Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a vehicle in old photographs of American main streets that everybody looks past: a flat wooden platform on four wheels, no sides, no seat to speak…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Rural schools had a shelf or a row of hooks inside the door, and on it sat a line of containers - tin pails with wire handles, small…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Barbed wire looks like the least interesting thing on a farm, and it reorganised the use of an entire continent.
The problem it solved was weight. Across the…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
To make a telephone call, you lifted the receiver and a person answered - and then physically built your call by plugging a cord into a hole.
The…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
America had an electric railway network between its towns, and almost nobody now knows it existed.
Interurban cars ran on their own tracks between communities, frequently alongside the…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The window box faced outward, which tells you exactly who it was for.
Nobody inside the house can see one properly. It was a statement to the street…