What's interesting about browsing these early magazines are the advertisements as much as the articles. Popular Science captured the gadget-loving, craftsy crowd 100 years ago, and you can tell when you see ads for radios disguised as flour bins so that women working in the kitchen could still play with their fancy radio tech. But more than anything else, of course, the covers of old Popular Science magazines reveal everything about geek culture of yesteryear. Rockets, incredible machines, and tips about driving adorn nearly every cover.

The searchable Popular Science archive is made possible via a partnership between the magazine and Google Books, which scanned the magazines and hosts the files.

You can search by topic via Popular Science, or browse the archive by cover via Google.

SF author Nalo Hopkinson called attention to the 1910 image on twitter, asking, "Who's missing in this pic?" In retrospect, it's obvious: The newspaper imagined that future Americans would be a blend of white ethnicities, and conveniently overlooked all the people of color whose hues would have altered that white male face of the future.

Possibly to rectify this, Time magazine's 1993 photo composite was a computer "mix of several races." Still, the 1993 face of the future doesn't really look that much different from the 1910 face - this future person is still so light-skinned that she doesn't seem like much of a racial mix at all. Maybe the mainstream media's idea of future Americans didn''t change that much between 1910 and 1993.

But the overarching weirdness of these kinds of images really comes from the idea that a "future person" will be a blend of the existing ethnic phenotypes in a given country.

First of all, many people in the U.S. already are mixed race, including our president. Even back in 1910, many white people in the U.S. were already a blend of those national groups in the diagram. Many were also mixes that the chart didn't even admit, like Irish-Filipino, or Italian-African, or Jewish-Native.

Secondly, I'm not sure if it's ignorance, optimism, or something else that makes futurists assume people of tomorrow will be a blend of groups that today are often divided by class and culture. Who is to say that future Americans won't look a lot like they do now? Some will be mixed, and some won't. Unless, of course, we live in a future like Marge Piercy describes in Woman On The Edge of Time, where racism is supposedly a non-issue because babies are genetically engineered to be a perfect blend of different races.

Need the right shirt for that Galaga competition this weekend, or simply some casual wear for alphabetically organizing your floppy discs? Free Gold Watch has you covered with T-shirt designs that harken back to a simpler, blockier time. The label's designs can be found at their website and Turntable Lab.

What's absolutely incredible about this series of posters is that they convey the ideological evolution of Japanese society through industrial fair advertising - the designs go from freewheelingly futuristic to downright fascistic. Check out these stunning prints (and oodles more) at Pink Tentacle.

Sea and Air Exhibition – Tokyo, 1930

Grand Exposition in Commemoration of the Imperial Coronation – Kyoto, 1928

Sea and Air Exhibition – Tokyo, 1930

International Hot Spring Tourism Exposition – Beppu, 1937

National Defense Science Exposition – Tokyo/Kanagawa, 1940

National Defense Science Exposition – Hyogo, 1941

National Defense Science Exposition – Hyogo, 1941

The above screencap is from Koreyoshi Akasaka's Evil Brain From Outer Space (1964), and so are the next couple. There's more over at Mononukleoza's Flickr account, but here are some of our favorites.

Evil Brain From Outer Space

Evil Brain From Outer Space

Pavel Arsyonov - Gostya iz budushchego AKA Guest from the Future (1985)

Pavel Arsyonov - Gostya iz budushchego AKA Guest from the Future (1985)

Pavel Arsyonov - Gostya iz budushchego AKA Guest from the Future (1985)

Alyce Wittenstein - No Such Thing As Gravity (1989)

Before the tubes were installed in the mid-1990s, Stanford had a team of 20 people who ran samples from doctors' offices and operating rooms to the lab. But as the hospital expanded, it became impossible for humans to run fast enough - especially with delicate blood samples that can't change temperature before analysis. So the university turned to yesterday's futuristic technology. With an 98.8 percent uptime and packet speeds of 18 mph, this pneumatic tube system is a physical information network that is invaluable for surgeons who need samples analyzed in real time during operations.

According to Stanford School of Medicine:

Its architecture is a sophisticated design of switching points, waiting areas, sending and receiving points. It hosts 124 stations (every nursing unit has its own); 141 transfer units, 99 inter-zone connectors and 29 blowers. To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones . . . Leander Robinson, the hospital's chief engineer, commands the system from a small basement office, where computer monitors light up every time someone puts a container in a chute, types in a numerical address and presses the "send" button. The screen displays a tiny icon that reflects the container's travel through various switches and transfers, but it moves so quickly it's actually hard to track its passage. Even during the heaviest flow through the system, between noon and 2 p.m., a container can cover the longest start-to-finish distance-1,500 feet-in less than three minutes.

Unlike most pneumatic systems, which relay documents, Stanford's is purely for samples: everything from tissue to blood. Here's what the packet wrappers look like:

Just goes to show that even old futurist dreams can eventually come true.

via Stanford University

When Karek Capek chose the Slav term for labor, "robota," (instead of the Latin root "laborus," which he considered) for the word "robots," he anchored them for all time in a particular moment in Soviet/German history. Until the 20th century, writes Smith, the concept of artificial life had often been seen as one of realizing freedom and spontenaiety. But in the past 100 years, artificial life forms have come to be seen as laborers, and intrinsically not free (unless they rebel, of course.)

And Smith explains how Kraftwerk's early classic music video "The Robots" (over at his site, but non-embeddable) is a work of retro-futurism harkening back to the 1930s:

Look at the microphones and the haircuts and the shirts and ties. These all represent something we are familiar with from German cultural output of that era, something you might call the 'seventies thirties guy', that is, the guy who is clearly in the 1970s, in reality, but who is understood to represent someone in the 1930s, perhaps his own grandfather. In fact, in spite of the 1970s technology on display, here Kraftwerk more compellingly channels the early 20th century than any other film image from the same era that I can think of (and certainly more compellingly than the characters in the Nazi films of Fassbinder or Visconti). Why though are they channeling the early 20th century? Much of the best German art that issues out of the intense efflorescence of creativity between roughly 1968 and 1982 (only to come to a screeching halt after that) is driven by a concern to work through the legacy of some of the most ensorcelling visions of the future that were entertained in the immediate pre-war period.

The whole thing is well worth checking out, even if you're not a fan of German techno music. [Justin E.H. Smith]

Netrunner was based on the role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 and released by Wizards of The Coast, the collectible card game heavyweight behind Magic: The Gathering. Even though the idea of portraying a cyberpunk hacker using playing cards is charmingly anachronistic (plus some of the computer art looks like production stills from Lawnmower Man), Netrunner attracted such artistic legends as Moebius and overall contains some of the finest artwork from the 20th century heyday of collectible card games.

[via Netrunner Online]

"Raptor" by Higgins & King

"Zombie" by Pete Venters

"AI Board Member" by Moebius

"Afreet" by Mike Kimble

"Death Yo-Yo" by Norm Dwyer

"Cybertech Think Tank" by Rick Berry

"Broker" by Armand Cabrera

"Tokyo-Chiba Infighting" by Mark Collen

"Matador" by Mark Tedin

"Imperial Guard" by Douglas Shuler

"MS-todon" by Douglas Shuler

"Rio de Janeiro City Grid" by Pete Venters

"Skullcap" by Craig Hooper

"Short-Term Contract" by James A. Higgins

"Dupre" by Robert McLees

"Sphinx 2006" by Daniel Gelon

"Code Corpse" by Brian Booker

"Big Frackin Gun" by Doug Shuler

"Shock Treatment" by Doug Chaffee

"Spinal Tap Cybermodem" by Clint Langley

Some of these citiscapes are incredibly rare images from Berkey that are rarely reprinted - others are iconic images of space ships that you may recognize. I also love the strange Japanese King Kong game packaging. His King Kong looks almost like he's merging with the building he's scaling. If you're a fan of googie architecture, you'll notice that his cities are all done in that futuristic style which was so popular in the 50s and 60s.

via Pinkoski via SFSignal

Grandma's fruitcake may have been lethal in its own special way, but it paled in comparison to the horrors of the "Battle of the Centuries" to come:

Death swifter than light, silent and stealthy as the shadow of a thought, will ride on the wings of radio to destroy nations in the space of a single breath. . . Imagine a fleet of battle planes circling, maneuvering, attacking or holding fire at the direction of minds hundreds, even thousands of miles away! Imagine the human eye endowed with a power of vision capable of spanning these thousands of miles to witness the lightning-like seep of this squadron . . . leaving in its wake a burnt and blackened desert, devoid of all life!

Among the weapons of the future predicted were:

Jets of water charged with electricity to kill all animal life with which they come in contact.

Wireless telephony, wireless sight, wireless heat, wireless power and wireless writing. . . .

Wireless fire to devastate enemy territory. . . .

Radio "eyes" and "ears" for the ferreting out of secret war plans through thousands of miles of space. . . .

Electrically controlled rockets operated on wires for wrecking planes. . . .

The possible perfection of mental telepathy to the point where it may be used over great distances to verify wireless speech. . .

These were not the "prophecy of a romantic fictionist," noted the Times, but the "sober conclusions" of Professor Archibald Montgomery Low, today considered a pioneer of radio-guidance systems.

One of the main predictions that this Indiana paper made was that Christmas this year would be full of people flying to their holiday destinations. Cars, they suggested, would be things of the past. Everyone would get to work by flying or via pneumatic tubes. The Earth would be used solely for homes and pleasant parks. Sadly the flying car has yet to take off, as it were, and we'll still trapped in our stinky automobiles for at least another century.

But shopping and watching movies via some kind of contraption that combined the telephone and "moving picture machines" was apparently easy to imagine. The paper explained:

A hundred years from now, if you want to avoid the rush and do your Christmas shopping in your own apartments, the scientists probably will have provided for you a combination of telescope and moving picture machine by means of which you can connect your room with the toy department and see the display by wire - or perhaps by wireless - and at the same time you get prices and leave your order with the clerk by telephone . . . If you prefer to remain at your apartments [on Christmas night] the telautoscope attached to your telephone may be connected to any theater you desire and you can sit in your easy chair and smoke while you see the play projected on the wall like the most perfect moving picture. All the stage settings will be there to make the play seem real and the improved telephone will bring ever shade and subtle inflection of the actor's voice to your ear.

It seems certain that this telautoscope arrangement - the exact word to describe it will be coined after the process is discovered - will be one of the triumphs of the coming century. It will enable you to see the person you are talking to over a telephone.

If you want to see a nice version of the whole article, you can check it out here.

via The Occultist (Thanks, Steve Huff, for the tip.)

These photos are from Becka's Transmutations series, which was exhibited at Dubai's Empty Quarter Gallery this past fall. You can see more images from this series on Becka's website, and he has collected the photos and their waxed paper negatives in book form.

Transmutations [Martin Becka via CNN via William Gibson]

Reviewing Metropolis, Wells wrote:"Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities."

The visual differences between Metropolis and Wells' Things To Come are staggering. And if it's necessary to pit these two films against each other in cinema bloodsport, it's difficult to determine a winner. The raw creativity and invention of the images in Things To Come still resonate over seventy years later: workers float through a bright industrial landscape of bubbling fluids in huge transparent vats and spiral staircases that go on forever. The images associated with Metropolis are certainly less fantastic, but iconic. It seems that history has already chosen a winner, and it's Metropolis in a cyborg landslide.

Both films serve as cautionary tales to the audience, but Things To Come tells a much more interesting story with a much wider scope. It is simply epic, regardless of its short running time. Metropolis warns us of removing the human element from our visions of the future, but Things To Come does what is required of great science fiction: It holds up a tremendously ornate mirror to our own prejudice and assumptions, and then requires us to make (and live with) our own decisions.

In Things To Come, a world war launches in 1940, and lasts 30 years, until nobody can remember why it started. The world descends into medieval squalor, and Everytown is run by an evil Boss — until a flying machine, piloted by Cabal, a representative of a group of enlightened scientists and thinkers, appears. The Boss and Cabal fight for control, until Cabal drops "Peace Gas" and wins. And we see 70 years of progress pass by in a montage, as humanity rebuilds its shattered world. But then in the year 2036, in an idealized future utopia, we see the battle between luddites and the representatives progress play out again, as the luddites seek to sabotage the futuristic Space Gun. It never stops.

You can watch the whole thing online at the Internet Archive.

About this particular advertisement for Los Alamos Labs (which worked on weapons systems), Prelinger writes:

The blue spot disrupts the conventionally romantic stylization of planetary or solar bodies by contracting the sphere to its minimal form. [Artist Oli] Sihvonen here seems to reference the early 20th century Russian constructivists, with the prolonged vertical angular shape aimed at the planetary circle. It brings to mind El Lissitzsky's constructivist graphic composition Beat Back the Whites with the Red Wedge which pioneered the use of juxtaposed triangle and circle as a graphic strategy to represent political conflict. I find it ironic that the graphic legacy of Communist action should be re-articulated and put into service - whether with or without the artists' sanction - in the service of American Cold War-era weapons and civil space technological programming.

You can see more of these advertisements, along with design-geek analysis, at Berg London. Or you can pre-order a copy of Prelinger's forthcoming (gorgeous) book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-62.

Here's the trailer for Busby Berkeley musical classic Gold Diggers of 1933.

And let's compare the two iconic dance sequences from these two flicks. Here's "We're In the Money," one of my very favorite musical numbers from Great Depression-era musicals. It's just completely psychotic and wonderful.

And here's the completely psychotic dance party from The Matrix Reloaded.

Which makes you feel more like dancing the apocalypse away?

Over at Hilobrow, Joshua Glenn writes:

What does this mean for men, you ask? John Broome, author of "It's a Woman's World," a science fiction story that appeared in the DC comic book Mystery in Space (#8), asked the same thing way back in July 1952. As the panels shown here demonstrate, Broome predicted that women would one day cruelly discriminate against men - force them to work in the home, while women ran businesses and fought wars.

But luckily, the men fight for their rights and come out back on top.

More awesomeness via Hilobrow

Banwell's masks are currently on display at the University of Oxford's Steampunk Exhibition.

[Tom Banwell Leather via Make]

According to an article in the New York Times, Moholy-Nagy was one of the least well-regarded members of Germany's Bauhaus school during his life, but The New Vision, his posthumous book on the future of art, design education, and the new media of photography and film, helped change that. And now he's being hailed as an important forefather to today's digital artists.

So what does the Light-Space Modulator do? It allows you to study the motion of light. Moholy-Nagy explains:

This piece of lighting equipment is a device used for demonstrating both plays of light and manifestations of movement. The model consists of a cube-like body or box, 120 x 120 cm in size, with a circular opening (stage opening) at its front side. On the back of the panel, mounted around the opening are a number of yellow, green, blue, rot, and white-toned electric bulbs (approximately 70 illuminating bulbs of 15 watts each, and 5 headlamps of 100 watts). Located inside the body, parallel to its front side, is a second panel; this panel too, bears a circular opening about which are mounted electric lightbulbs of different colors. In accordance with a predetermined plan, individual bulbs glow at different points. They illuminate a continually moving mechanism built of partly translucent, partly transparent, and partly fretted materials, in order to cause the best possible play of shadow formations on the back wall of the closed box. (When the demonstration occurs in a darkened space, the back wall of the box can be removed and the color and shadow projection shown on a screen of any chosen size behind the box.) The mechanism is supported by a circular platform on which a three-part mechanism is built. The dividing walls are made of transparent cellophane, and a metal wall made of vertical rods. Each of the three sectors of the framework accommodate a different, playful movement study, which individually goes into effect when it appears on the main disc revolving before the stage opening.

Image by HC Gilje on Flickr. [New York Times]

The above image is Yap's incredible "Legend Of Yamato" image won the CG Society's concept art challenge a couple years ago. You may have seen it before, but it was new to us — and we love how colorfully it reinvents steampunk. Here are some more of our favorites.

It's a steampunk boat that's also a train, from BlueStorm. More of his art here.

A steampunk arctic explorer by Vyse — way more of his awesome art at Concept Art forums.

Fantastic concept art from Big Huge Games' Rise Of Legends. Way more awesome art here.

Fantastic concept art from Big Huge Games' Rise Of Legends. Way more awesome art here.

Fantastic concept art from Big Huge Games' Rise Of Legends. Way more awesome art here.

Fantastic concept art from Big Huge Games' Rise Of Legends. Way more awesome art here.

Fantastic concept art from Big Huge Games' Rise Of Legends. Way more awesome art here.

"Crab fort" concept art from Guild Wars Factions — we featured this art at io9 ages ago, but it's so amazing it deserves to be seen again. More art from the game here.

Walker concept art from Guild Wars Factions. More art from the game here.

Walker concept art from Guild Wars Factions. More art from the game here.

Requiem For Industry by Kazuhiko Nakamura. Way more art here.

Automaton by Kazuhiko Nakamura. Way more art here.

Metamorphosis by Kazuhiko Nakamura. Way more art here.

Steampunk concept art by Lebbeus.

Steam train concept art by Emil Landgreen.

War Zeppelin concept art from Iron Grip video game, by Leviathan artist Keith Thompson. Way more at the link.

ST-38 tank concept art from Iron Grip video game, by Leviathan artist Keith Thompson. Way more at the link.

Steam walker concept art from Iron Grip video game, by Leviathan artist Keith Thompson. Way more at the link.

Freighter concept art from Iron Grip video game, by Leviathan artist Keith Thompson. Way more at the link.

Norse APC concept art from Iron Grip video game, by Leviathan artist Keith Thompson. Way more at the link.

Antarctic exploration by Myke Amend, more at his site.

Captain Nemo's Office by Alex Brockel.

Steampunk Mary Poppins by Daniel Cestari (More at the link.)

Steampunk Mary Poppins (draft) by Daniel Cestari (More at the link.)

Juggernaut assault, concept art from Steam Wars movie by Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra director Larry Blamire.

Turkish "Flaming Kettle," concept art from Steam Wars movie by Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra director Larry Blamire.

Tyler Gunwagon (1872), concept art from Steam Wars movie by Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra director Larry Blamire.

French experimental steam rig, concept art from Steam Wars movie by Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra director Larry Blamire.

Goliath class gunrig, concept art from Steam Wars movie by Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra director Larry Blamire.

Concept art from War Of The Worlds: Goliath, a direct-to-DVD animated movie (from the Heavy Metal Fan Forum. More at the link.)

Concept art from War Of The Worlds: Goliath, a direct-to-DVD animated movie (from the Heavy Metal Fan Forum. More at the link.)

Concept art from War Of The Worlds: Goliath, a direct-to-DVD animated movie (from the Heavy Metal Fan Forum. More at the link.)

Concept art from War Of The Worlds: Goliath, a direct-to-DVD animated movie (from the Heavy Metal Fan Forum. More at the link.)

Concept art from War Of The Worlds: Goliath, a direct-to-DVD animated movie (from the Heavy Metal Fan Forum. More at the link.)