New machines changed how people understood distance, danger, speed, and possibility. This section brings together the strange, ingenious, elegant, and sometimes impractical technologies that shaped modern life: experimental aircraft, early submarines, cars, bicycles, traffic signals, warships, and visions of homes and futures. The photographs and illustrations show both success and uncertainty. Inventors often had to guess what the future would look like, and their guesses could be brilliant, comic, or frightening. Looking back at these machines helps us see innovation as a human drama, full of ambition, trial, error, and spectacle.
Members of the Bay City Wheelmen Cycling Club. San Francisco 1890. It is an interesting historical coincidence that the bicycle and the automobile were developed at roughly the same time, and both achieved their first practical commercial…
wpsso pinterest pin it image added on 2021-05-20T03:07:53+00:00 .wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image Today our time machine takes us to a jewellery store in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is 1899 and the owner, Mr. Dodson, is busy working on a watch so…
“Glory to the conquerors of the universe!”, ca., 1960. The USSR developed an early lead over the United States in the Space Race, when it launched the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the first successful orbiting satellite.…
Out for a Drive A group of fashionably dressed women go for a Sunday drive on a beautiful summer day in 1915 San Francisco through Golden Gate Park. I have no idea how they managed to keep their giant hats from being blown off. Based on…
Members of the Bay City Wheelmen Cycling Club. San Francisco 1890. This old photo taken in a photographer’s studio shows some unidentified members of the San Francisco cycling club known as the Bay City Wheelmen. The club was very…
What was it like to work on an assembly line at the start of the 20th century? The assembly line system had revolutionized American industry and greatly increased the productivity of factories. Today, we take this system for granted and we…
Weird airplanes from the early days of aviation. 1. The Multiplan (1908) multiplan The Multiplan (from the French for “multiple levels”) was a bizarre airplane designed and invented by the Marquis d’Ecquevilly . This bizarre contraption…
Out for a Drive A group of fashionably dressed women go for a Sunday drive in 1915 San Francisco through Golden Gate Park. I have no idea how they managed to keep their giant hats from being blown off. Based on their dresses and the fact…
Modern Homemaker 1908 This is an advertising photograph showing off GE’s new fangled electrical cooking pot, just what every housewife in 1908 needed. Here the model is showing off her cooking skills on an electrical heating plate plugged…
Human Powered Traffic Signal This handsome Haynes Roadster is stopped at a traffic signal on the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington D.C. And because this is 1913 the traffic signal is but is “powered” by a traffic…
