The Promising, Techno-Doomed Future of Popular Science in 1939
Motherboard just launched a new video partnership with Popular Science. In honor of that, here's a little excursion into the pages of PopSci, 1939-1966, that we took when the magazine first opened its giant archive.
Motherboard just launched a new video partnership with Popular Science. In honor of that, here's a little excursion into the pages of PopSci, 1939-1966, that we took when the magazine first opened its giant archive.When I learned that Popular Science, the magazine of scientific record and unbounded possibility, had opened its 137 year archive with the help of Google, the first year I typed in was 1939. What a year it was — marked by, among many highlights, the rise of Batman, the first World Sci-Fi Convention, and the New York World's Fair, that great monument to America's Technicolor optimism. (Also happening that year: people were paying for magazines – on paper no less. Fifteen whole cents for an issue!).
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It also happened to be the year the year that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II, while Einstein telegraphed his uranium-enriched dreams to President Roosevelt, thus launching the Manhattan Project. All kinds of techno-utopian dreams would again be blown to bits, amidst a new flurry of possibilities that pushed the scientific envelope. They weren't terribly popular.
Fitting then that one of the cover stories of the September 1st issue — the same date that Hilter came to Poland — is the not-exactly-flag-waving piece "How Will the World End?" It gets the full-on old-sci-fi-novel watercolor treatment, including a depiction of New Yorkers and their skyline under attack by a totalitarian … meteorite attack. Fortunately, there's also wonderfully excited pieces about cryotherapy, the phonograph ("Movie fans collect stars' voices"!), a kooky inventor, and a small washing machine built for three dollars. (See the slideshow above.)The latter is a reminder of just how popular the ethos of do-it-yourself ingenuity was for an earlier era of innovation, technological curiosity and the cavernous uncertainty of a world coping with the means of its own demise. Just look at the other best part of these old things: the ads. They're packed with so much information and enthusiasm you can almost hear the boom of the old radio announcers and snake-oil salesmen delivering their spiel.Also revealing, thanks Google, are the the word clouds. It's a mix of the delightfully surprising and not-so-surprising: Diesel, easy, Homeworkshop Club, National Radio Institute, Patent Attorney, post-and-rail fences, postpaid, solder, and SWING MUSIC are some of the obvious keywords of that techno era.
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And the most frequently used words? Dept, electric, Floyd Bennett Field (New York's first and now defunct airport), FREE BOOK, HARLEY-DAVIDSON, hydrogen bromide, hydrobromic acid, slide rule, shellac, and of course, screw. Compare that to the word cloud of the September 2008 issue and just try not to feel a pang of borrowed nostalgia for a techno-optimism from another brave new world.There was of course one other term I had to search for: hologram. It's first mentioned in the December 1965 issue (the link above says "January 1966," but it's wrong), alongside references to "air-cushion trucks" and a "radio powered by coconut juice," in a short blurb on "True 3D television and movies." The headline might have been written last month. And the cover story of that issue could have been written yesterday too, at least by a stream-dreading network executive: "Color TV: How to Live With It – And Love It"!Explore the archive at Google's News Timeline or at PopSci(This post was originally published in March 2010.)
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