Yesteryear's Follies
Yesteryear's Follies
| I know, I know: it’s unfair to mock the past for
these things. In ten years people will guffaw at the size of the phones in the Matrix
movies. Nothing is so dated as yesterday’s future. — James Lileks |
|
| The gent up there is wearing a portable radio, not a bomb
belt. No, the odd haberdash accoutrament on his head is not a solar-power collector, it's
an antenna. This could be considered the first Walkman – Eat Our Electrons, Japan! Who would commission a painting of such an odd device? Hugo Gernsback, the father of Modern Science Fiction and a gearhead par excellance. If it had to do with pushing around electrons, Uncle Hugo had a mighty yen for it. Modern Science Fiction, in fact, started out as a medium by which Uncle Hugo could make technological predictions without looking like a techie Nostrodamus. One of his stories Ralph 124C41+ [get it? one to foresee for you, what a trickster], appeared in his magazine Modern Electrics, in 1911. People used videophones, flew around in private aircraft, used radar, and sauntered into space. Most of what he dealt with was technology just on the edge of giving birth, like the concept of zero-point enegy today, so many of his predictions were way in right field, like those below. |
|
 |
Radiohead
|
| A Tapdancing Theramin | |
 |
|