The Retro Blog

Thomas Edison was kind of a jerk. He came up with DC current, which was sort of impractical and inferior to Tesla and Westinghouse’s AC current, but that wasn’t going to stop him from making everyone use DC. He decided the best way to accomplish this was to portray AC current as exceedingly dangerous. How [...]

Stéphane Massa-Bidal created an entire series of these wonderful retro inspired covers that includes such sites as Twitter and Facebook.
[via laughing squid]

Actually I don’t think I’d like to see them make that, thank you. ::cough cough::
[via weird universe]

Life Magazine presents its collection on 30 Dumb Inventions. See them in all their brilliant retro glory. Here’s a lovely “baby cage you can keep suspended out your window. Such a lovely place for baby.

This is a brilliant article about about a British designed WWII weapon known as the Great Panjandrum. It’s basically a giant wheel with explosives strapped to it. The plan was to set off the explosives which would send the wheel hurtling across Normandy beaches and smash a tank sized hole into the Nazi’s defensive wall. [...]

This post from the vintage photo livejournal community is all about retro diving technology. Here’s an early “rebreather”.

Popular Science magazine used to have a section where readers would suggest product ideas. Here’s a great one: spray on asbestos! The submitter thinks liquefied asbestos would be handy in a pressurized can for spraying on heating and water pipes, and into the lungs of children! [via weird universe]

I’m a sucker for vintage science equipment. What kid didn’t want a lie detector growing up? Oobject has compiled a list of the best looking vintage lie detecters.

The IBM Antique Attic is a wonderful archive collection of old counting devices and early computers. This 1948 Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator looks the product of a lite-brite and love seat coupling.
[via boing boing gadgets]

Happy Bedford Day, everybody. On January 12th, 1967, University of California psychology professor James Bedford became the first man to have his body cryogenically frozen. As the first man to be preserved, the bill was paid by the Life Extension Society. He also earned the awesome title of “cryonaut,” the term given to cryogenically preserved [...]

The Chicago Tribune has yet another wonderful gallery. This time it’s of gadgets that must have been pretty darn snazzy and high tech in there day. Now… not so much.
High-tech once upon a time — chicagotribune.com.

Here’s a lovely gallery of retro future illustrations from old science magazines. [via boing boing].

It seems like you need movies to sell books these days, and this is an effective one. It’s an ad for Jetpack Dreams, a book about the mode of transportation all the post-war folks thought we’d have by now. [via boing boing]

Today marks the anniversary of the closing of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.
Disney was a major presence, and a lot of the attractions that ended up at Epcot were built for the fair. A lot of these new attractions were animatronics. I’ll let Uncle Walt explain:

Did you stay tuned until the end? Them [...]

Here at The Retro Blog we’ve celebrated the Charles and Ray Eames extensively. We’ve also discussed the wonders of polaroid instant film. This wonder little film combines the two. Here the Eames’s take an in depth and stylish look at the iconic Polaroid SX-70. [via mid-century modernist]

“Mars and Beyond” is a 1957 episode of “Disneyland” the tv series in which the folks at Disneyland contemplate life on other planets and man’s quest for understanding of the world around him. I like to think of it as Mickey Mouse’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The episode is introduced by Walt himself with his personal [...]

If the winner of The Cold War was going to be determined by who had the most awesome looking new technology, I think the Ruskies would have been miles ahead of us. You know Sputnik looked sweet, but what about this lesser known project, EPIK. This flying saucer like aircraft was being designed in secret [...]

Everybody’s favorite furniture designers, Charles and Ray Eames, produced this film to help people learn about computers called “A Computer Glossary: Or Coming to Terms with the Data Processing Machine.” It looks like an episode of Schoolhouse Rock that’s been to art school for layout design.

[via laughing squid]

I must say that “test pilot” has never been an appealing sounding job to me. In the 50’s, though, it seems as though there were plenty of people quite happy to perform the task. Have a look at this gallery of all the exciting and dangerous looking toys these test pilots got to play with. [...]

Hey guys, remember tennis for two? Now you can build your own! [via boing boing]

Here’s a gallery of some interesting vintage exercise equipment. It all looks quite heavy and perhaps painful. I’d like to see some late night infomercials with Chuck Norris trying to sell these things.

Old electronics are some of the easiest retro items to find at garage sales, thrift stores and the like. People are quick to do away with their vintage electronics because they seem so incompatible with modern technology. If you’re in the mood for a little “do it yourself,” however, there are a lot of great [...]

I think being a tester for Consumer Reports would be a pretty sweet job. Who wouldn’t want to spend all day beating up a bunch of products to see what it takes to make them break? I think this job was probably most fun back in the 50’s and 60’s, when a ton of new [...]

This Disney Innoventions Dream Home currently in Tomorrow Land reminds me of how there seem to be houses of the future every few years and yet I never see half the stuff in them implemented.
Here’s a look at a kitchen of the future from 1967. Thing is, most of the stuff they showed is very [...]

As you can likely tell by the fact that I’m a 22 year-old maintaining a blog about the 1950’s and 60’s, I’m really into false nostalgia. This is why I think the emotoscope is a brilliant idea. Essentially it’s viewfinder that makes the world around you look like it’s playing out in super 8mm. You [...]

I think it would have been pretty cool to be a nerd in the 1950’s. You know how I’d impress my nerdy friends? With a Curta calculator. Designed in 1948, this fishing reel-like device could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even complicated calculations like square roots. The device even has a cutesy nickname: the [...]

I was born in an era where one use flashes were a thing of the past, but to the swingin pseudo mods in this Kodak commercial, flashcubes were probably pretty exciting. These nifty little devices were tiny cubes with a one use flash on each side, allowing the photographer to shoot four flash exposures before [...]

When the average person thinks about the history of video games, Pong typically springs to mind. But what came before? All the way back in 1958, a select group of nerds were getting very excited about a game called Tennis for Two. The game was invented by physicist William Higinbotham to entertain visitors at the [...]

What do Hitler and The Beatles have in common? A love for this distinctive looking microphone. Not only is it gorgeous to look at, but the sound is divine. Readers of this blog probably already know that retro mics reign supreme over their modern counterparts, so take a moment to appreciate the interesting history of [...]

Oh boy, how the people of the past loved their cigarettes. Back when smokers were celebrated rather than shunned and forced to huddle together in cold, stinky alleys behind bars, creative inventors loved to keep the nicotine flowing. Modern Mechanix posted a wonderful little roundup of such devices. Marvel at the clever methods people used [...]

When going to a fair or amusement park in the first half of the twentieth century, you had many options for entertainment. You might go on the swings, or a thrilling ride on the wooden roller coaster, or maybe you would just stare at some tiny babies in glass bubbles. Modeled after similar devices used [...]

The other night I was watching 60 Minutes when this lovely little segment appeared:

Two thoughts came to my mind:
1. When did 60 Minutes become Jackass with a budget?
2. Why isn’t that ray-gun more awesome looking?
I’ll address only issue two here. This thing looks like a giant black tray with a hole in it stuck on [...]

Here’s a short video of a man going on a quick jetpack ride over Tomorrowland at Disneyland. Why don’t we all have jetpacks in the 21st century? I guess there’s the whole thing about them being extremely inefficient. And judging by the pained faces of the kids in the video covering their ears hard enough [...]

Polaroid recently announced that it is going to end all production of instant film. Although this isn’t as devastating to me as two years ago when Kodak slit the throat of Kodachrome (how I love thee, super 8), but there’s still something sad about losing a unique method of creating images. Pre digital, there was [...]

I’ve been keeping an eye on these electric bikes from Schwinn for a while. The battery gives you an extra push when you get tired. I think I’d be inclined to ride a bike more often if I weren’t so intimidated by San Francisco’s landscape. It’s certainly not the worst looking bike, and it [...]