In the 1930s, audio tech nerds were tinkering with everything. The most futuristic model homes of the day were wired for sound in every room, home audio recording was being introduced, and the LP was invented to use as audiobooks for the blind. And even things we’d consider mundane today got the radio treatment in…
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.
Throughout the 20th century, radio nerds were trying to figure out how to build the perfect headphones. Over-the-ear varieties could get hot and sweaty. In-ear varieties would fall out. And then there were these clamp-ons from 1927, which looked like the least comfortable of the bunch — despite what the manufacturers…
For today's edition of There's Nothing New Under The Sun™, we have a radio engineer who experimented with creating high-tech fashion that would be right at home amongst the 21st century's glitch art and wifi visualizations. Except that these patterns were made in 1938.
Many people are convinced that wearable tech will revolutionize our relationship with technology in the coming decades. But we’ve been waiting on this revolution in some form or another for a century. Case in point: This kid who had it all figured out in 1922 when he invented a radio that fit inside his top hat.
Each generation seems to think that it's the first to imagine radical change in the newspaper industry. The predictions of futuristic robot editors? They date back to at least 1968. Tablet news? At least 1994. Printing the news by radio right in your home? 1934.
By the late 1930s the vast majority of American households had a radio. So how were radio manufacturers supposed to expand their market? By insisting that the ideal American home has a radio in every room . Sometimes that meant putting radios in the latest appliances — like right inside every American's favorite…
Do you find yourself obsessing over the latest tech? Does owning the newest model smartphone or tablet feel like a need more than a desire? Well, as you can see in this comic strip from 1919, your anxiety about having the Latest New Thing is actually nothing new. In fact, you're continuing a long tradition of nerds…
Josephine Daskam Bacon was an author known for her adventure serials that featured female protagonists. But in 1929, she took a break from her regular fiction writing and slipped on her futurist goggles for an article in Century magazine titled "In Nineteen Seventy-Nine." Bacon imagined just how much progress women…
"What for example could be staler than to-morrow morning's newspaper account of a prize-fight or political convention one has already received over the radio?" wrote one commentator in 1928. Radio was overtaking print as the news medium of the day and some people insisted that newspapers were going to disappear…
In 1939 Radio-Craft magazine wrote a series of articles promising that they would build a home of the future in Teaneck, New Jersey. What fantastical, futuristic technology would they show off? Robot servants, newspapers printed by radiowaves, and glowing walls? Sadly, no. The tech of tomorrow in this house was…
Some day a President of the United States may be elected “electronically.” This sentence wouldn’t look out of place in any news story from the 21st century, despite quotes around the word “electronically.” But believe it or not, that prediction comes from a magazine article in 1945.
We often think of subscription radio in the U.S. as a fairly new idea. But back in the 1940s, one company was trying to make ad-free subscription radio a reality. How would they make sure people paid? By protecting their broadcast from freeloaders with shrieking cat noises.
If you lived on the small Southern California island of Catalina at the turn of the century, news was hard to come by. The island had a rather unreliable carrier pigeon system and copies of the L.A. Times wouldn't arrive by boat until around 1:30 in the afternoon. News was slow moving. But all that changed on March…
Television was hardly a reliable broadcast medium in the early 1930s. But that didn't stop companies from speculating about TV designs of the future. Like this Marconi-brand "radio set of 1960."
PBS has a documentary about Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the resulting hysteria that swept America. The only problem? Many scholars contend that the program didn’t actually cause mass panic at all.
Soaring through the clouds in 1925, passengers on an Imperial Airways flight traveling over Germany were treated to a brand new novelty—one of the first in-flight movies. Even more astounding? The film had live orchestral accompaniment. But not in the way you’re probably thinking.
Today, there's a lot of scaremongering in the media surrounding online trolling. When people are being terrible to each other, there's often this knee-jerk reaction to blame the technology rather than acknowledge that human beings have always been just plain horrible. Case in point: the radio trolls of 1910.
America got a little bit smaller on the night of February 8, 1924. Or at least it felt that way. From a banquet hall at the Congress Hotel in Chicago one man could be heard simultaneously in New York, Jacksonville, Denver, San Francisco, and even Havana, Cuba (which was no longer technically controlled by the U.S. but…
