I wonder how many kids who grew up with smartphones realize that back in the day it was necessary to take a full 12, 24, or 36 pictures, then wait days for a photo lab to develop them, before you got to see any of them.

Doesn’t it though! I could see a tiny local business run like that where you do business on a handshake. But this was a multi-national business with product shipped out of NYC and Toronto. The customer might be in like California or Saskatchewan. Eh, just send us some money once in a while if you keep it more than 30 days.

Found photo of surviving one.

These apparently became motorized around 1920, so the ad must be before that.

I have to admit, I thought this was historically significant, and would get more interest than it did.

So be it, lol. I actually learned more about this event from reading wikipedia and other sources to make the post, than I ever got out of my school’s history class!

The art is not bad, but I’m slightly uncanny-valleyed by the tail length to body size ratio of that kitty cat.

They had some difficulties going after him for the worst of the charges. I didn’t quite understand the legal situation or reasons behind that, but his conviction ended up being on lesser charges like mail fraud. Even that was hard because he used proxy control, and he himself wasn’t on the business roster. Hence the short sentence.

I didn’t see any info about how many people died due to his sham treatments, who might have been saved or at least given some more months or years. I’d love to know, though. There are photos where you can see crowded dining halls and so on.

False positives sound like an unpleasant process to discover. I wonder how many times those happened.

Edit. Also, though there are no recorded cases of a true positive, I wonder if there were false negatives, like someone really was alive, but nobody noticed the bell, or the mechanism failed in some way. Wikipedia does mention,

and a demonstration in which one of Karnice-Karnicki’s assistants had been buried alive ended badly when the signalling systems failed

Apparently there’s another folklore, also false, that “saved by the bell” referred to this practice. It’s boxing related, which is more plausible, but less fun.

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That’s the version Sam Jackson gets.

Seems everything you’d buy through the mail in those days, both sham and legit products alike, was sold could be bought C.O.D.

By the time the real DTMF phones appeared, they did get the the keypad into the base, so the handset part was still slim. Not sure if that was all of them, or just some models. But it looked like so:

I am wondering about those wings, too. They’re tiny compared to her size. Let’s say she is 100 lbs. How fast do they have to move to let her hover, as she is shown doing? The only hovering animals we have are small. An Osprey can hover for a very short time, at high energy cost, but they weigh only a few lbs and have much bigger wings relative to their body. There must be some incredible bio-materials going on with Psyche.

Also, no way is she gliding with those, which an Osprey can do. It’d have to be active lift at all times.

Yeah - eek. That’s rather … open and brazen, isn’t it.

This appears to be the painting they bought the rights to.

Wow… of course there’s an HP calculator museum!

I didn’t know it was the first pocket calculator with transcendentals. Very interesting, thanks for sharing the link!

We thought you’d like to have something only fictional heroes like James Bond, Walter Mitty or Dick Tracy are supposed to own.

Last but not least.

Some others, wouldn’t fit in main post,

YW! I’ll eventually get bored with it, but I’m on a nostalgia bender at the moment. Maybe it’s a form of escapism from the troubles of the present. Not that the past didn’t have its own troubles, but… they’re in the past.

I didn’t know the name and had to look that one up!

with an unusual intuitive sensitivity for branding, manifested primarily in her physical aversion to particular logos and corporate mascots.