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For those who are just getting comfortable with text messaging and Facebook, Twitter can seem dauntingly cutting-edge. And yet, as a page from the August 1935 edition of Modern Mechanix magazine reveals, there are some great-grandparents out there to whom micro-blogging looks positively old-fashioned. They probably remember The Notificator.
Like Twitter, the Notificator enabled people to post short messages on an ever-rolling public display. First patented in 1932, it was inspired by similar machines in Japanese railway stations and was designed "to aid persons who wish to cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts".
Essentially, it was a very simple device: a large mechanical paper scroll sits behind a sheet of glass with a hatch at the bottom. By inserting two pennies, any passerby could open the hatch, write a message on the exposed paper, and close it again, causing the mechanism to ratchet the whole scroll up another notch. As with Twitter, the size of these messages was limited, but what they might say was not.
The Notificator is not the only example of an idea that seemed to arrive decades ahead of schedule. The April 1933 edition of Modern Mechanix describes a new German "amplifier which boosts both the incoming and outgoing voice" just like your hands-free button on your phone. And incredibly, the July 1934 edition of Popular Science details the miraculous invention of the "Sound Pen", which took minutes to convert a radio signal into a sketch of a small cartoon. Ah, fax machines . . . remember them?
