HOME |
RSS | 
Mitch O’Connell posted 34 vintage valentine cards that appear to be the type children would exchange at school, yet many of them contain double entendres, whether intentional or not. Link -via Boing Boing
On March 21, 1920, the Sandusky Register reported on an astonishing invention in which W. W. Macfarlane, traveling in a car (driven by a chauffeur), held a conversation with his wife back at the garage -500 yards down the road! The article is reprinted at Paleofuture. Link
This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort
The 1947 version Aesop’s fable, produced by Encyclopedia Brittanica Films. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Comments Off
Mysterious beings that disable computers are called bugs. Before computers, mysterious beings that sabotaged vehicles and other machines were called gremlins. This use of the term originated in the 1920s to describe unexplained problems with military aircraft, according to Wikipedia. Gremlins were blamed for factory mishaps during World War II, as this safety poster reminds us. See more wartime industrial safety posters at vintage ads. Link -via Boing Boing
Comments Off 
As it gets closer to Thanksgiving, some of us look forward to the public spectacle of giant balloons floating through NYC streets that is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
This vintage shot from the 1940 parade shows a simpler balloon version of the Man of Steel taking his place in the parade. Boy, parade balloons sure have come a long way!
We’ve posted about some extremely unsafe toys here. the one that came to mind immediately when I saw the title of this Cracked post was the Atomic Energy Lab, and it’s included. But the others are just as shockingly dangerous! However, I remember some of them from my own childhood, the childhood with no seat belts or bicycle helmets or minimum age for babysitting. Shown here is a kit for children to learn how to melt and mold their own lead, which could not only burn a hole through flesh, but poison your brain as well. NSFW text. Link
We’ve posted art from more than one person who takes everyday paintings or iconic images and adds fantastic monsters to them. It’s neat, but it’s not new. Back in the 1970s, Yokopro in Japan published postcards that did the exact same thing. The monsters are called pachimon kaiju. See a collection of them at How To Be a Retronaut. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Comments Off 
How to Be a Retronaut has a collection of portraits of married couples a hundred years back or more. Some look strangely alike, and they all look fairly uncomfortable posing for the photographer. Link -via Everlasting Blort
It’s hard to believe that people once thought we’d all be living in domes by the year 2000, but this delightful retro article from Popular Science confirms that the future is a lot squarer than people in the 60s and 70s thought it would be. The geodesic dome was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller, who felt that the simplicity of design and ease with which it could be built would catch on like wildfire across the country, and claimed rather ambitiously that it could replace all manner of traditional housing. However, Fuller hadn’t taken the cost of repairs into consideration, nor the problems that would be encountered bringing the dome up to code, and the awkward shape of the panels made replacing them a real pain, so the geodesic dome fad fell along the wayside, becoming nothing more than a vision of the future that was never meant to be. If you want to read more about the “dome of the future”, follow the link to PopSci, where you’ll find lots more info, and pages from past Popular Science articles detailing the rise and fall of the housing dome fad.
Public health posters from the World War I and World War II eras warned soldiers of the dire consequences of venereal diseases (now called STDs). Since military men were the target, blame was squarely put on the woman they may encounter. This gallery at Environmental Graffiti also features a French poster that even a non-French reader can decipher. Link
Chromeography is a website dedicated to retro chrome logos and lettering on vintage cars, trucks and household appliances. They don’t make them like they used to, and this gallery of logos reminds us of a different time. I think it would be cool to see these types of old chrome logos in cursive fonts on today’s computer equipment and televisions.
Comments Off 
An electric razor that shaves close to the bone! This x-ray, featured at Modern Mechanix, was taken in 1941, back when x-ray scientists and technicians didn’t bother wearing lead aprons and spent their spare time coming up weird things they could x-ray. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(Image credit: L. F. Ehrke, Westinghouse Research Lamp Laboratories)
Remember the good old science kits of yesteryear that contained things like cyanide, uranium, and ammonium nitrate, as well as Bunsen burners and glass vials that are now considered too dangerous for children? Why, you can’t even blow up the kitchen anymore! How do the original science toys stack up against their modern counterparts? Collectors Weekly looks at both the old and the new science kits, which include a lot more than chemistry, and rates the old against the new. We may not have ammonium nitrate anymore, but we have some science kits that our parents and grandparents never had. Link
Cartoonist Winsor McCay {wiki} creates an early movie animation in this 1911 film, originally entitled Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics but often just called Little Nemo, after McCay’s comic strip. Most of the video is a dramatization of how the animation came about. The actual animation happens about eight minutes in. McCay later went on to produce Gertie the Dinosaur, which many of us learned was the “first” animated movie. -via Buzzfeed
You know these two fine-looking young men, even if you’ve never seen a photograph of either one before. They are both featured at My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a photo blog dedicated to the hotties of history, dating back to the invention of the camera. Really, who knew that Hermann Rorschach (of the ink blots) resembled Brad Pitt? The site is accepting submissions of more attractive public domain photographs. In case you are still wondering about the guys here, on the left is Almanzo Wilder, husband of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. On the right is Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. Link -via Metafilter
The fashion industry unveils the latest swimsuits for the summer of 1952, designed to elicit wolf whistles. I can’t decide which I like better, the Wingding (for “obvious” reasons) or the Dunk Me. -via Nag on the Lake
Only recently have pit bulls gained a reputation for being dangerous dogs, mainly due to their popularity among those who breed and train dogs to be overly aggressive -or to just look scary. For generations, the breed was known as “The Nanny Dog.” See a collection of children’s pictures taken with their beloved and loyal dogs, all pit bulls, at What I Saw Today. Link -via the Presurfer
For you young folks, an “arcade” was a place where people could go to play games on “arcade machines.” It was fun! You could socialize, hone your fine motor skills, and spend all your money! See a collection of classic arcade games from the 19th century through the space age at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Comments Off 
DDT {wiki} is a pesticide that was used extensively in the US from 1939 until it was banned in 1972. It was very effective in controlling insects that spread typhus in Europe and malaria in tropical regions, but it also accumulated in the ecosystem, killed wildlife, and was found to have harmful effects on humans as well. But in the 1940s and ’50s, pesticide companies promoted DDT as the cure-all for everything. This 1947 ad gave quite a few reasons DDT is “good for me.” See the rest of it at Mindfully. Link -via J-Walk Blog
This French medical poster is from a exhibit called “Health for Sale: Posters from the William H. Helfand Collection” currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Strange how vintage art and the French language can make even syphilis seem somehow more benign. A dozen such posters can be seen at PBS. Link -Thanks, Travis Daub!
YouTube combines vintage footage, special effects, and modern memes to salute the viral videos of 100 years ago with this top 5 countdown. Somehow this video has 7,200 likes and a few hundred dislike, but only 489 views -but it’s their website, so I guess they can do that. The YouTube page has links to the videos that inspired this compilation. -via Buzzfeed
Collection curator Emma Hawkins shows us some items made from animals long ago with functions beyond display. On one hand, using animal remains to make consumer products is green in that the items are organic, biodegradable, and an example of recycling. Compare these items to the same things made of plastic or fiberglass. On the other hand, it’s morbid and may have contributed to the decline of certain species. What do you think? Is it OK to value a fur or something made of ivory as long as the animal died a hundred years ago? Link -via Nag on the Lake
This picture and others from the same sequence are everywhere on the internet today, but rarely is there any source or context attached. These are stills from the movie Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest.
Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest {wiki} is a 1908 film by D.W.Griffith. It featured cutting-edge special effects that were frightening to audiences. -via Dangerous Minds
The “notificator” was coin-operated and left a message for only two hours. It probably did not catch on due to competition from the much-cheaper “bulletin board.” Link -via reddit
Printing a book was different in 1947. The process required quite a few skilled workers performing tasks you won’t see anymore, outside of historical videos like this. Contrast this process with a more modern method of publishing. -via Metafilter
A computer from the mid-20th century would fill an entire room -a big room, at that! IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC system in 1956, the first computer to use a hard drive. What you see here is that hard drive, which weighed a ton and held a whopping 5 megabytes of memory storage. It was named the 350 Disk Storage Unit. At the time, you could lease the entire computer setup for a mere $3,200 a month! Link -via Bits and Pieces
Although the Lunar New Year doesn’t begin until February third, 2011 will be the Year of the Rabbit. Pink Tentacle welcomed the year by posting several beautiful antique bunny illustrations from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The rabbit shown dates from 1903. Link -via Right Brain Terrain
Science Service was a nonprofit news organization that decided to “jazz up” their information releases by adding humorous pictures in the 1920s. Some of these “cartoonographs” are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Many of the early cartoonographs were drawn by Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin; see more examples at The Bigger Picture. Link -via Nag on the Lake
A Livejournal post has an extensive collection of beautiful vintage magazine covers, including many from 19th-century issues of the Italian magazine La Scena Illustrata and the French magazines La Vie Parisienne and Figaro Illustré. Some contain illustrated nudity. The cover shown here is from 1883. Link -via Everlasting Blort
