Here's a precursor to Skype.  "In the year 2000.  Correspondance Cinéma-Phono-Télégraphique," from 1900.

Before the invention of the recreational vehicle, people had picnics in Winnebago, as opposed to having picnics in their own Winnebagos.  From 1913.

"Cross crossings cautiously" -- say that ten times fast!  This tongue-twister of a warning message is from 1922.

The moonlight over Jacksonville, Florida is obsolete in this scan from the Boston Public Library.  (By the way, the phrase "obsolete moonlight" delivers no accurate Google results.)

Before phone cameras and social media, people had to buy postcards of their dinners out.

It's not just any postcard that features a tear in the fabric of space.  One recalls: "The heavy buildings dissolved before his very eyes.  The solid walls and roofs were gone, the chimneys, railings, doors and porches vanished" (Algernon Blackwood, The Bright Messenger, 1921).

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to turn down the lights and turn on the fountains.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to give Jacksonville an obsolete sunset

You'll have noticed the error in this postcard.  The bottom two images of Niagara Falls are identical, and as Heraclitus of Ephesus of said, we can't step into the same river twice (or look at the same waterfall twice).

"I'm in the arctic" -- a precursor to the tacky tourist postcard craze, from Letters from High Latitudes by Frederick Blackwood, 1858.  (See our previous tacky postcard precursor here, with a Florida alligator.)

"Flat tint colors. . . to dramatize you."  Scanned by the Boston Public Library.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to light up the night.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to bring on the night.

The game of Monopoly sure did get Marvin Gardens right. Click to remove our silly overlay.

Once upon a time (or was it in a parallel universe?) real estate offices were highly themed and casinos were drab.  To those who seek proof that the earth's poles have shifted, we send these vintage postcards.  

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to reveal the photo that inspired the postcard.

"View from Mt. Fuji" -- not a view of Mt. Fuji?  Yet it's possible, if one is beside oneself.  What happened here is surely this: the postcard artist scaled Mt. Fuji and was so transported as to be beside himself.  You've heard of being "in but not of the world," and that can be applied to mountains in particular.  The only way out of such a scenario is to proclaim, "Let the mountain come to me," and so-called normalcy is restored.  (We originally mistyped Mt. Fuji as Mr. Fuji, all three times.  And while the Japanese name Fuji-san seems like it would mean Mister Fuji, the san here actually means mountain.)

Here's the mysterious floating signage of Motel McNeive, exactly as it was scanned by the Boston Public Library.

It's rare to encounter the Platonic ideal of a postcard.  A negative was made for a postcard of the post office in Jackson, Michigan, but the card was never printed.