The Huckster Ads of Early “Popular Mechanics”

Weird, revealing, and incredibly fun to read

8 min readAug 6, 2022

An ad for “The Greatest Gold Dredging Enterprise in the world”, which offers to take your money so they can install twenty “gold dredging machines” that “can do the work of 1,000 men”. The top left hand corner has a black and white drawing of a dredging machine, which, improbably, looks like a mechanism that scoops up buckets of gold coins

When I’m bored and worried about falling into a Twitter hole, there’s one thing that can always divert my attention.

Going over to the Internet Archive and perusing the incredibly weird ads of early-20th-century Popular Mechanics.

What, you haven’t already discovered this yourself?

You’re in for a treat. Popular Mechanics was a curious beast back in those days. Like the name suggests, it included tons of stories about inventors around the world, and stuff they were getting up to. So in the April 1920 issue, for example, you had articles like these …

Three short articles. The leftmost is “Two purposes served by new lighting fixture”, showing a photo of a man sitting at a table beneath a hanging lamp, and drawing the lamp down to hang low right above his reading. The second is “Odd baby carrier hangs from mother’s shoulder”, with an illustration of a woman holding a shoulder-mounted strap with a flat piece of wood hanging from it, and a baby lying bundled on it. The third is “Solitaire board aids invalid”, with a wooden board holding cards

A ceiling lamp that lets you yank a fixture downwards to be reading lamp (legit good idea: I’d buy something like that from Ikea today); an “odd baby carriage” that seems indescribably unsafe; and a device for playing solitaire upright in bed, which is actually kind of cool.

There was also plenty of news about the frontiers of science, including — again from that same issue, this piece …

The Huckster Ads of Early “Popular Mechanics”

Weird, revealing, and incredibly fun to read

Written by Clive Thompson