Truly new!

My standard theme here: Most of today’s “new” ideas were already in place, either patented or produced or fully described in a publication, by 1910.

Here’s one that nobody imagined, even in the ’50s when smoking was maximally cool and required! Nobody dreamed of a cigarette that also serves as a radio and phone and TV. Vapes are already unbelievably hi-tech. Instead of a simple aneroid pressure sensor, they use a matrix of dozens of mini-microphones. Some of them sense the pressure in the tube, others sense the atmosphere. The difference is computed to leverage out the baseline of ambient pressure.

There were some transistor radios and spy bugs disguised to look like a package of smokes, but Google doesn’t find any actual KGB cigarette bugs.