Captured here: Smokebot: Retro technology at its finest! The Westinghouse Electric Corporation actually made a smoking robot in the 1930s. It was taken in the 1930s, and like the best archival images it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
The 1930s were shadowed by the Great Depression, which put a quarter of American workers out of a job at its worst point. Yet the same decade produced streamlined trains, record-setting aircraft, grand public works, and a flood of documentary photography as magazines like LIFE sent cameras into everyday America.
Looking at experimental machines from the past, it is easy to laugh at what failed and forget how strange the successful inventions looked at first. To the people in the frame, this was the cutting edge, and the photograph preserves that optimism intact.
