The Pet Rock was probably the biggest toy fluke of the 20th century. Can you imagine people today buying a rock decorated with animal features?…
Browsing: Fads
It used to be the case that if you wanted to telephone somebody while walking down the street you would go into a phone box,…
A six-man team of students at Derby College of Technology in the UK, working with hand tools such as axes, sledgehammers, crowbars and brooms, were…
Playboy magazine was founded in 1953 by Hugh Marston Hefner (b.1926). To raise money for the venture he mortgaged his furniture at two different banks…
The shorthand term for a set of liberal attitudes about education and society, and the terminology associated with them. To be “politically correct” is to…
The first large-scale exhibition of Pop Art was held at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1963, featuring works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper…
The weekly British pop magazine Popswop was first published in October 1972, primarily aimed at the teenage girl market. In addition to full-colour posters of…
Protests in the 1960s can be divided into two main categories; those provoked by racial tensions, such as the ghetto riots in the United States,…
In the late 60s, the duffle coats and scarves of yesteryear were replaced by kaftans, beads, bells, velvet loon pants, afro hairstyles, bright military uniforms…
Most of those responsible for the European development of the Quadraphonic stereo system would probably rather forget that they were involved. To say that it…
Cold War America was a hotbed of fear and suspicion of possible Communist infiltrators and spies – known as ‘the enemy within’ – and the…
For any kid attending a British comprehensive school between 1971 and 1977, Richard Allen’s Skinhead books were required reading. ‘Richard Allen’ was actually a pseudonym used by…
Roller Derby was born in Chicago during the Depression but didn’t achieve national prominence until the advent of television in the late 1940s. In 1949,…
Roller skates are an ultimate icon of the 1970s – but the first demonstration of roller skates in Britain actually took place 200 years earlier.…
The brainchild of a young Berkeley dropout named Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine was founded in 1967 with a mere $7,500 and a few volunteers…
Ronco is still going today, but its heyday was unquestionably the 1970s, when it churned out a seemingly never-ending range of unnecessary and frankly pointless…
Just three months after the September 1976 punk festival, the Roxy opened in a former gay club at 41-43 Neal Street in the West End…
Professor Erno Rubik was once an Architecture Professor at the Budapest School of Commercial Art in Hungary. Now, however, he is far better known as…
Less well-known on American shores than he is at home in England, this hairy denizen of Nutwood Forest has been delighting children since 1920 when…
There have been plenty of toys that allowed children to put their natural creative energies to work. Lego, Erector sets, and countless other similar items let kids…
