By Jim Zub April 24, 2012

Now, far be it for me to claim that Sky Kid is any kind of accurate historical representation of the past but, even still, I do want it to have a certain genuine World War I flare. While doing research on the WWI time period (1914-1918) I discovered that a whole bunch of things we take for granted in our modern life were either brand new or not yet invented and shouldn’t referenced at all, and I’m not talking about obvious stuff like computers or mobile phones either.

Check this out:

Items Invented That Are Brand New During World War I

 

Hamburger buns
Radio tuners
Military tanks
Supermarkets (and grocery bags)
Tow trucks
Light switches
Modern zippers

Items That Have Not Been Invented Yet and Shouldn’t Be Referenced At All

 

Toasters
Plastic
Radar detection
Traffic lights
Hair dryers
Sunglasses
Band-Aids
Blenders
Rockets/rocket fuel
Notebooks with spiral bindings
Television
Tape recorders
Bubble Gum
Yo-Yos
Reheat-able Frozen Meals
Ballpoint pens

It’s kind of mind-blowing, isn’t it? Some of them are ridiculous little things but, taken as a whole, there’s a whole lot we interact with almost every day in our modern lives that just doesn’t exist at all in that time period. Even if most would never have come up in the Sky Kid comic strip, it surprised me and made me think a lot more about life in the early 20th century. There’s immediacy to the technology. Everything can be fixed with a hammer, wrench and screwdriver. The concept of moving assembly line production emerged right before World War I and it vastly changed the way items were put together. Factories moved us away from individual craftsmen building things to people working on one aspect of a much larger and faster production cycle. World War I, and the need for military vehicles and armaments being produced faster than ever, catapulted us into a cycle of building and innovating that hasn’t stopped ever since.

When I think about the amount of progress even in the past 30 years, it’s hard to imagine where technology and invention will take us 10, 20 or 30 years from now. I’m sure that when the next era of storytellers are writing fictional stories about the year 2012 they’ll look back at our laptops, cell phones and wi-fi with equal amusement and amazement. They’ll wonder how we could have gotten along in our day to day lives with such old and archaic technology.