The exhibit started out with vacuums and their salesmen.

This Electrolux looks exactly like the vacuum that my grandmother used on the stairs. She kept it in the basement. Seeing it makes me think of the green shag carpet and how many times I vacuumed up the stairs with that aqua colored vacuum.

I loved how the museum posted replicas of the advertisements for the gadgets alongside the real thing.

My grandmother also had this iron. I remember ironing my grandpa’s handkerchiefs with it while watching Phil Donahue on the television. I can still smell the spray starch.

This Rival crockpot, however, is exactly like the one from my mom’s house. Carol made homemade chicken noodle soup in that crockpot so many times that my mouth waters just seeing that avocado colored appliance.

I was most surprised by the antique toasters. I had no idea how old that technology was.

I loved how the museum included technology from present day. In this “Keeping Food Fresh” section, they included antique Mason jars, Tupperware from the 1970′s and even Ziploc containers from 2010. A century of awesome on one shelf.

The blender on the right is exactly like the one my mom had. We made so many cakes and cookies with that blender. She told me that she received that blender as a wedding present and it always amazed me that something older than me was still helping us in the kitchen.

Some of the gadgets brought back a strange nostalgia like the box for the hot plate in the background here. Then again, they included a George Foreman grill, which is a similar appliance, but it took the world by storm when it hit the market.

Seeing this exhibit was a strange mixture of nostalgia for the past and coveting in the present. The starburst clock on the wall made me jealous with desire.

It was a great exhibit and I truly enjoyed myself. Here is a video from the Clark County Museum talking about it:

Instead of a sprayer attached to a hose on your sink, the sprayer has a dish brush. Not only does your brush stay right where you need it, it squirts water out on your dishes while you clean. You can see the entire ad here:

What I would love to see is a modern day hack that takes the Oxo SteeL Soap Squirting Dish Brush and attaches it to my nearly useless sink sprayer. What would I have to do to make that a reality in my own home? Maybe it’s time to hit the hardware store and find out for myself.

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They had a display honoring the great Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of polarization.

They showed some artwork made with Polaroids.

They even brought some favorite retro gadgets out of the Polaroid Museum for some nostalgic appeal.

You can see all the photos here:

May you receive all the gadget visions that dance in your head.

I’ll leave you with a photograph from our Christmas back in 1991. It was our second Christmas together and Mike bought me a Atari Lynx II for the holiday. You can see it plugged into the wall front and center under our tiny tree if you look carefully (it’s the big black rectangle). It cost us over a hundred bucks and Mike had to order it from the only Atari dealer left in Salt Lake City. He was a crazy guy with an office in South Salt Lake that was filled top to bottom with old Atari parts, boxes of papers and oh so many wires and cables. He believed that the government was tracking him by reading the magnetic strips in money. He was the first person to point them out to me and showed me how to remove them so the government wouldn’t be able to find him.

The two of us played Chip’s Challenge and S.T.U.N. Runner all day. Looking at the photo, it looks pretty meager, but it was a wonderful Christmas!

It is for a hundred year old camera, but some of the advice is good even today. I love their simple definitions for things like Depth of Focus and f-Stops. This photograph showing the proper way to hold the camera is wonderful!

These old Kodak cameras had a feature that I wish modern day cameras had. It was called the Autographic Feature and allowed you to document notes about the photograph when you took it.

The advice on how to take photographs is still good even today. I love this description of why it’s important to keep your lens clean. All of us need to remember this simple tip when we pull our camera phones out of our lint infested pockets for a quick shot.

If you own a camera like this, then this instruction manual might be helpful. You can see the whole manual here:

• Kodak Pocket Camera I and IA Instruction Manual – a set on Flickr

If you don’t own a camera like this, it’s sure fun to see how far photography has progressed in the last century and how the definition of “pocket” has changed over the years.

We bought this clock for Carol when her eyes started failing. When you press the button on the top, the clock announces the time. Here is a video of it in action.

I’ve seen this clock in my parents’ house for two decades, but something about the retro Max Headroom style made it jump out at me. It suddenly looked out of place in their house. All the Eighties stuff that used to be in their house has slowly gone away, leaving this last vestige. The talking clock was spared because of its functionality. We should all be so lucky.

I’m surprised at how high tech the album was. It was released in 1983 and it is far more computer, robot and digital friendly than I realized back when I was a kid. Take the song, Digital Duck, about Donald Duck’s love for gadgets, even when they steer him wrong.

He’s a D-D-D-D-Digital Duck
D-D-D-D-Digital Duck
Donald loves his gadgets, even though they run amok,
He’s a D-D-D-D-Digital Duck

You can hear a clip here:

For the full Disney and Eighties masochists, here is the full song:

It doesn’t end there, with songs like Hoedown at the Robot Farm, One Little Android and Gyro Gearloose, it was a TOTALLY gadget lovin’ album… TOTALLY.

• Go Retro!: Bad Car Names

4. Dodge Diplomat: Despite a long production run (from 1977 to 1989) I’ve never heard of anyone who owned a Diplomat, and I’m not sure that those who did really did feel all that more important. Check out the vintage ad I’ve posted above – shuttle diplomacy? A misguided advertising attempt to make a soccer mom feel like she’s royalty or something.

When my dad moved out, my mom’s friend from work, Carol, moved in. She drove a Dodge Diplomat. It didn’t look like the one in this advertisement. It looked like this, except it was white (not silver) and the cloth top was a dark blue, not brown.

It breaks my heart that we don’t have a photo of that car, because we had so many good times in it. Carol and Mom took Stacey and me to Wisconsin in that car, driving across I-80 through the desolation that is Wyoming and the boredom that is Nebraska. We had a lot of good times in that car.

I never realized how cool it was until I was fourteen years old. By that time, Carol had been living with us for five years and the car was just the Diplomat. It was the family car and we took its luxuries for granted every day. That day, in ninth grade, Mom picked up a bunch of us from a school function. Crammed in the front seat, were the two cutest guys in the Quest program. While I was stuffed into the back seat with four girls, they fiddled with the radio up front. They were so impressed with the digital tuner on the radio (this was 1984, so digital tuners were VERY rare back then). After the ride, they told me how cool my mom’s car was and I beamed with pride.

Did riding in the Dodge Diplomat make me feel like royalty? That day, it sure did. Not to mention the fact that the car could hold six stranded teenagers. Sorry, Go Retro, you’re wrong. The Dodge Diplomat was a VERY cool car.

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I remember when the idea of having my own computer sounded so wonderful that I felt it would never happen for me. I was so jealous of my friend, Mike Moncur, because his dad had bought an Atari 800, just like we programmed on in school.

That old computer lives on even today, stored in our basement with all of its floppy disks. The two of us are unwilling to let it go. I think it represents all that excitement and potential of the “new era” of the personal computer.

I wonder if I will feel the same about my iPhone in twenty years.

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He had found it at the local Deseret Industries. It was broken, but he had been able to solder it back together. Stacey and I played “tennis” all night long.

We played with that simplistic video game for months until my mom and Carol gave us the Atari for Easter. After Atari, the Sears Tele-Game was just a cheap knock-off.

I have no idea what my dad did with that video game he rescued from a thrift store and nursed back to health, but he was the hero for those few months before Atari entered out lives.

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