Boy Watching TV for the First Time in an Appliance Store Window, 1948

Flabbergasted by the screen – not the screen size – just the screen.

(Image: Ralph Morse - Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

It was the year that Beethoven’s No. 9 was played on television in its entirety for the first time. It was the year that the BBC attempted its longest sustained broadcast ever as it filmed three hours of each day of the Olympics.

A roller derby and multiple children’s shows were aired and TV was growing by leaps and bounds all over the world from Russia to the United States, and it was becoming more widely available. Nonetheless, The TV in the storefront was probably a rare sight for the well dressed young man in the picture.

Adorable Photos of Young Girls in Their First Communion From Between the 1900s and 1910s

First Communion is a ceremony in some Christian traditions during which a person first receives the Eucharist. It is most common in the Latin Church tradition of the Catholic Church, as well as in many parts of the Lutheran Church and Anglican Communion. In churches that celebrate First Communion, it typically occurs between the ages of seven and thirteen, often acting as a rite of passage.

When boys and girls make their First Holy Communion (usually in second grade), it's a big occasion for Catholic families. Like their Baptism, the day of First Communion is one filled with family, friends, and feasting after the sacred event has taken place in church.

Girls typically wear white gowns and veils and often look like little brides, and boys wear their Sunday best or new suits and ties bought for the occasion.

These adorable photos that show young girls in their first Holy Communion from between the 1900s and the 1910s.

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Cool Photos of Women Posing Next to Their TVs in the 1960s

Here is a photo collection that shows women posing to take photographs near their TVs in the 1960s.

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Yak Yak Yak! 16 Funny Candid Snapshots of People on Telephone From the Mid-20th Century

Remember when people used phones to actually talk to other people? So crazy!

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An Excellent Guide for Using Telephone in 1951

How to use the rotary dial phone? How to talk with a phone? How to call, how to answer?

This booklet The Telephone and How We Use It, published in 1951 by Bell Telephone System, was a beginner course in telephone use. Targeting elementary school students, it covers everything from basic use to emergency calls and proper etiquette.

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Before the Internet – 25 Vintage Photos Show Children Watching TV in the Past

No smartphones, iPads, or any internet technology devices. The only thing of technology for entertainment this time was black and white TVs. Take a look at these lovely vintage photos to see children entertained by watching television in the past.

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How to Make Friends by Telephone From the 1940s

Speak to the person at the other end of the line — not to the telephone — then you’re more apt to be pleasant and understanding.

As technology and the services we use are getting ever more advanced, it could, for some people, become harder to make real friends. The social networking hubs that have become the backbone of business are also becoming the new avenue for making friends.

In the 1940s, when the phone first became a household item, people started to question if we would even need to get out of the house anymore (just like we did when the television and the Internet became household names). However, history has shown us that we still need that physical interaction. We want to keep all our friends and still go out for a coffee or a movie every once in a while.

If you still don’t find a way to make friends in today’s jungle of technology services then why not have a look at this insanely geeky and retro guide brought to our attention by Contact Sheet? It’s called How To Make Friends By Telephone and is a guide meant to show people how to go about making real friends even though you’re in different locations by just using technology to interact back in the 1940s.

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Adolf Hitler’s Personal Bunker Telephone Is Up For Auction! Will You Pay $300,000 For It?

If you have a passion for historical artifacts and some money to burn, then, you better rally up to get Adolf Hitler’s personal telephone.

Adolf Hitler's telephone, recovered from the Fuhrerbunker and kept in a box at an English country house since 1945, will be sold at auction in the United States later this month. And it is estimated to go for $300,000

The phone was presented to Hitler by the Wehrmacht and was used by the Nazi leader to issue most of his commands during the last two years of World War II, according to a description in the catalog for Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland.

Made by Siemens as a black Bakelite phone, it was later painted red and engraved with Hitler's name and a swastika, the catalog says. The auction house describes the telephone as "Hitler's mobile device of destruction" and called it "arguably the most destructive 'weapon' of all time, which sent millions to their deaths around the world."

British officer Ralph Rayner recovered the phone from Hitler's bunker while visiting Berlin on the orders of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery just a few days after the end of the war. His son Ranulf Rayner, 82, inherited the phone after his father's death in 1977. "My father didn't see it as a relic of Hitler's glory days, more a battered remnant of his defeat, a sort of war trophy," he told CNN. "He never thought it would become an important artifact."

Sent to the shattered German capital to establish contact with the Russian forces who had captured the city, Ralph Rayner was probably the very first non-Soviet victor to enter Hitler's bunker.

"He could still smell burning flesh," Ranulf Rayner said, recalling his father's description of the underground shelter where Hitler spent his final days. In his words, it was a "dreadful hellhole."

First offered the black telephone found in the room of Eva Braun, Hitler's bride, Ralph Rayner instead chose the red phone next to Hitler's bed. "He told the Russians that red was his favorite color," Ranulf Rayner said, "which the Russians rather liked."

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18 Rare Vintage Photographs of Swedish Telephone Operators at the Turn of the Century

In the early days of telephony, through roughly the 1960s, companies used manual telephone switchboards, and switchboard operators connected calls by inserting a pair of phone plugs into the appropriate jacks. Each pair of plugs was part of a cord circuit with a switch associated that let the operator participate in the call. Each jack had a light above it that lit when the telephone receiver was lifted (the earliest systems required a generator on the phone to be cranked by hand). Lines from the central office were usually arranged along the bottom row.

On September 1, 1880, for the first time in Sweden, it became possible to place calls to a number of persons, to anyone who had a telephone that was connected to a telephone exchange. The first telephones that came to Sweden were simple Bell instruments that had been made in the United States. They were available in Stockholm at the end of 1877. One could only speak between two instruments that were connected to a fixed line. The same device served as both the receiver and microphone, so that callers had to move the "open" end between ear and mouth during a call.

When telephones had been developed to the point where they had a special microphone and a bell, they could be linked together in telephone networks. This required a telephone switch in a telephone exchange, plus operators who made the connections.

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18 Funny Photos Show People's Expectation Before Mobile Phones

Before the first handheld mobile cell phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973, people had ideas to show their expectation for them.

Here below is a small collection of funny vintage photos capturing people with their mobile phones in the past.

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They Don’t Make Cool Looking TVs Like This Anymore: 13 of the Most Bizarre and Breathtaking Television Set Designs That Ever Existed

When televisions were still a luxury, high-tech item, designers wanted to make them look as crazily futuristic and beautiful as possible. Here are 13 of the most bizarre and breathtaking historical TV set designs that ever existed, dating from 1928 through 1991.

1. Massive Luxury Kuba Komet, 1957-1962

How cool is this midcentury modern TV console? Shaped like a sailboat, it features an upper section that rotates like a sail on a mast so you can tilt the 23-inch screen in the desired direction. The lower cabinet holds additional multi-media features with a pull-out, 4-speed phonograph, a TV tuner and a multi-band radio receiver.


2. First Publicly Available Russian TV, 1932

The first television set that was available to the public in Russia looks exactly like you would expect – basically, as if it were a piece of military equipment.


3. GE Performance Television, 1978

Once upon a time, having a gigantic ugly faux-wood-covered box in your living room was considered a sign of prestige. The GE Performance Television is about as ridiculous as it gets, especially since the picture was terrible owing to the fact that it was essentially just a regular TV tube flipped and back-projected onto that giant screen. GE marketed it as “a super-size TV with a picture three times as big as a 25-inch diagonal console and the ‘chairside convenience’ of random access remote control.”


4. Zenith CBS Mechanical Color Wheel, 1948

Before ‘real’ color TVs were available, CBS labs came up with this contraption – essentially a black-and-white television equipped with a spinning mechanical wheel of red, blue and green filters that added color to the picture seen on the screen. CBS was all ready to start selling these things when RCA protested that an all-electronic color system (which they were researching, but had not yet developed) would make more sense. Ultimately, the Zenith design was briefly used as a teaching tool for surgery, but never sold to the public.


5. Phillips Discoverer Space Helmet TV, 1991

This novelty television didn’t really do anything special – it just looks cool, modeled after a space helmet with a closing lid.

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