Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Time Machines

The Google Maps of 1917

May 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
communal-map

Our relationship with maps has evolved over the past hundred years. We don't have to unfold too-large sheets of paper, search out our destination, and trace back the route with a marker anymore. We can plug in an address or a point of interest, and a computer will tell us how to get there. But that might not be as new as it seems. This "electric directory"  from 1917 (pictured above) contains many of the elements any modern tourist in New York City might desire. Just push a button with the attached pen, and your route is illuminated. Local advertisers even had their own real estate on the ... Read More

Thinking Cap

May 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
thinking-cap

Decades before Twitter, Snapchat, and viral cat videos, inventor Hugo Gernsback bemoaned the difficulty of concentrating on desk work. Even back in the 1920s, noise from the street and the frequency with which “a telephone bell or a door bell rings somewhere ... is sufficient, in nearly all cases, to stop the flow of thoughts,” he wrote. Even more perniciously: “You are your own disturber practically 50 percent of the time,” always willing to be distracted by the wallpaper’s pattern or a buzzing fly, he warned. Gernsback’s solution, presented in the July 1925 edition of Science ... Read More

The First Audiobook: an LP for the Blind

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
lp-audiobook

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. In the early 1930s, the American Foundation for the Blind took on the project to get "talking books" into the hands of blind Americans, with a mixture of funding from public and private money. In the early 20th century, the major record companies had found success selling records that could only hold about five minutes of music, but they struggled during the ... Read More

The ‘Like’ Button That Came Before Facebook

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
like-button

Talking back to our broadcast media seems to be an integral part of the early 21st century experience. Hulu is constantly asking me if a particular ad is relevant to my interests. Major news networks like CNN want me to give my opinion on breaking news stories to them via Twitter. Even here at Pacific Standard we encourage you to leave comments on stories. In the parlance of advertisers, this two-way street of media communication is called "engagement." It might seem like something that's just started popping into conversations recently, but the idea is as old as broadcasting itself. In ... Read More

The Dream Recorder (of 1926)

April 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
dream-recorder

Last week, new research was published that showed the first objective recording of the contents from a dream. Using an MRI machine and images from the Internet, researchers in Kyoto, Japan, devised a way to decode with some accuracy what people were visualizing while they slept. But scientists and science fiction folk alike have been targeting the elusive dream for capture since at least the 1920s. The cover of the September 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine included concept art of the "dream recorder" machine. The device wasn't invented by sci-fi publishing pioneer Hugo ... Read More

Nikola Tesla and the Myth of the Lone Inventor

April 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
edison-tesla_fe

This post is based on a talk I gave at South by Southwest and a version of it first appeared at BBC Future. Who invented the Internet? To answer that seemingly simple question you basically have two options: you can go on for hours explaining the hundreds of people and institutions that contributed crucial advancements to the way that the Internet operates, or you can just say Vint Cerf. Or Leonard Kleinrock. Or Tim Berners-Lee. People have been fighting for decades over who invented the Net. Some will tell you that Vint Cerf’s work on its underlying protocols—TCP/IP—was its ... Read More

Will California Build an Earthquake Warning System?

March 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A Santa Monica apartment building destroyed by the Northridge earthquake in 1994 (PHOTO: SPIRIT OF AMERICA/SHUTTERSTOCK)

On March 27, 1964, a 9.2 megathrust earthquake rocked Alaska. It was the most powerful earthquake to ever hit the United States and 143 people lost their lives. The earthquake lasted almost four dreadful minutes as office buildings in Anchorage folded in on themselves and homes tumbled down cliffs. No one saw it coming. Just as no one could predict Monday's 6.2 earthquake in Guatemala (which thankfully didn't cause any serious damage). There's no surefire way to predict when an earthquake will strike (and some experts feel that as a practical matter the push for prediction should be ... Read More

Adding a Horse to the Horseless Carriage of Yore

March 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Horse attachment as depicted in the 1937 Popular Science film "Horse-Friendly Auto Attachment"

Last month we looked at an invention from 1904 which could be attached to the front of your horseless carriage in order not to spook that of the horsed variety. Today we have a short film of that pseudo-horse in action (or at least a re-enactment). From the 1930s until the 1950s Popular Science produced short newsreel-type films which would play before Paramount Pictures movies. Much like the magazine, the short films usually would take a look at some of the weirdest new inventions around at the time. But proving that we're far from the first generation to revel in nostalgia, the ... Read More

Your Granddaddy’s TiVo

March 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
timemachinerobot

Turns out fast-forwarding through commercials with your TiVo isn’t exactly a new concept. Irritated audiences have been looking for ways to tune out broadcast advertisements since at least the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, Professor Gleason W. Kenrick of what is now Tufts University developed a machine that could be attached to a radio to automatically “delete” ads. It also targeted excessive on-air talking, which was apparently just as irksome pre–Rush Limbaugh as it is now. The device was a clunky looking, dial-studded box, but the March 1934 issue of Radio-Craft magazine ... Read More

Visions of Futuristic Air Travel (And Plenty of Leg Room!) in 1946

March 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
airtravel

  Before the American airline industry had really taken off, there were many predictions about what pent-up consumer demand following WWII would mean. The September 1946 issue of Popular Science imagined what air travel might look like just five years into the future. The cover proclaimed that "Air Travel for Everybody" was just over the horizon! From Popular Science: By 1951, air transports and the airline pattern itself, both domestic and intercontinental, will confound the most extravagant predictions of the men who were nursing a few scrawny air lines to maturity in 1931. The ... Read More