The Fantastically Geeky Ads That Gave Rise To The Tech Industry

The Fantastically Geeky Ads That Gave Rise To The Tech Industry

Megan Prelinger's new book, Inside The Machine, offers a fascinating visual history of technology through the lens of the commercial art that helped popularize it.

In the period between the advent of the light bulb in the 19th century and the space race of the 1960s, new technology emerged at an exhilarating speed. As electronics like light bulbs, telephones, radios, and TVs made their way into people's living rooms, the companies that produced them were faced with an interesting dilemma: How to describe these new products—which relied on an invisible process of moving electrons—to the general public?

Thus the inventive ads, magazine covers and graphic design of the early tech industry, and the subject of Megan Prelinger's book Inside The Machine: Art and Invention In The Electronic Age. From modernist paintings of the silicon transistor to drawings of mid-century robots to Paul Rand's iconic Westinghouse Electric logo, Prelinger takes readers on a fantastically geeky visual tour of tech industry history as seen through the lens of the commercial art that helped popularize it.