1926: One of the world’s first walk-through metal detectors, invented to search employees leaving a manufacturing plant in Germany. [April 1926 issue of Radio News]

Atomic Bomb Testing Dummy (1953)

March 1953: A dummy sitting behind a protective shield in a Nevada basement used for atomic bomb testing. The mannequins used for these kinds of tests were often purchased from downtown Las Vegas department stores like J.C. Penney’s. [National Geographic’s Tumblr “Found”]

Fallout shelter originally installed in 1955 for a family of three in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The shelter cost $1,800 (over $15,000 adjusted for inflation) and contained four drop-down beds, a chemical toilet, and an air exchange device that was operated by hand-crank. The entire thing was brought to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. during the…