Feedback: A gramophone news service


Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more


WE SHOULD have guessed that the blog flyingcarsandfoodpills.com – dedicated to "the visionaries, madmen, and tinkerers who created the future that never was" – is by a Feedback reader. Steve Carper sends a 1911 image from Life, then a weekly humour magazine, answering our call for premonitions of the internet.


We had mentioned a "typical home of the future" in Modern Mechanics magazine in June 1931, with a "radio newspaper" (15 November). Steve's picture has a gentleman surrounded by horns of the kind that used to adorn wind-up gramophones, one offering "opera delivered at your door". And, yes – to one side is the "International Wireless Home News Service": a brass-pointer "menu" selects politics, stocks, sports and so on. But no kittens :-(


Ah, technology. Making life easier. Rod Costigan sends a ...


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