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Category / Obscure history

When He Could Book a Men-Only Flight with United Airlines

It sounds like a plot line from an episode of Mad Men, but if you opened the Wall Street Journal in the 1950s and 60s, you were likely to have found an advertisement for United Airlines’ “club in the sky for men only”, offering complimentary cigars, cocktails, a steak dinner and special business amenities. The flights between…

Before the Eurostar: Remains of the Flying Rail Plane that Never Was

In a slight twist of fate, we might have been traveling between London and Paris in one of these thing-a-majigs– or more accurately, a propeller-driven ‘Flying Railplane‘. This fancy futurist contraption was invented by George Bennie and launched in 1930 as a prototype, designed for a more economical and rapid transport system between the two European capitals. The test track was…

Desire to Kill the Streetcar

In the 1920 and 30s, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and countless other major American cities had sprawling electric streetcar rail systems until General Motors, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone bought up a controlling interest in National City Lines. Once the monopolising companies owned the railways, they shut them down, forcing Americans to buy cars or…

Calling on her Cell Phone in 1922

Found by a researcher in the Pathe vaults, this clip from 1922, possibly filmed in New York, shows that 90 years ago, the idea mobile phone technology was not only being thought of, but being tested…. Of course, Eve’s Wireless is not technically a mobile phone, it’s a mobile ‘wireless’, which is what they used to call…

The Anti-Nazi Teen Gang that Beat Up Hitler Youth and Danced to Jazz

A band of adolescent music-lovers, swing dancers and snappy dressers– not exactly the type you’d expect to take on the Nazi Hitler Youth. But in pre-WWII Germany, the Nazi regimentation of society inadvertantly gave rise to massive teenage street gangs who beat up the Hitler Youth, tagged anti-Nazi graffiti at train stations– and listened to…

Mona Lisa and Machine Guns: Was Leonardo daVinci an Aspiring War Lord?

When you think of Mona Lisa’s peaceful smile, you probably wouldn’t imagine it was captured by the same man who invented the world’s first machine gun. You knew da Vinci was a multi-talented visionary; free-thinker, architect, painter, scientist among many things, but aspiring war lord? Take a look through the blueprints of his lesser-known inventions, and it might start…

The Swedish Subculture Hoarding More 1950s American Cars than the USA

I started this article because I was researching a Scandinavian subculture of ‘greasers’ said to be responsible for Sweden having amassed more restored American 1950s cars than the United States itself has today. The “Raggare” movement, which emerged from a post-war youth counterculture mainly in Sweden and parts of Norway, is known for its undying love of vintage American…

That Time Soviet School Children Bugged the US Ambassador’s Office

Did you hear the one about the Soviet school children who presented a US Ambassador with a wooden plaque of the Seal of the United States as a gesture of friendship in 1945? It hung in his Moscow office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device. True story. Man, that’s cold! Get it? Anyway, after…

And then, Man Created the Stick-On Bra

Ah yes, there’s nothing like a good game of tennis while sporting a pair of pointy cotton hats glued to your bosom. I had the pleasure of digging up an actual fashion feature that Life magazine ran in 1949 on the latest brassiere to hit the market, called the Posĕs (pronounced “pose-ease”). Advertised as both bra and bikini, the “discrete”…

Inside the FBI’s Colossal Fingerprint Factory

Before the FBI went digital, it looked a little more like a giant stock warehouse for Amazon.com. In the 1920s, the bureau was only employing 25 workers to classify around 800,000 print cards, but by 1943, there were more than 20,000 employees sorting through 70 million fingerprints. At the height of wartime, the archives were so overwhelmed that the FBI eventually…

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