Marvellous magazine ads of 1904
JD sez, "While reading through a couple of old magazines I bought at a garage sale, I fell in love with the ads. The art and the ad copy are wonderful. Because I run a personal finance site, that's the focus of my post, but really these are fun for just about anyone. Special fun: the 1904 magazine features ads for horse carriages, but by 1909 the ads are for automobiles." Marvelous Magazine Ads from 1904 (Thanks, JD!)
the latest
latest episodes
Personally I like the insights into culture shown by old ads. For example, who knew that burnt matches on the floor was so prevalent?
If the old vacuum cleaner angle grabs you, check out the episode in The Secret Life of Machines by Tim Hunkin.
never gonna catch on
Steampunk!
!, when you watch a lot of old movies you start noticing how many light up with a match, then pitch it aside. Must have driven housekeepers nuts.
"Its a good plan to have a few boxes of Jello around for an emergency."
They had different kinds of emergencies back then.
I love it.
"While reading through a couple of old magazines I bought at a garage sale, I fell in love with the ads. The art and the ad copy are wonderful."
Reminded me of an old Sontag essay I ran across yesterday:
"It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic."
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html
The soggy, sticky sawdust left behind when the carnival's moved on can hide some treasures. Put another way, once the quack's dead, his miracle cures seem quaint and funny.
Why is Princess Leia selling vacuum cleaners?
I sometimes get a melancholy feeling reading adds and magazines from a time when civilization was on its way up but had not seen the horrors of gas and trench warfare in WW-I or the atrocities of WW-II. That and we were still in the early stages of the up curve on oil production and total potential energy production. The marvels to be developed, the atom, antibiotics, immunizations, electricity, radio, airplanes, internal combustion engines, what a time! I still have hope we will get things right but now to walk on the moon again by 2020 seems like an impossible dream.
What the hell are burnt matches doing on the carpet?
Anon @#7:
That's not a vacuum cleaner, that's her assistant, an early R1A1 droid.
We also apparently vacuumed in full evening-wear. I suppose sweeping with electricity is not something to do informally.
Full evening wear? My child, that is a bathing suit!
Did she plug it in upstairs and then rappel to the ground floor using the cord?
I always wear a corset and a dress when I vacuum too -- and I'm a man!
For those who wonder about the matches on the floor : just remember that the spittoon was still quite common in 1904 and that grand-daddy, in his eighties maybe didn't have that great an aim... I'd take the matches, any time.
exactly, and the stench of horse crap in the street found its way into the home as well - - basically we were still filthy beasts who weren't quite finished crawling out of the ooze of prehistory in 1904
the carpets were installed before hygiene had a chance to catch up
oh, and don't forget soot
for 3 cents a week, you can download all the music you want ... hmmmm
@anon #7, yamara #19:
She felt a tremendous suction in the force. As if a million dust bunnies cried out at once and then were silent.
#13 - ANTHONY
I noticed the cord going straight up, too. It's because houses only had a few electric lights and no power outlets. The cords for appliances ended in screw-in plugs that fit the light socket.
They must have gotten table lamps with plugs later.
Too many burnt matches are being thrown around this home, i think. What this home needs is a fire extinguisher.
That's pretty standard day dress for the time. The clothes for that time were gorgeous, and extravagant by current standards.
What I find interesting is the collage effect of photographing a women and painting in the rest, including the vacuum. It's kind of creepy.
A logical fallacy:
I used to be happier
Before all this stress and responsibility
Ergo, things used to be better
Statistical fact contradicts
Conservative edicts
LOL
That, my friends, is called a photograph using a special instrument called a "camera."
Consider if you will that ceilings in large, victorian-style homes were at least 9' to 11', the plug must have been a real challenge to use, especially in that dress.
Fran, to be fair, it's at least a retouched photograph. I once applied for a 'spotter' position; that's where you would take the glare out of folk's eyeglasses using a tiny, tiny brush and paint.
I'm a good painter, but didn't get the job because I totally made my test subject look like a zombie.
As for the "I vacuumed my parlor in my Maidenform Bra" aspect of this, I daresay the downstairs maid would've been doing the job instead of the Missus, who likely would've been in her bedchamber, abed with the 'vapors' - the Mister was at the Jardin de Paris for the Follies, chatting up a Ziegfeld girl for dinner at Delmonico's, and whatever else a white fox stole could buy.
She's smiling. She's so over the Victorian era.
I love old vacuum cleaners. I have always loved the design and how durable they are. I am currently living a year as a 1955 housewife and I use, almost daily, a 1956 Kirby that sounds like an airplane when you start it, but it works a charm. It is also earth friendly with its cloth bag you empty and can wash and use over and over. There is much to be said for old technology built to last. I have a phone from 1950s that works fine, yet my cell phones break every 6 mos. almost to the day!
Great image!