π πΏπππππππππ π°ππππππ Roundup
π° Too Much Time (1886)
Everything we have was once a luxury, at some point things become cheap commodities that no longer evoked reverence or respect. We found a complain from 1886 about the βera of cheap clocksβ and how it meant homes contained too many time pieces that all show a different times.
"Well, for heaven's sake, telephone down town and find out what time it is, and then take all the clocks in the house and trade them off for an hour glass."
π Deepfakes of Yore (1891)
Fake nudes arenβt some Frankenstein of AI, this report from 1891 shows there was a brisk trade in doctored explicit photographs whereby a head from one photograph is attached to the naked body in another photo.
βTheir methods are to get possession of the photographs of well known and prominent society women and then attach to the head of the picture the photograph of the half or whole of a nude body.β
π Vaccinated Anti-Vaxxer (1885)
Leading anti-vaccination campaigner Dr. A. W. Ross was found to have vaccination marks on his arm after refusing to present a certificate of vaccination when traveling from Canada to the United States.
The report said Dr. A. W. Ross had:
"done more than anyone else to work upon the prejudice of the ignorant, and has published a daily fly sheet denouncing vaccination."
π Too Much Booktime (1910)
Adults will always reminisce about the βgood old daysβ of childhood. We found an extreme example in a Guardian report that quoted a man yearning for the 1860s, a time when books werenβt as affordable and had to be borrowed. He said βthe existence of all these books creates a restless spirit.β It is worth reading the whole thingβ¦
"He believed that if they got back to the simplicity of fifty years ago, when books were fewer, they would find that the children would take more interest in a better class of books."
π² Alibicycle (1882)
A Scottish man writes a letter to the editor defending himself against a previous report in the paper of a horse and cart accident. The rider went to aid the drivers and was then blamed for scaring the horses with his bicycle and causing the crash.
The man said he only wrote in because there was such a prejudice against the bicycle and it was unfairly blamed for scaring horses regularly.
βI should not have troubled you with this letter had it not been that bicycles are often blamed as the cause of accidents of which they are innocentβI am.β
βοΈ Top Tweet
This week in 1993 the World Wide Web was open sourced, it wouldnβt be long before the doomsaying began, Bob Metcalfe would eventually eat his words - literally - by blending a copy of his article and drinking it in 1997.
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