|
|
 |
|
|
Here's a precursor to tablets and smart phones destroying human communication, from Humorous Poems by Alfred Ainger, 1893. The caption says, "Reading,—and wept." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Orson Welles' Lady from Shanghai famously features a shootout in a hall of mirrors. A 1901 issue of Puck shows a gunslinger using his looking-glass reflections as decoys.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Wouldn't it be loverly" to have a room somewhere "with one enormous chair"? That's what Eliza dreamed of in My Fair Lady (1956), though rooms with enormous chairs go back at least as far as 1865, as we see in Punch: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Everywhere, all the time, a barrage of scrambled images assaults us -- disjointed scenes, outlandish mergers. ... But by now we have little trouble reading or understanding this new visual lingo. ... We have already had our homework done for us by Picasso." — Life, "The Power of Picasso," Dec. 27 1968 One hundred years earlier, a proto-Picasso debuted in Punch (1860).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Exactly one-hundred years before the giant dragonfly's debut in Monster on the Campus, these monstrosities appeared in Punch (1858). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's a precursor to the thrice great Charles Fort, on humankind being ghosts: [Samuel] Johnson had a peculiar temperament. For a time he was extremely interested in the subject of ghosts. He was so interested in them that he spent several nights in an abandoned house to see if he could meet one. Apparently, he didn’t. There’s a famous passage by the Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle … in which he talks about Johnson, saying that Johnson wanted to see a ghost. And Carlyle wonders: "What is a ghost? A ghost is a spirit that has taken corporal form and appears for a while among men.” Then Carlyle adds, "How could Johnson not have thought of this when faced with the spectacle of the human multitudes he loved so much in the streets of London, for if a ghost were a spirit that has taken a corporal form for a brief interval, why did it not occur to him that the London multitudes were ghosts, that he himself was a ghost? What is each man but a spirit that has taken corporal form briefly and then disappears? What are men if not ghosts? — A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Borges |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's a precursor to a memorable scene from Best in Show: "We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about." The caption reads, "Having our choice between nothing to say, and the excess." From Cornhill magazine, 1871. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's a precursor to the signature "Be seeing you" sign in the cult television series The Prisoner. It's from Colliers magazine, May 17, 1919. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's a precursor to the 3D printing (additive manufacturing) process, from Cornhill magazine, 1883. We see that the more things tech, the more they stay the same. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
About seventy years before Hemingway debuted The Old Man and the Sea, we find the story of "The Old Woman of the Sea" in Cornhill magazine, 1883. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Alex Baze once tweeted, "Mom has left town, and with her, most of New York City's Splenda packets." Here's a precursor from Cornhill magazine, 1860. The caption reads, "Where the sugar goes." |
Page 65 of 71
> Older Entries...
Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
|
