Slides

The original PowerPoint was first manufactured in the seventeenth century. The magic lantern was a form of image projector that used bright light to project pictures painted on sheets of glass onto a screen, perhaps a white wall or a sheet.

The Children’s Hour

On the BBC, the Children’s Hour lasted from 5pm until 6pm, the time of day when the children might be home from school. During that hour, from 1922 until 1964, the BBC broadcast radio programmes for the younger members of our families.

Radio Luxembourg: Fab 208

Do you remember the static? The crackles? The first fuzzy bars of music could be heard as the evening closed in, the light retreated, and the waves wandered in. The first strains of music from Radio Luxembourg reached the British Isles and the evening began.

Telephones in hotel rooms

To have a telephone in your hotel room was once such a novelty that hotels marketed themselves with this as their main attraction. Nowadays, the cool, modern trend is for your hotel to boast that it doesn’t have a phone in every room. It doesn’t have a phone in any room.

The second post

Waiting by the door for important news to arrive? The first post would tip through the letterbox early in the morning. Important news not there? Then you would wait patiently for the second post to occur, and that would happen somewhere between midday and 2pm.

Little bits of plastic

You could put these on the till in your shop to show that you accepted the daringly modern devices known as credit cards. Today, it’s more usual for merchants to put out signs when they don’t take them.