Twenty years ago, you would have been the coolest kid on the block for carrying a Nokia 3310. But time flies and technological innovation accelerates along with it. Today, we live in a world ruled by touch screens, face recognition, and machine learning, so imagine what the technology was like a century ago, or two.
In order to find out, we’re taking you on a historical roller coaster to see what ancient technologies defined the future a hundred years ago. From motorized roller-skate salesmen in 1961, aka the proud ancestors of today’s hoverboards, to giant mechanical tricycles from 1896 and orgone accumulators of the ’50s, these are some of the most interesting retro-historical devices.
Some were truly incredible, others look kinda cool, and the rest… make you think “what on earth were they thinking?”
#1 300 Year Old Library Tool That Enabled A Researcher To Have Seven Books Open At Once, Yet Conveniently Nearby (Palafoxiana Library, Puebla)
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#2 350 Year Old Pocket Watch Carved From A Single Colombian Emerald
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#3 Robo-Vac, A Self-Proppeled Vacuum Cleaner Part Of Whirlpool’s Miracle Kitchen Of The Future, A Display At The 1959 American National Exhibition In Moscow, 1959
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#4 This Car Is A French ‘Delahaye 175s Roadster’, Introduced At The Paris Motor Show In 1949. Only One Was Ever Made. It Was Recently Sold At Auction For Around Five Million Dollars.
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#5 Philco Predicta Television From The Late 1950s
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#6 The World’s Oldest Surviving Diving Suit: The Old Gentleman, From 1860
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#7 Motorola Vice President John F. Mitchell Showing Off The Dynatac Portable Radio Telephone In New York City In 1973
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#8 Kodak K-24 Camera, Used For Aerial Photography During Ww2 By The Americans
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#9 The Old “Telefontornet” Telephone Tower In Stockholm, Sweden, With Approximately 5,500 Telephone Lines C. 1890
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#10 A Rail Zeppelin And A Steam Train Near The Railway Platform. Berlin, Germany, 1931
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#11 Helen, An American Indian Telephone And Switchboard Operator, Montana, 1925
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#12 A Thin TV Screen (Only 4 Inches Thick) With An Automatic Timing Device To Record TV Programs For Later Viewing Is The Wave Of The Future As Shown At The Home Furnishings Market In Chicago, Illinois, On June 21, 1961
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#13 Soviet Peasants Listen To The Radio For The First Time, 1928
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#14 Motorized Roller-Skate Salesman In California, 1961
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#15 FBI’s Fingerprint Files, 1944.
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#16 The Open Side View Of An Old Calculator
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#17 One-Wheel Motorcycle, Germany, 1925
Image source: Nationaal Archief
#18 The Hindenburg Takes Shape, 1932
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#19 The First Public Demonstration Of A Computer Mouse, Graphical User Interface, Windowed Computing, Hypertext And Word Processing, 1968
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#20 TV Glasses Decades Before Google Glass, 1960s
#21 Orgone Accumulator, A Device Sold In The 1950s To Allow A Person Sitting Inside To Attract Orgone, A Massless ‘Healing Energy’. The Fda Noted That One Purchaser, A College Professor, Knew It Was “Phony” But Found It “Helpful Because His Wife Sat Quietly In It For Four Hours Every Day.”
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#22 Bikes For Your Feet
#23 Jay Ohrberg’s ‘Double Wide’ Limousine. Built By The Man Who Also Created The ‘American Dream’ Superlimo
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#24 A 5mb Hard Disk Drive Being Loaded Onto A Plane, In 1956
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#25 The ‘Isolator’ , By Hugo Gernsback: A Helmet For Insulating The Senses Against Distraction; From The Journal Science And Invention, Vol. 13, No. 3, July 1925
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#26 Using A Two-Horn Listening Device At Bolling Field In Washington, D.c., In 1921 Before The Invention Of Radar, To Listen For Distant Aircraft
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#27 1911: Chester Mcduffee And His Ads Diving Suit, Aluminum Alloy Weighing 485 Lbs/200 Kg
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#28 A Man With A Punt Gun, A Type Of Large Shotgun Used For Duck Hunting. It Could Kill Over 50 Birds At Once And Was Banned In The Late 1860s
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