The website devoted to Hudson material includes quite a few Dealer Bulletins. These gave dealers the company’s talking points on this year’s cars and options. Each bulletin started with a long set of features and fillers, giving salesmen some jokes and bits of knowledge to spice up their talks. I’m an avid consumer of Features, whether they come in newspapers or other forms. Features are considered literary snacks, but generally they’re more truthful and nutritious than the main dish.
Some of the better jokes and typos:
A music school made this promise on their poster: “Piano and violin lessons, special pains given to beginners.”
A San Francisco furniture store’s ad included this coupon to be worn by just-lookers: “I’m looking. It is understood that this coupon prohibts all sales talk unless specifically requested.”
A new scale weighs people for free, and delivers a recorded commercial. (The great-grandfather of Web-Enabled Devices!)
Experience helps you recognize a mistake the next time you make it.
An ad suggested, “Don’t kill your wife with work, let electricity do it.”
Here’s a nutritious snack from 1954:
By next Thanksgiving or the one after, mother may prepare that big turkey by baking it in a cold oven for only an hour and a half.
A midwestern manufacturer is now testing electronic ranges which cook foods from the inside out without heating either the food container or the oven. Mom can reach in and take out the plates containing her baked cake (3 minutes) or hot baked potatoes (5 minutes) with her bare hands.
Well, the microwave wasn’t ready for home use in 1954 but some restaurants were trying it.
From Electronics magazine, Nov 1933.
Diathermy was a very old practice in industrial and medical applications. The caption implies that cooking by diathermy was already familiar, but it was newly suitable for home cooks making “bun sandwiches”. [Was hamburger trademarked? Apparently not, but cheeseburger was trademarked.]
Restaurants were starting to use HF ovens in 1960. I remember trying an electronic “bun sandwich” in a roadside cafe in western Kansas, hardly a high-tech center! The oven was fascinating, but the “bun sandwich” was too dry and tasted wrong.
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Most inventions were anticipated as ideas or fantasies long before they came to fruition. An idea can’t turn into a practical and producible device until Materials and Methods are ready. Microwave ovens might hold the record for the longest immediate anticipation. Ready next year for 50 years.
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