Laptops are soooo 1890s

Product: World typewriter
Date: 1890

I don’t know why I continue to be surprised at finding evidence, way back in the past, of ideas and sentiments that are supposedly so very 21st-century modern.

Take portability, for example. We tend to think of small, lightweight technology as a development of the last 10 or 20 years. After all, it’s our highly mobile culture and our “do anything anywhere” expectations that have both pushed the development of these technologies and embraced them. Isn’t it?

Umm, maybe not.

Take a look at this ad for a portable typewriter from 1890 — yeah, that’s right — 1890. There’s a well-dressed guy using some down time on the train to tap out a bit of writing on a teeny little keypad resting in his lap. (Little does he know that more than 100 years later, millions will be following his lead.)

In 1890, typewriters were still in their infancy. Multiple forms and designs of type machines abounded; many of them were quite small.

It wasn’t until about 1910 that the typewriter, as we know it to look today, was standardized. Then we moved into the kind of heavy typewriters that most of you will be familiar with, followed by room-sized computers, and then desk-bound PCs before emerging once again into unplugged handhelds.

La plus ça change….

When white just isn’t white enough

Product: Derma-Royale
Date: 1895

So you have a freckle or two. Maybe a pimple or a blemish. A liver spot? A tan? Don’t pout. Your skin can be lily white again with the miraculous Derma-Royale!

Because like the ad says, “Nothing will cure, clear and whiten the skin so quickly as Derma-Royale.” Its “bleaching” and “brightening” properties (and who doesn’t want bleached skin?) are highly recommended by Physicians with a capital P — so you know it must be good.

And just in case you’re thinking that something so powerful must also be dangerous, never fear! Derma-Royale is “as harmless as dew,” so harmless that a “whole bottle may be drank without the least serious effect.” And since all you have to do is drink it, need it be said that the product is “so simple a child can use it”?

For all you hard-core doubters and nay-sayers, let’s dig into the guarantee. If Derma-Royale does not quickly remove and cure “any case of eczema, pimples, blotches, moth-patches, brown spots, liver spots, blackheads, ugly or muddy skin, unnatural redness, freckles, tan, or any other cutaneous discolorations or blemishes” the company will pay out $500.

What’s that? It must be the sound of a quack being run out of town.

Click to enlarge.

Ice — it’s the coolest

Product: Ice
Date: 1928

In our ultra-modern hyper-technological age, it’s hard to imagine a time when refrigeration was a novelty. And yet it wasn’t all that long ago, as this December 1928 ad for ice blocks attests.

Only 80 years ago, ice had copywriters gushing:

• Ice was “the life of the party”.
• Ice clinked merrily in time to music.
• Ice sparkled brightly.
• Ice added flavour and appeal to food and drink.
• Ice made out-of-season foods available all year round!
• Ice was good health insurance, keeping food pure and untainted.
• Ice was efficient and inexpensive.

You could even send away for a free booklet called Ice – the Life of the Party. Inside you would learn “modern ways of enjoying ice, including proper uses of ice in table settings.”

Cool.

Click to enlarge

Hump, there it is!

Product: DeLong Hook and Eye
Date: 1896

This ad reminds me of nothing so much as the Victorian equivalent of “SEX! ha ha. Now that we have your attention…”

Why else use those two strange words called out in large letters: approximately and hump. Does Approximately hump make any sense as a sentence? No. Does it speak of hook and eyes? No, not really. Does the sentence starting with approximately even make sense?

Approximately the cut below represents the DeLong Hooks and Eyes.

Nope, no sense at all.

But you’ve got hand it to the designer — it certainly is an attention grabber.

And I haven’t even mentioned the clean, uncrowded layout with lots of white space (this during a time when it was common practice to cram your ads with as much copy as possible) and the simple, yet elegant diagram demonstrating the Dramatic Difference of the product.

From the text, we can surmise that randomly popping hooks were quite a problem for well-dressed ladies of the day. Oh my.

Baby wanna bottle?

Product: 7-Up
Date: 1950

It’s 1950. It’s Middle America. Here we have Mom (in her high heels and pearls), Dad, Freddie, Kay, and little brother on a swell outing to the zoo. Look at the polar bears! Look at the balloons!

Now let’s turn our attention to little brother, the cute baby in the stroller. How old is he? Eighteen months? Maybe two, tops? He’s having a good time at the zoo, as well. What’s that he’s drinking? A bottle of nourishing mama’s milk? A cup of apple juice?

No, sir! It’s cheerful, clean-tasting 7-Up. Just because you’re still in diapers doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your very own glass bottle of fizzy sugar water. In fact, it’s good for you. It’s practically medicine. The ad says so.

Seven-Up is so pure — so good — so completely wholesome that even the very youngest can “fresh up” just as often as they want…and with as much as they want.

God bless America.

Click to enlarge.

Who put the snail in mail?

Product: Zip codes, United States Postal Service
Date: 1969

Bet you thought the term “snail mail” was added to the popular lexicon when email went mainstream in the early 1990s and postal mail came to seem so old school. I know I did.

So imagine my surprise when I came across this 1969 ad from the United States Postal Service with a huge Snail Mail headline. The ad explains that mail without a zip code would move at a snail’s pace.

Zip codes became mandatory in the United States in 1963. Six years later, this ad shows there was still a problem with getting the public to use them.

Incidentally, though “zip” actually stands for Zone Improvement Plan, the acronym was chosen to underscore how much more quickly postal codes could move the mail.

Wikipedia dates the earliest known use of the term Snail Mail to a 1981 Strawberry Shortcake episode, of all things. Guess I better mosey on over there and update the entry.

Click to enlarge.

Sorry the enlarged ad — the one that comes up when you click on the thumbnail — isn’t bigger. Normally I try to scan the ads at a large enough size to read all the text. But I scanned this ad a couple of years ago and it’s a smaller size.