CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Here's a precursor to the melting watches of Dalí's Persistence of Memory, by nearly three decades. The accompanying text [for a watch case] even says that "Gold alone is soft and bends easily." From Farm-Poultry, 1902.
Here's a precursor to the pushpin marker in Google Maps, from Millsaps College's Bobashela yearbook, 1905. (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)
"W is the only letter of the alphabet formed from two letters, U and U, two equals. It is both a co-equal, and a concordant one. In union they are the U U, the two in one, the single one" (Sir Francis Bacon's Own Story by John Elisha Roe, 1918).
A baby is about to experience the miracle of flight in The Trail to the Woods by Clarence Hawkes, 1907. Previously, we discovered a precursor to the filmA Cry in the Dark (1988): a dingo takes a baby in an illustration from The Wide World Magazine (1900).