In 1952, Maurice Julliard patented a typewriter small enough to fit inside "an average size pocket." It could be used "without any support, being simply held in the hand."
His patent included a sketch of the typewriter, but I haven't been able to find any pictures of it. I'm not sure what practical use it was supposed to have, beyond being a novelty. His patent doesn't say. Would one use it to type miniature notes or manuscripts?
I noticed that it had a non-qwerty keyboard.
The Hackensack Record - July 24, 1952
Julliard's pocket typewriter wasn't the first one in existence. The book Victorian Inventions by Leonard de Vries contains an example from 1891. Though unlike Julliard's typewriter, it lacked a keyboard.
The video below is interesting as a peek into the way that YouTube works, but it's also interesting as a YouTube curiosity because its view counter is permanently stuck at 301, and has been for 11 years now, even though its actual view count is probably well over 1 million. Someone at YouTube had to deliberately freeze its view counter. As far as I know, it's the only video on YouTube that's received special treatment in this way.
Now Spanish artist Alicia Framis has announced she'll also be marrying a hologram. Her holographic partner is a life-size, three-dimensional projection powered by AI. His name is AILex.
Whereas Akihiko Kondo married a hologram because, by his own admission, he had trouble forming relationships with flesh-and-blood women, Framis is marrying a hologram as a piece of performance art which she's titled "The First Woman to Marry a Hologram."
She previously lived with a mannequin named Pierre.
Saulnier had come up with a way to allow vehicles, or even people, to climb vertical surfaces without the aid of ropes. His insight was that climbing any slope is essentially a problem of adhesion. If a force stronger than gravity is pushing you against the slope, then you won't slide down. And that adhesive force could be supplied by the downward pressure of propellors or jet nozzles.
Of course, powering propellors or jet nozzles requires a lot of energy. So Saulnier imagined powering them with compressed air supplied by a tube from the ground. He suggested that firefighters, among others, might find his system useful for scaling the sides of buildings.
I've never seen a prototype of Saulnier's invention in action. But when I was in Target the other day, I noticed a Sharper Image-branded toy named the "Gravity Rover" that "climbs from floor to wall to ceiling." It occurred to me that this was Saulnier's invention transformed into a toy.
It's a pretty cool toy, but based on videos of it, extremely loud.
In 1969, Neiman Marcus offered a Honeywell "kitchen computer" in its Christmas catalog. The price tag was $10,600, which is equivalent to about $80,000 today. The price included a two-week course in programming, which was required to know how to use the computer. The computer could supposedly store recipes and help housewives plan meals.
No one ever bought one. Or rather, no one ever bought the "kitchen computer," but a few people (engineers, and the like) did buy the H316 minicomputer, which is what the kitchen computer really was. Neiman Marcus and Honeywell had simply repackaged the H316 as a kitchen computer.
Nevertheless, the "kitchen computer" is now credited as being the very first time a company had offered a home computer for sale. One of them is on display at the Computer History Museum.
image source: Divining a Digital Future, by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell
If someone had bought one of the kitchen computers, it would have been pretty much unusable, because a user had to communicate with it in binary code, using a series of 16 buttons on the front to enter data. From Wired:
The thought that an average person, like a housewife, could have used it to streamline chores like cooking or bookkeeping was ridiculous, even if she aced the two-week programming course included in the $10,600 price tag. If the lady of the house wanted to build her family’s dinner around broccoli, she’d have to code in the green veggie as 0001101000. The kitchen computer would then suggest foods to pair with broccoli from its database by "speaking" its recommendations as a series of flashing lights.
The Institute of Radio Engineers chose 19-year-old Toy Palaske to be "Miss Electronics of 1950." She got to wear a swimsuit covered with electronics symbols and a crown topped with a television antenna.
A few papers reported a different title for her, "Miss Microwave of 1950".
I assume she was both simultaneously.
(left) Pasadena Independent - Sep 15, 1950; (right) Los Angeles Mirror - Sep 14, 1950
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.