Popular Science , which started as a text-only newsletter in 1872, has made its entire 137-year archive available for free browsing . It’s an invaluable resource, especially for those of us interested in retrofuturism (depictions of the future produced in the past). From the 1920 to the 1970s, Popular Science was at the forefront of futurism, with depictions of ray-guns, robots, rocket-ships, and other future tech depicted in almost every issue.
Naturally, the types of popular science the magazine focused on tended to be those of applied science and technology. And while no topic that entails application in human lives is completely free of ethical and political concerns, some subjects proved to be—at least in retrospect—more controversial than others.
For example, while browsing the archives I stumbled across an article from 1910 innocently titled “Heredity.” The content, however, reveals a future that was narrowly avoided .
Fortunately, we are more enlightened than Harvard professors were a hundred years ago. A century later we have totally repudiated the idea of eugenics, haven’t we ?
(Via: i09 )
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