Rare movie posters are going up for sale later this month in a Sotheby’s auction that includes a very special find: The world’s first movie poster, according to the Guardian, created in 1895.
Phone calls here in 2018 seem to be more and more rare, especially with younger people. But most Americans still know basic phone etiquette, like saying “hello” when you answer the phone, and not hanging up without some kind of goodbye. But in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a helpful guide from 1950 that was produced…
Americans who opened the newspaper on January 5, 1961, were greeted with an article by Associated Press science writer John Barbour. He described the futuristic world of the year 2000 and the great medical advances that would be achieved by then. And quite frankly, reading about all of the medical miracles we were…
Never say never. Thomas Edison was both a great inventor and an amusing prognosticator. But nobody, no matter how smart, knows the future. And that goes for Edison as well. Back in 1894, Edison predicted that transatlantic phone calls would be impossible. But his doubts would prove silly roughly 30 years later when…
Cars have been around for more than a century now. We take it for granted that we have names like ‘automobile’ and ‘car’ to describe these four-wheeled beasts we love so much; they’re the only names we’ve ever known. But, friends, it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, the American government’s foreign propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), invented fake names for journalists to plant stories in newspapers. In 2016, I wrote about Guy Sims Fitch, just one of the pseudonyms that was used globally. But I recently stumbled upon a few more names…
Gina Haspel was confirmed by the Senate to be director of the CIA on May 17th. But the public never got to see the memos that she wrote and authorized about the brutal torture of Al Qaeda suspects at a CIA black site that she oversaw in Thailand in 2002. Until now.
Alvin Toffler, who died in 2016, will be remembered for his many contributions to the work of futurism. Toffler was a prolific writer, most notably the author of the 1970 best-selling book Future Shock, and a man who became friends with important figures across the political spectrum in Washington DC, including Newt…
A lot of things were supposed to kill newspapers in the 20th century. There was radio, then TV, then the internet. Somehow newspapers have survived, in one form or another. But it’s still interesting to take a look at the predictions that people of yesterday had for how the news business would change. Like this comic…
When you hear about the concept of missile defense in space, your first thought might be Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly called Star Wars. But ideas for an invisible missile shield in the sky are much older than the 1980s. As just one example, we have this Sunday comic strip from 1959,…
We’ve looked at a lot of weird cars here at Paleofuture. But this one might take the cake.
When you think of jetpacks, your first thought is probably an image of some fun, care-free piece of pop culture like The Jetsons or James Bond. Or maybe even the Super Bowl. But jetpacks were serious business for the U.S. military in the 1960s. And, believe it or not, there were plenty of futuristic ideas that…
Have you ever seen a kid take a marker or crayons to a phone or iPad? If so, you might be able to imagine what it was like to see kids of the 1950s drawing all over the fantastic new technology of the day: television. But in at least some cases, this wasn’t a horrifying mistake. The person on the TV screen told them…
What will real estate agents of the future look like? That’s what a video from 1991 was trying to find out.
Do you know WWII veteran Richard Silagy or his family? Silagy lived in Cleveland, Ohio, sometime after World War II and hid a time capsule filled with personal items in his home. The time capsule was recently discovered by a housing contractor doing improvements on the house, but a search online for Silagy or any…
We’re still waiting on our flying cars. But back in 1923, the magazine Science and Invention assured readers they were just around the corner. And to top it off, the buildings of tomorrow would be built to “solve” the traffic problem.
One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous mansions, known as the Ennis House, is up for sale in east Los Angeles. And even if you don’t know the house, you certainly know the movies that the famous building has appeared in, including Blade Runner (1982), The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Replacement Killers…
Over the past two years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been digitizing old, never-before-seen films of nuclear tests and uploading them to YouTube. The LLNL just uploaded a new batch of films last week, and I couldn’t help but notice that one in particular is incredibly cinematic.
Robotic lawnmowers are fairly mainstream these days, even if they don’t have much market share yet. But they’ve been a long time coming. We’ve been promised solar-powered semi-autonomous lawnmowers for decades. This Sunday comic strip from 1959 predicted the rise of these machines, but also pointed at the problem with…
Rivers in cities can easily fill with heaps full of trash, lost things, and industrial waste. But if the city has been around for a while, all of that garbage can tell an incredible story.
