Buy bread in waxed paper and then lounge about with it while wearing a gown designed by
Pauline Trigere.
Life - June 7, 1954
Once upon a time answering machines were considered strange and dumbfounding.
Wilmington News Journal - Mar 31, 1956
We've looked at the humor of DJ Rege Cordic at Radio Station KDKA
in a previous post.
The home page of Rege Cordic.
But here's a stunt not covered there.
He decided to stage a gag beauty contest for "Miss Brick Throw of 1959."
It was announced in 1958 in BILLBOARD.
Eventually a winner was chosen, "Miss Twerpie Walker," and a fake magazine was printed for the occasion.
Listen to three minutes of the gag here. NOTE: sound file begins to play automatically.
Obscure world record: longest time playing the harmonica while sitting in a chair balanced on top of three wine bottles. Set by Michel Perrigaud in 1959, who played for seven-and-a-half hours.
Albuquerque Journal - Jan 29, 1959
In 1950, graduate student Fred Snyder of the University of Wichita spent 30 days wearing special glasses that inverted his vision. It was part of an experiment designed by Dr. N.H. Pronko, head of the psychology department, to see if a person could adapt to seeing everything upside-down. The answer was that, yes, Snyder gradually adapted to inverted vision. And when the experiment ended he had to re-adapt to seeing the world right-side-up.
Snyder and Pronko described the experiment in their 1952 book,
Vision with Spatial Inversion. From the book's intro:
Suppose that we attached lenses to the eyes of a newborn child, lenses having the property of reversing right-left and up and down. Suppose, also, that the child wore the lenses through childhood, boyhood, and young manhood. What would happen if these inverting lenses were finally removed on his twenty-fifth birthday? Would he be nauseated and unable to reach and walk and read?
Such an experiment is out of the question, of course. Yet another experiment was made: a young man was persuaded to wear inverting lenses for 30 days, and his experiences are reported here. His continued progress, after an initial upset, suggests that new perceptions do develop in the same way as the original perceptions did. Life situations suggest the same thing. Dentists learn to work via a mirror in the patient's mouth until the action is automatic. In the early days of television, cameramen had to "pan" their cameras with a reversed view. Later the image in the camera was corrected to correspond with the scene being panned. The changeover caused considerable confusion to cameramen until they learned appropriate visual-motor coordinations. Fred Snyder, the subject of our upside-down experiment, found himself in a similar predicament, at least for a time.
Images from
Life - Sep 18, 1950:
"Graduate student Fred Snyder falling down after removing special eyeglasses that reverse and invert everything he sees. Immediately before removing glasses he rode a bicycle with perfect control along sidewalk in Central Park."
How do fighter pilots poop while in the air? I think the answer is that they try very hard not to, because if they have to go, they're going in their flight suit. Back in the 1950s Constantin Paul Lent, et al., tried to come up with an alternative. From their patent (
No. 2,749,558):
This device relates to feces and urine elimination cabinets and more particularly to defecation relief devices used by aircraft pilots and other key flying personnel. More particularly it relates to feces and urine elimination cabinets which may find utilization in single pilot driven aircraft.
Comparatively speaking it is an easy matter to provide adequate latrines for the men in the forces on land and sea. When the time comes to eliminate, one just walks to the nearest comfort station. But in the Air Force the problem of elimination can not be always solved that easily especially by aviation pilots...
The applicants are cognizant that there are relief tubes provided on most all jet planes for urinating, but no single seat aircraft is equipped with a safe and sure means for defecation. When the pilot of the jet, due to accident or enemy action needs to eliminate, the problem of defecation becomes acute. The pilot must wait until he lands his craft; and quite often he must remain aloft for a considerable length of time before he has a chance to visit a comfort station on the ground. In many cases due to the physiological and psychological effects produced on the pilot by enemy action, he is forced to eliminate even before he has a chance to land his plane.
For housewives on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Medical Economics - Mar 2, 1959