- These inventions crawled so today’s tech could run.
Some things in our homes have remained virtually unchanged for centuries, if not millennia. Even a peasant from an ancient world would recognize basic tables, chairs, and maybe some toys or sports gear.
Many things in our homes, though, would be completely unrecognizable to the people of the past – at least in their modern iterations. However, they might realize they are familiar with an early, primitive take of the same idea.
Here are nine examples of strange early versions of modern tech and appliances.
1. Pie Safe
In the days before refrigeration, storing food was an everlasting struggle. One cabinet-shaped food preservation appliance from yesteryear was the pie safe.
It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a wooden cabinet designed to keep pies and bread from going stale. The safe achieved this with perforated tin panels on its doors.
The tiny holes allowed air to circulate in the cabinet and delay staleness, while being small enough to keep most bugs outside. However, with the invention of ice boxes and later refrigerators, the pie safe served little further purpose.
Or so you’d think, but I’d kind of like one of these in my kitchen.
2. Gas-Heated Tub
Most people still think of hot tubs as somewhat luxurious, even in this age of readily available and safe water heaters. Consider, then, how fancy a self-heating tub was in Victorian England.
The method the English used to heat the water was far from safe, though. A small gas burner under the tub would swing back and forth, slowly warming the water.
Basically, you had a Bunsen burner sitting under the tub to keep the water warm. There’s no way this could go horribly wrong, right?
3. Apple Newton
In 1993, Apple released the Newton. It was a cutting-edge PDA with a touchscreen, a whole slew of useful applications, and – as the cherry on top of the sundae – handwriting recognition software. You could write a message in your own handwriting using the stylus, and the Newton would interpret it into digital text.
Or that was the idea anyway. In the end, the Newton did pretty much none of that. It was a slow, bug-ridden, crashing mess of a gadget that sold few units.
Perhaps the Newton never should’ve been a finished product and more of a tech demo. It was ahead of its time, both in good and bad. Many of the Newton’s technologies ended up paving the way for the iPhone, iPad, and other modern touch-based tablets.
4. Hoosier Cabinet
Believe it or not, there was a time when kitchen counters didn’t exist in regular homes. Countertops and cabinets didn’t become common until after World War II.
So where did people do all their chopping and kneading and other food preparation? On the dining table?
Nope; that’s what the Hoosier cabinet was for. It was a free-standing cabinet with drawers and a workspace for the chef of the house.
Hoosier cabinets ranged from simple homemade cabinets in poor rural households to exorbitantly expensive luxury units. The high-end models might have everything from can openers to coffee grinders, flour sifters, and other appliances integrated into them.
5. CueCat
Some of you reading this article might remember the CueCat. If you used the internet in the very early 2000s, there’s a chance you received one of these barcode readers for free.
The idea behind the CueCat was to plug it into your computer and then scan barcodes published in printed magazines and newspapers. The thing would interpret the barcode and open an internet link or perform some other functions.
Virtually no one used the CueCat, though. If you have to take the magazine to your computer, you might as well type in the URL instead of messing with the unreliable barcode reader.
In a way, though, CueCat’s functional principle still lives on in QR codes. However, it’s not a direct predecessor, since by the time the CueCat was released in 2000, QR codes had already been invented in Japan six years earlier.
6. Sad Iron
The sad iron is a predecessor of the modern electric clothes iron. Its name has nothing to do with feeling blue, as it’s derived from the Middle English word “sad,” meaning “solid.”
This iron could very easily make you sad, though. Instead of electricity, these 17th- and 18th-century appliances had a small metal box on top where you’d pour blazing hot charcoal.
Using the iron was a heavy, smoky, and hot affair. And should an errant spark land on your dry clothes and set them alight…
Well, that would certainly make you sad.
7. IBM Simon
The Apple Newton blazed the trail for modern smartphones, but it wasn’t the first smartphone. That was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, a brick of a cellular phone released in 1994.
Technically, it had everything you need to recognize it as a smartphone. It had a touchscreen, could send and receive e-mails and faxes, and featured a bunch of productivity applications.
Much like with the Newton, though, the thing was too far ahead of its time. Its battery lasted less than an hour, the display was dim and unresponsive, and the applications were far from user-friendly.
It was also criticized for its price, costing nearly $2,700 adjusted for inflation. Still, it laid the foundation for modern smartphones as a proof of concept.
8. Pneumatic Tube Mail
You need to send an instant message to a coworker, but no one’s invented e-mail or texting yet. What should you do?
Easy. Write your note on a regular piece of paper, put it in a plastic container, and send it careening through a series of tubes until it plops at your colleague’s desk.
That’s how the pneumatic tube systems installed in offices and even entire cities worked. Air pressure pushed the message container through the tubes. All you had to do was sit back and hope that it arrived at the right end station.
9. Juicero
The Juicero isn’t the precursor to any specific popular appliance. What it is is one of the earliest examples of the many utterly pointless smart home gadgets that serve no purpose whatsoever.
If you don’t remember the Juicero, it was a supposedly high-tech juicer released in 2014. It could squeeze juice out of its proprietary juice pouches, and it boasted Wi-Fi connectivity.
And it was utterly, completely useless.
People quickly found out that it was easier to squeeze the weird juice pouches into a glass with your bare hands instead of messing with the clunky contraption. The internet connection did nothing else but check the juice packet’s authenticity and expiration date.
Yes, the whole system was based around a subscription managed through an iPhone app. If it couldn’t verify you were using a real, authentic Juicero™ juice pouch – perhaps because of an internet outage – the machine would refuse to squeeze it.
And of course, the juicer had a sky-high price tag. Really, Juicero was an eerie sign of things to come about all the worst aspects of modern tech.