When I’m bored and worried about falling into a Twitter hole, there’s one thing that can always divert my attention.
Going over to the Internet Archive and perusing the incredibly weird ads of early-20th-century Popular Mechanics.
What, you haven’t already discovered this yourself?
You’re in for a treat. Popular Mechanics was a curious beast back in those days. Like the name suggests, it included tons of stories about inventors around the world, and stuff they were getting up to. So in the April 1920 issue, for example, you had articles like these …
A ceiling lamp that lets you yank a fixture downwards to be reading lamp (legit good idea: I’d buy something like that from Ikea today); an “odd baby carriage” that seems indescribably unsafe; and a device for playing solitaire upright in bed, which is actually kind of cool.
There was also plenty of news about the frontiers of science, including — again from that same issue, this piece …
… a full-on investigation of whether radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi has discovered that Mars has been sending Morse-style signals to Earth, complete with thoughts from Thomas Edison on the viability of constructing a mammoth array of lights to send a signal back.
So the content was, in some respects, much like the techy-engineering stuff you’d see today in Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Wired or the myriad of online science/engineering sites. A little heavy on the credulous paranormal at times, as with this 1923 piece on spirit photography (“Remarkable Demonstration in Broad Daylight before the Editors of This Magazine”)
But the truly delightful stuff wasn’t in the actual articles, interesting as they may be.
No, the mesmerizing stuff is the ads.
By and large, they are an absolute carnival of hucksterism. Enforcement of truth in advertising was still pretty skimpy back then; the FDA was only established in 1906 after journalistic outcries against the hawking of bogus health remedies in periodicals.
The categories of puffery are quite interesting, though, because they betray the anxieties and dreams of Popular Mechanics readers. One of the big tropes was …
MEN! Climb the manly corporate ladder with correspondence courses
Easily half the ads in these issues are for correspondence courses. It was clearly a big thing back then, maybe loosely comparable to the boom in MOOCs and coding bootcamps a few years ago.
In each case, the pitch is the same: You’re a schlub, doing an unskilled job, waiting in line with the other losers for a day’s work. But there’s a world where you could have high-demand skills! Just write for this easy correspondence course and the pay is yours!