Pessimists Archive Podcast

The Eiffel Tower is as iconic of France as croissants and baguettes, and equally emblematic of Paris as Notre-Dame or the Arc de Triomphe. Yet, before completion for the 1889 World’s Fair - the project was treated by some as an industrialist “ Tower of Babel ” that was anti-ethical to French taste and culture. A month after construction of the Tower began in 1887, a group of prominent French artis...

In the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic San Francisco quickly instituted a mask mandate, when it was repealed there was a countdown in the streets and jubilation as reported on the front page of The San Francisco Examiner . To the right of the report was a piece by Annie Laurie celebrating the moment and lamenting how smiles had been hidden away, she declared the pandemic over and a return of smiling - h...

Did the rise of 19th century technologies - such as radio - lead to an increase in ghostly sightings? That’s the question Atlantic writer Derek Thompson asked on Twitter this week and it brought to mind a 1930s piece from the archive titled: Weird, Ghostly and “Supernatural” Antics of the Radio that could hint at an answer (yes!) The 1931 San Francisco Examiner peice consisted of a heavily illustr...

At the end of the 1920s aeroplanes were becoming a more common sight in the skies, in 1928 The New York Times reported on growing public disdain, comparing it to past reactions to transport innovations like the automobile and bicycle. The piece was subtitled “A Skeptical Nation Visits Upon the Airplane the Doubts it Once Felt for the Automobile ” explores many of the patterns we see today play out...

146 years ago The New York Times published an article lamenting anti-vaxxers, the piece began:   "One might suppose that the popular prejudice against vaccination might have died out by this time, considering it has been practice for nearly a century." Today this statement is as amusing as it is painful, when considering anti-vaxxers remain a relevant movement. It rightly observed that “It se...

This screed against mass-media appeared in a 1953 issue of The New York Times, it was an excerpt from an article written by British novelist J.B. Priestly for The Newstatesman. Today people yearn for the days of unsocial mass-media, but we forget that once mass-media was a strange new cultural influence - Priestly gives some insight into concerns about it at the time.  Source: The New York Ti...

69 days before the Wright Brothers achieved manned flight The New York Times posited it could take between 1 and 10 million years to achieve. The piece chides those experimenting in the field and posits that human ingenuity will never achieve what evolution had done over millions of years. The piece ends implying it is a waste of time and money: "To the ordinary man, it would seem as if effort mig...

These two pieces from the last decade of the 1900s cover two big consumer trends at the time: personal photographs and bicycle riding. Photographs of oneself were popular, as they are now and so was retouching! Photoshop used to mean a literal photography shop where edits were made to photos to enhance beauty, enlarge eyes and reduce bulge - the article lamented this trend for encouraging vanity....

In 1912 hand mirror use evoked similar reactions to smartphones today, the Chicago Tribune reported:  "WOMEN CONSTANTLY WALK INTO DANGER. Accidents which are due to women’s passion for looking in mirrors in stores are slight compared with ones which result from the use of the fascinating little hand mirror."  Source: Chicago Tribune 08 Sep 1912, Sun • Page 48 https://www.newspapers.com/c...

♟️ The year is 1859, American Paul Morphy had just defeated Europe's top chess masters leading to a surge of interest among the American public. Scientific American tried to quell the hype, suggesting chess playing was a waste of time that would be better spent outside, the piece stated: "A game of chess does not add a single new fact to the mind; it does not excite a single beautiful thought; nor...

It was the first decade of the 1900s, the bicycle was now mainstream and manned flight was still a curious novelty, oh and reading in bed a dysfunctional sin. Sources:   Aeroplane Face: http://digital.chipublib.org/digital/collection/examiner/id/12588/ • 🤳📰 View in AR: https://pessimistsar-flight.netlify.app Reading in Bed: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/79793760/the-inter-ocean/

'THE AEROPHONE' - The New York Times, March 25, 1878, Page 4 • 🤳🗞 VIEW IN AR: https://bit.ly/3uMHcGZ In 1878 The New York Times wrote a scathing article on Thomas Edison and his little known invention the 'Aerophone' (a giant megaphone.) The piece began "Something ought to be done to Mr. Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope" joking some wanted to h...