By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Life in 2015 isn’t quite what we were promised in the last century's science-fiction fantasies: We don’t live on the moon, commute to work in autonomous flying cars, or get homework help from friendly robot maids. And yet, our predictions for food service—fully cooked meals delivered instantly at the push of a button—became a reality more than 50 years before "The Jetsons" ever aired. Starting in the 1890s, people flocked to a new type of restaurant whose walls were lined with futuristic...

Scopitone: '60s Music Videos You've Never Seen

By Ben Marks — Before MTV, and long before we could stream music videos on our cell phones, mid-1960s American hepcats gathered around 500-pound, 7-foot-high contraptions to watch 16-millimeter Technicolor films of B-list pop stars gyrating to their latest hits. The contraption in question was usually a Scopitone, one of several audio-visual jukeboxes found primarily in bars. Their reign, if you can even call it that, was brief, and by the end of the decade, the novelty of these then-high-tech devices had...

Why People Flip Over Vintage Pinball Machines

By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge arcade there. I always said that Space Invaders and Pac-Man took so much of my money—money that I really didn’t have—that it would have been cheaper to just buy one of those machines. So one day I went to an auction of coin-operated video games. They had pinball machines there, too, including a 1980...