Little ads, 1925

"Electricity at your finger ends." Continue reading with the forward portion of your eye holes for
even greater word-make of more eloquenceness.

If you can figure out what product the Flash Sales Corp'n is selling, you should get it for free. The logo kind of makes you expect a free eggroll with every order.

Joke #1 - "Return maill will bring Free Trial Plapao". Seems a bit cruel to name the product after the sound a hernia makes.

Joke #2 - "The Trial of Plapao" was also a landmark war crimes tribunal held in The Hague just after the Vietnam war.

Radio Ga Ga, 1925 style.

Geeky hobbies. Right now, that's, what? Quadcopters, right? In The Nineties, maybe the big one was building your own PC. My brother had magazines with scores of ads for hard drives and "modems" with (now) pathetic-sounding specs, going for eye-watering prices because, at the time, they were cutting edge. Funny stuff.

Back in 1925, they had their geeky hobbies, too. Radio! At the time, World War II was over, and radio stations were popping up all over the place. The first radio commercial EVER had just happened three years previously. Radio must have seemed really exciting. You know the Radio Flyer wagon? They gave it that name as a tribute to Marconi and Lindbergh, who were very much at the top of mind in 1927.

So radio was The Shit in 1925, and there were hobbyists who built their own radio sets. As with any really good geek hobby, there were plenty of parts to choose and buy. Tubes and batteries being pretty important components to spec accordingly with your budget. All of the ads posted below appeared within the back twenty pages of the August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly. That's a lot of radio geekdom ads.

So what was there to listen to in 1925? Well, assuming that radio hobbyists were also listening in on short wave, they could eavesdrop on stuff from around the world, whether it was meant to be interesting or not. The BBC had only opened up shop in 1922, so that was new and exciting. For my money, it's still pretty much the best radio and news you can find anywhere. The grand Ole Opry started up in 1925, if that's what you're into. Here's a massive list of what was on the radio in '25. jeez, that's a lot.

Radio Ga Ga was released by Queen in 1984, to lament the ascent of the visual medium of video, at the expense of audio, which they saw as having a little more gravitas. Now, we can get misty about the good old days when MTV showed music videos, before it became a 24-hour parade of reality shows featuring useless idiots. If that bugs you, liberal application of old radio programs are an effective salve. And wine. You can find gobs of shows for free download in The Internet Archive.

1925 D.I.Y. Kite Reel - Stop wasting your child's time.

Large kite-flying reel practically flies kite without child supervision. Frees up child's precious time for more pressing matters such as plowing, darning, sowing, re-darning, reaping, haying, trunking, sawing, duckery, mudding, slopping, frothing, hacking, spaying, fruiting, neutering, castrating, fraying, bulling, reconnoitering, chickenry, frogging, bullocking, stowing, thackery, coopering, wheelwrighting, de-boning, masonry, butchering, binding, re-re-darning, cobbling, fencery, usuring, bear-baiting, geeking, vulcanizing, gooping, mousing, ratting, falconing, and hyena rebuffing.

Shaler 5 Minute Vulcanizer - Boom. You're vulcaned.

There's a Simpsons episode called The Class Struggle in Springfield, which first aired in 1996. yes, The Simpsons used to be savagely clever and reliably hilarious. In one scene, there's a throwaway joke that does nothing to forward the main story, but is till a brilliant piece of character writing.

Marge is left by her wealthy friend at a gas station holding the pump's nozzle. Mr. Burns pulls up in his 1896 Ford Quadricycle, assuming that Marge works at the station and says "You there, fill it up with petroleum distillate, and re-vulcanize my tires, post haste!" Cut to next scene.




The current writers of the show could go a full season without being that funny, and in this classic episode, it's a disposable one-liner, like they had so many good jokes, they could just throw one like that in there just for kicks. Different times, friends.

Anyway, you'd think that vulcanizing rubber at the consumer level was some absurd thing that never happened. Well, that's what I assumed, anyway. Nope. Meet the Shaler 5 Minute Vulcanizer.

 In 1925, your tires came from the factory all vulcanized and ready to roll, thankfully. But, should you need to patch the inner tube (yes, car tires still had inner tubes, like your bicycle probably does) you would have to vulcanize the patch yourself. I am not making this up. Here is a FaceTube video of a gloriously restored Shaler Vulcanizer. The guy seems pretty proud of it.

Yep. It's a clamp. Pretty much. It's job was to squeeze the patch onto the tire. The patch was permanently sealed to the tire with a little puck of fuel, which the motorist lit with a match. Presumably, the fuel puck also contained a bit of sulfur, which seems to be key to the vulcanizing process.

Good news, someone! The Shaler Co. is still around! Here's their page on their old vulcanizer product. What are they up to now? Sealing hockey rinks. Stick with what you know, am I right, people? The Shaler company used to be located at 2104 Fourth St, Waupun, Wisconsin. let's go see what's there now!

Camp Long Lake, home of canoes, knot lessons, and (probably) endless noogies. Here's a video of Camp Long Lake's 2014 Chili Supper, if you're curious. PS: Don't be curious. I'll let you down easy by telling you right now that there's no discussion at all about the vulcanization process at the 2014 Camp Long Lake Chili Supper. Bummer. I wonder how this would make Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, feel. Poor guy. Know what? The beardy guy in the video would make an excellent god of fire. Sadly, the P.A.G. Research and Googling team were unable to unearth this gentleman's name. Just call him Vulcan. Let him wonder.

The Marched of Science

Way back in The Past, Science was marching on to Now. Such marching! Observe these Sciences of Yestertime!

Here's a handy tip for disposing of your user motor oil. Apparently, in 1963, it was A-OK to basically pour it into the ground, where it would never wind up in the water table or food chain, and would almost never make flipper babies.

Drink sunlight. In 1925, lots of people had psoriasis of the mouth, which can sometimes be helped with liberal application of ultraviolet light. Also, some people were ashamed of their pale esophaguses, and would go to great lengths to get that San-Tropez tan on the inside.

Motor-truck lost tug of war to 24 mules, but was still rolling on dope set of dubs, yo. Tight!

The Wonder City of the Future You Definitely Didn't Live to See

We love futurists, here at GO! Tower. Somebody has to figure out how we'll do everything in the future. Futurists usually look like naive goofs, but if you don't at least make some attempt to plan how to make things work, you wind up living in a city that's not so much structured as it is congealed. A city could theothetically look like a perfectly balanced model of efficiency if the whole thing were designed by one person at one time, but this is almost never the reality. Usually, cities wind up as ad-hoc jumbles, designed by hundreds of committees working independently, at different times over decades. Poor Harvey W. Corbett.

Good news! Predictions of future past don't have to be accurate to have value. When they miss the mark, they can range from fascinating to hilarious. That's how you make lemonade out of disappointing lemons. Here's a two page feature from a 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly on the ideas Harvey Corbett and his ideas for the future city of 1950. Lemonade up, you! It's not so much hilarious as it is interesting. Corbett was a pretty successful architect, and his ideas were not insane in the membrane, just very optimistic. But that's what we want when we're shopping for futurists, isn't it? Optimism. Okay, sometimes I like a futurist to be completely out of their mind. That's not Harvey. Maybe next time?

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Little Ads - Get you some learn!

Spewing from the pages of Popular Science Monthly comes... Fancy Book Learnin! Learn to remember, detect crime, learn to play Jazz, and forget how to play Jazz. Let's get learned!

Thank you, Probable Library Rummage Sale organizer From Nineteen-Forty-Something (probably) With a Fifty-Pound Pencil, for making sure we never forget how much you value the knowledge of the past.

In 1925, Chicago was the center of a wild new wave of "scientifical" forensic analysis, supplanting the more traditional "scary claw hand" method of determining guilt.

In later decades, with the proliferation of FaceTweet and related services, the "social" section of the mental file system would come to dominate the majority of the human cranial cavity's file system.

If you learn Jazz, you'll become the most popular person in your "set". However, to truly master any craft, you must then choose to forget everything you've learned, just to show that it has no power over you.

To that end, please attempt to enjoy this improvised jazz-loss lament, "I forgot how to Play Jazz", by my former non-band, Blue Wank. All noises and words were improvised directly to tape, for your sanitation. You're welcome, and I am so sorry.

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