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A Mobile Phone From 1922? Not Quite
History often plays linguistic tricks on us, especially when it comes to rapidly changing technologies
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Trade Your Trouble for a Bubble
Sightseeing across the country in an atomic-powered "pleasure ball"
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Moving Sidewalks Before The Jetsons
The public's fascination with the concept of "movable pavement" extends back more than 130 years
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Mobsters Tremble Before the Crime-Fighting, Red Flying Gondola
Science-fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback predicted that, as long as police officers were stuck on terra firma, criminals always would have the edge
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The Future’s War on Cancer
Scientific progress during the 20th century prompted a number of predictions about an impending cure
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Santa’s Trusty Robot Reindeer
A special visit from the Ghost of Christmas Retro-Future
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The Fanciful, Chocolate-Filled World of 2012
In 1912, the French chocolate company Lombart printed a series of six collectible cards envisioning daily life one hundred years in the future
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Giant Automatic Highway Builders of the Future
Radebaugh's vision of a road-creating machine may not have been a figment of just his imagination- a Disney-produced television program had a similar idea
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Boxing Robots of the 1930s
Jack Dempsey boasted he could tear apart a robot opponent "bolt by bolt and scatter its brain wheels and cogs all over the canvas"
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Senator Barry Goldwater Imagines Arizona in the Year 2012
The Republican senator and 1964 presidential candidate predicted the growth of the Sun Belt and envisioned an open border with Mexico
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Weather Control as a Cold War Weapon
In the 1950s, some U.S. scientists warned that, without immediate action, the Soviet Union would control the earth's thermometers
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A Thanksgiving Meal (in-a-pill)
The future of food was envisioned by many prognosticators as entirely meatless and often synthetic
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A Whole Town Under One Roof
We're moving on up—visions of a self-contained community within a 1,000-foot tall skyscraper
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1968′s Computerized School of the Future
A forward-looking lesson plan predicted that "computers will soon play as significant and universal a role in schools as books do today"
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Zipping from San Francisco to Oakland in 5 Minutes
An inventor's plans for traveling inside a giant bullet would have made a trip across the Bay a fast one
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Would You Pass the Panic-Proof Test?
If an atomic bomb drops on your house, a civil defense official advises: "Get over it."
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Arthur Radebaugh’s Shiny Happy Future
For five years, a popular comic strip gave us a preview of life in Suburbatopia
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