Xul Solar, "San P," 1923
I think we should just nominate
Xul Solar as someone whose entire output would have displeased our Soviet realist.
More images here.
A questionable medical device widely advertised in the early twentieth century.
The article
"Two Millennia of Impotence Cures" details some similar "equally flawed" devices including "the Erector-Sleigh, Gassensche Spirale, Gerson’s Constriction Bandage, and Virility, a double cylinder connected to a bellows to produce a vacuum."
If the Vital Power Vacuum Massager cost $15 in 1921, that would be around $500 today.
Jackson Daily News - Oct 30, 1921
via National Library of Medicine
Back in 1921, the chemist Arthur D. Little took it upon himself to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Or rather, he figured out a way to produce a silk-like thread out of sows' ears and wove a purse from this.
Actually, he made two purses. The Smithsonian has one of them. MIT now has the other. (Little was an MIT grad).
The picture of the purse (below) looks nothing like the illustration of it. I wonder what happened. Did the dye fade, or something?
More info:
MIT Museum,
MIT Library
Pittsburgh Press - Dec 28, 1975
This young lass is delighted to be offering an armful of potatoes to someone. Who and why? PS: They are not the product of her personal horticultural skills.
The answer is here.
And after the jump.
More in extended >>
Apparently Lota Cheek was her real name.
She was the daughter of Georgia farmer Leon Cheek. After winning a beauty contest in 1921, in which she was declared America's prettiest girl, she became a successful actress in New York City. In 1922, she was involved in a scandalous divorce case (her husband was simultaneously married to another woman). By 1925, she had remarried and took the name of her new husband, Sanders. The last record I can find of her is from 1927, when she was featured in an ad for Colgate toothpaste.
Wilmington Morning News - Jun 15, 1922
Baltimore Sun - Dec 8, 1927
Crossword puzzles first became a fad in the 1920s, and immediately created a problem for libraries as puzzle devotees thronged reading rooms, putting a strain on library services, wearing out the various reference books, and generally being a nuisance to regular patrons of the library.
The Wilmington Evening Journal - Apr 13, 1925
Cho-Cho was a "health clown" who toured the USA during the 1920s, visiting classrooms, and trying to encourage kids to eat more vegetables, take baths, and brush their teeth. In a way, he was like the opposite of Ronald McDonald (Ronald being a clown who encourages children to eat junk food).
CHO stood for "Child Health Organization," which was the group that dreamed him up and sent him out. Some more info from the book
Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective:
The clown Cho-Cho was trained to "teach health, sugar coated with all the nonsense and fun of the sawdust ring." The Health Fairy, a public health nurse, told "delightful stories," and a cartoonist drew "a white loaf of bread into a sour-faced boy,... a brown loaf into a round-faced smiling boy," and "vegetables weeping great tears because children do not eat them."
All three travelled to elementary and secondary schools, as well as exhibitions, fairs, and "any place where children were gathered together. A less traditional figure was CHO's pseudo-professor Happy (played by Clifford Goldsmith), who entertained child and adult audiences with snappy health maxims.
Happy, the Health Fairy, and the cartoonist worked well within the boundaries of CHO's program, but when the clown who played Cho-Cho began to regard himself "as a real authority on diet, hygiene, and even the morals of childhood," and deviated from his "carefully learned lines," the organization had to find a new Cho-Cho.
Popular Science Monthly - Feb 1920
The short-lived Michelin Hour radio show, 1928, in which an orchestra of men dressed as tires played popular numbers and lighter classics.
Detroit Free Press - Apr 8, 1928