Cutaways and other cool illustrations from the 1920s.
Elevator-style car parks were still quite a novelty when this cutaway was published in 1920.
The garage shown could hold 6x the number of cars that a comparable, ordinary garage could hold.
This garage was basically all elevators: 42 elevators that retained the cars during the stay rather than off-loading them. Each elevat0r could hold 7 cars, for a total of 294 cars per garage.
Source: Popular Science Monthly February 1920
It was a fairly accurate prediction, in 1920, of the difference between the bulky locomotive of the day vs. the predicted streamlined version.
The article claimed that more locomotives had been built in the last 15 years than in all of history–perhaps true.
It was also claimed that, by streamlining the locomotive and cutting down on wind resistance, it could achieve speeds of up to 150 mph.
Click to Enlarge to 912 x 205 px
Source: Popular Science Monthly February 1920
The past always seems to be so…old. Previous styles, mores, customs seem to have vanished, replaced wholesale with an entirely new set of styles, mores, and customs.
That’s why we can snicker at ridiculous stuff like men with handlebar mustaches riding crazy bicycles and corpulent women vamping it up as if they were sex goddesses.
In thinking about the past, I still can’t decide if we’re basically the same as our ancestors or if we are completely different. The easier thought is that we are different; that they inhabited a different nation than us, a nation called 1913, 1945, 1864, or whenever.
Then I see something like the Kodachrome color film test girl from 1922, from Kodak’s blog called “A Thousand Words.”
We see a series of women, most of them looking very 1922. But the one who really bridges the gap between the ages is the woman at 1:11, in the green. Her clip lasts only ten seconds, but in that short time we see an awkward girl of perhaps 20 years old begin with a shy smile, turn her head, turn back to the camera with just a wisp of a sexy glower, and then smile again.
Ten seconds.
Unlike the other women, who were actresses and who knew how to act very silent movie-like, she didn’t know how. Who was she? Whoever, she was probably born around 1900 and died by 1980.
So, turn off the sound, hit Play, advance to around 1:11, and go back in the past.
This picture came up today in BoingBoing.net, via a Tumblr post. What struck me, and several of the commenters, wasn’t so much the monkey aspect but the Woman On The Right.
She is an anachronism. She looks like someone you might meet on the street today.
But she probably did not adhere to beauty standards of the day: too scruffy, too thin, too ethnic. Some of the BoingBoing comments say:
Even the next-over woman isn’t so bad herself, though the hairstyle looks decidedly Marcelled or at least like something from the 1920s or 1930s:
