The tide casts a shadow, as we learn in Chita by Lafcadio Hearn, 1889.

From Popular Mechanics, 1931.

Before orange was the new black, gray was the official white.  From Popular Mechanics, 1932.

"Toad withstands great pressure" -- a headline in Popular Mechanics, 1908.

"Can't sleep?"  From Popular Mechanics, 1930.

Current mood: "Standing still at eighty-five miles an hour."  From Popular Mechanics, 1932.

We've all driven past tacky cement lawn ornaments, but here's news of the very first instance.  From Popular Mechanics, 1921.

"Something dreadful happened to this woman!"  From The Leavenworth Post, May 16, 1910.

The day meteorologists took their heads out of their asses long enough to discover what everybody else always knew: "Temperature found to vary with solar changes."  We wonder if meteorologists of today have forgotten this bombshell (given their track record).  From Popular Mechanics, 1930.

"Invisible life believed key to mystery of universe."  One of the very few headlines in Popular Mechanics that we can believe!  From 1933.

"I'll tell you what; I'll just do it for you."  In January, 1908, How to Write threw in the towel and merged with The Editor.

Here's one of the only legitimate things we've enountered in vintage issues of Popular Mechanics, and it's only because they stole a page from the great Charles Fort.  "Queer things that fall from the sky" was a topic Fort studied in tremendous depth.  From 1930, two years before Fort's death

"Rubber flowers solve bathers' problem"  From Popular Mechanics, 1913.

"Speed of snakes is delusion produced by fright."  From Popular Mechanics, 1932.

A sunnier clime would presumably require a larger crystal ball — "London's sunshine measured by small glass ball."  From Popular Mechanics, 1930.

"Donkey used to express national hatred."  From Popular Mechanics, 1913.

"Modern flying carpet visits city of Bagdad" (1932).  Turns out that the flying carpet is just an airplane, but here's the crucial question: why call an airplane a flying carpet?  Why, as vintage Popular Mechanics did in every issue, refer to scientists as "wizards" and their work as "magical"?  The answer is simple: they co-opt mythology and magical lore so as to demystify the world into a very cold place, devoid of metaphor.  Sad, colorless, and shallow.

"Feather-covered dirigibles predicted for the future."  From Popular Mechanics, 1930.  Big Science back then (as now) can't see the forest for the trees.  The naiveté would almost be charming, if not for the smugness behind everything in vintage Popular Mechanics.  (We daren't look at more modern issues.  The white-coat New Inquisition, as Robert Anton Wilson called them, terrifies us.)

"Rubber 'muscles' enable wood doll to walk."  From Popular Mechanics, 1919.

Here's a precursor to the "selfie" phenomenon.  "Butterfly wings photograph selves."  From Popular Mechanics, 1930.