Today in TIME Tech History: Warm-Blooded Robot (1945), $500 Cloud Computer (1996), Apple’s PowerBook G4 (2001) and More

Let’s hop in the TIME Wayback Machine to see which notable tech-related stories were published on January 22 between 1923 and today.

If you’re a TIME subscriber, you can click each headline to read the entire story.

Science: Warm-Blooded Robot (Jan. 22, 1945)

To find out how long a flying suit will keep an aviator from freezing, human models often have to sit hour after hour in a cold chamber at 60° below zero. Candidates for this sort of work are naturally somewhat hard to find. And, because human models vary in resistance to cold, they are not very satisfactory anyway.

Last week, at a Manhattan show, General Electric showed how to supply the demand: a ”Copper Man” so cunningly contrived that it gets hot & cold just like a human being.

Science: Snowflakes Electrified? (Jan. 22, 1945)

It was snowing—a dry, cold, tiny-flaked snow. In his country house near Greenwich, Conn., which is cluttered with a variety of electronic gadgets, Dr. Orestes H. Caldwell, editor of Electronic Industries, was fiddling with his short-wave radio. It seemed to be afflicted with a peculiar kind of staccato static. He turned on his television set, found it similarly affected, the interference appearing as a series of rapid black & white flashes on the screen.

Dr. Caldwell went out into the snowstorm, began to tinker with the television antenna. He made a discovery which so electrified him that last week he announced it in a press release: ELECTRIFIED SNOW FALLS IN CONNECTICUT.

Nuclear Energy: Destruction on Jackass Flats (Jan. 22, 1965)

One continuing nightmare of the atomic age is the possibility that somewhere, some time, a nuclear reactor may go out of control and blow itself to bits like an overheated steam-age boiler with its safety valve tied down. Builders and promoters of reactors insist that this is highly improbable, but the Atomic Energy Commission wants more facts — just in case. So last week it loosed the controls of a reactor and let her blow.

Zoology: Nature’s Counter-Sonar (Jan. 22, 1965)

Modern bomber-plane crews know just what to do when their receivers pick up the pings of an enemy radar. They transmit pings of their own designed to confuse an oncoming fighter or trick an attacking missile into veering toward empty air. Such sophisticated electronic countermeasures may be the latest thing in aerial warfare, say Entomologists Dorothy C. Dunning and Kenneth D. Roeder of Tufts University, but the idea is not at all new to non-human flyers. For millions of years, shifty moths have been using similar sound-pulsing stunts to protect them selves from marauding bats.

Why Sun’s Java Is Hot (Jan. 22, 1996)

Java is the hottest thing in cyberspace. More than 100,000 copies have been downloaded by software developers eager to try out the new language, which promises to make sending programs across a computer network as easy as sending E-mail or pictures. Hundreds of little Java applications (dubbed “applets”) have started to pop up on the World Wide Web, the multimedia portion of the Internet. One site lists more than 700 working Java applets–each only a mouse click away–that generate everything from small dancing cartoon figures and steaming cups of coffee to knock-offs of such games as Pac-Man and Missile Command. Several leading venues on the Internet, including c|net and Time Warner’s Pathfinder, now use Java applets with links to the wire services to display live news tickers running across the screen.

How Cheap Can Computers Get? (Jan. 22, 1996)

The idea is straightforward. Instead of buying bigger and bigger hard drives to store programs that seem to grow more monstrous with every upgrade, why not let the Internet be your hard drive? The World Wide Web contains more data than you’ll ever use. Java, in theory, can retrieve all the software you need when you need it. All your computer really has to have is a fast processor, a good Internet connection and a few built-in programs to handle E-mail and word processing. If the price is right, predicts Larry Ellison, chairman of software giant Oracle and one of the idea’s chief promoters, “everyone will have one of these things.”

To test his theory, Ellison has commissioned Acorn, a British computer maker, to help design a “networked computer” to his specifications, with a keyboard, a processor, some random-access memory, a communications link and not much else. Meanwhile, nearly every other major computer maker, from Apple to IBM, claims to have something similar in the works. Sun has teamed up with Japan’s Fujitsu on a machine they are calling (not surprisingly) the “Java terminal.”

How much would one of these babies cost? That depends on whom you ask. The price heard most often, from Ellison and others, is $500. Sun is less optimistic; company officials imagine their hot little Java boxes selling for somewhere between $500 and $1,000.

Books: Why Microsoft Crashed (Jan. 22, 2001)

When I was covering the Microsoft antitrust trial, the company invited me to have breakfast with its legal team. We covered all the basics: whether Microsoft was a monopoly, whether its actions had caused “consumer harm.” But what stuck with me was a remark by a high-level Microsoft executive. He had heard I once worked for a federal judge he knew. The more I tried to focus on the antitrust issues, the more I kept wondering how this man I’d never met summoned up this nugget from my past.

That little mystery is solved in Ken Auletta’s absorbing new book, World War 3.0: Microsoft and its Enemies (Random House; 436 pages; $27.95). Microsoft kept dossiers on reporters who covered the trial, including former jobs, friends and perceived biases. All things considered, it probably wasn’t a great idea. In the middle of a lawsuit accusing Microsoft of being controlling and intimidating, it just made the company look, well, controlling and intimidating.

The Waiting Game (Jan. 22, 2001)

You’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs. Age has not withered the Apple CEO’s famous flash and showmanship. P.T. Barnum himself could not have done a better job at the Macworld convention in San Francisco last week. Barnum, of course, could only offer dancing elephants; Jobs has some of the most sublimely sexy high-tech products of our age. And he was able to pull these latest tricks out of his hat at a time when Apple’s profits are turning to deficits and Macs are selling at fire-sale prices. Whatever his flaws, the man knows a thing or two about timing.

Take the showstopping titanium-covered G4 PowerBook, which Jobs left for his now traditional “one more thing” finale. This is pretty much what Mac lovers like myself have been fantasizing about for a long time: it’s 1 in. thick and weighs less than 5 lbs., with a gorgeous 15-in. screen and slot-loading DVD drive. No Windows laptop offers all those features combined…

Although the G4 laptop ($2,599 to $3,997, comparable to Vaio prices) will be officially released at the end of this month, there will probably be quite a bit of pent-up demand, and Apple has a long history of not delivering enough product on time. “We’ll be making them just as fast as we can,” Jobs told me. But when I asked if there would be a shortage, he smiled and said, “I hope so.” Lines of would-be buyers clamoring for his products would, after all, make for an irresistible spectacle. Memo to Mac loyalists: time to test your patience again.

More tech history here…

Aamoth handles news, reviews, how-to's and videos as TIME's technology editor. He lives in Boston and has spent more than 15 years in the tech industry.

Today in TIME Tech History: The Television Apparatus (1928), the U.S. Technocratic Party (1933), the Thinking Machine (1950) and More

Let’s hop in the TIME Wayback Machine to see which notable tech-related stories were published on January 23 between 1923 and today.

If you’re a TIME subscriber, you can click each headline to read the entire story.

Practical Television (1928)

Said Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the three-element vacuum tube: “I do not think that any marked advance has been made in the Alexanderson television apparatus, except in the synchronization system. I think that television will never be practical in the home, due to the fact that the present methods require large rotating parts operated by a motor. The difficulty is that the operator at the receiving end must constantly regulate a little knob or dial, to prevent the picture from becoming distorted. We are still a million miles away from the application of television on a large theatre screen, because eighteen inches today constitutes approximately the largest television screen in use. A new system must be developed, based on another branch of physics, which will get away from heavy and rotating parts before seeing by radio can be made practical for private use.”

Technocracy’s Week (1933)

It still rode bulbously about the land last week. It created hundreds of miscellaneous news items. In Chicago Patrolman John Shannon arrested two men as “Reds” when he heard them argue about it. In Roseland, Manhattan dance hall, a new dance was named after it. In Chicago was formed the Technocratic Party of the U. S., sponsored by the sponsors of the Anti-Rodeo League and the Mental Patients Defenders’ Association.

Quick as a Flash (1939)

In Chicago last week Drs. Francis Wood Godwin and Alfred Orpheus Walker showed pictures of a .22 calibre bullet in flight taken at speeds of about one-millionth of a second, fastest exposure ever accomplished. These photographs revealed the bullet “stopped” in its course, a clear-cut image with highlights gleaming on its surface; stopped again so close to a pane that its reflection could be dimly seen in the glass; passing through and emerging in a cloud of glass dust.

The Thinking Machine (1950)

On Oxford Street in Cambridge, Mass. lives a sibyl, a priestess of science. Her devotees take their problems to her as devout ancient Greeks took their insolubles to Delphi. She is no mumbling, anonymous priestess, frothing her mouth with riddles. Her name is Bessie; she is a long, slim, glass-sided machine with 760,000 parts, and the riddles that are put to her and that she unfailingly answers concern such matters as rocket motors, nuclear physics and trigonometric functions.

For a computing machine, Bessie is old: she has been steadily at work since 1944. And she is not the brightest of her breed. Compared to her children and grandchildren (one of whom, Harvard’s Mark III lives on the floor below in Harvard’s Computation Laboratory), she is dim-witted and slow. But Bessie is a progenetrix, a sort of mechanical Eve. By proving what computing machines could do, she started one of the liveliest developments in modern science.

Master Clock (1956)

The Copenhagen clock is the product of some 40 years’ planning by onetime Locksmith Jens Olsen, who died in 1945. A self-taught astronomer, physicist and engineer, Olsen conceived the idea of his clock after seeing the famed astronomical clock in Strasbourg. He devoted all of his spare time to planning it and calculating its complex mathematical functions. With funds raised by clockmakers’ societies, he completed the plans in 1944, lived just long enough to supervise the first months of production of the clock’s 15,000 different parts. Since then, a million dollars has gone into the clock. It is housed in an airtight, humidity-and-temperature-controlled glass case.

Cars, Computers and Coptermania (1984)

They never complain. They never forget their lines. They have no agents or egos. They are composed of moving parts, but their parts are rarely moving. They are sex objects who do not object to being handled, symbols of power whose judgments go unquestioned, the most impersonal of actors in the most personal of media. They are the new stars of prime-time network television: machines.

Helicopters, cars and computers dominate such action-adventure shows, as Magnum, P.I., Matt Houston, Trauma Center, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Cutter to Houston and The Fall Guy.

Boosting Your Home’s IQ (1989)

Home automation took a major step forward last week, when the Electronic Industries Association/Consumer Electronics Group — a trade organization that includes such giants as Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Tandy, Mitsubishi and RCA — unveiled a new wiring standard called the Consumer Electronics Bus, or CEBus. CEBus will enable microprocessor-equipped appliances built by one company to communicate with those built by any other. In the first public demonstration, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, enthusiastic manufacturers showed off a prototype CEBus-controlled home of the future packed with high-tech features. When a telephone rings in a CEBus home, the stereo automatically lowers its volume. As someone walks into a room, the lights go on. If a visitor pushes the doorbell, his or her face is displayed on a TV in the living room. Commuters unable to reach home in time to cook dinner can set the oven timer by calling home and pushing buttons on the telephone.

Hacker Homecoming (1995)

THE NIGHTCLUB IN DOWNTOWN Manhattan is swarming with reporters, cameramen, Internet bohemians and online celebrities, people with handles like “Mnemonic,” “Razor” and “Garbled Uplink.” The center of attention — a fashionably wan, cigarette-smoking ex-con known as Phiber Optik — shows up an hour late, even though the party is in his honor…

Phiber Optik, 23, is decidedly not a soft drink — and probably not a sex aid. According to his supporters, who gathered last week to celebrate his release from prison, he’s the first underground hero of the Information Age, the Robin Hood of cyberspace. Arrested two years ago in a federal crackdown on computer break-ins, he became a cause celebre among the Net intelligentsia: a master hacker jailed not only for what he did but also for what he knew how to do.

More tech history here…

Aamoth handles news, reviews, how-to's and videos as TIME's technology editor. He lives in Boston and has spent more than 15 years in the tech industry.

Today in TIME Tech History: Revolving Doormat (1935), Stratospheric Balloon Ride (1946), ‘Videodisc’ Players (1980) and More

Let’s hop in the TIME Wayback Machine to see which notable tech-related stories were published on January 21 between 1923 and today.

If you’re a TIME subscriber, you can click each headline to read the entire story.

Science: Einheitlichen Feldtheorie (Jan. 21, 1929)

It means “A Coherent Theory of the Electro-Magnetic Field” and is the title of a five-page paper of highest mathematical formulae which Relativist Albert Einstein worked on for ten years and last week handed to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin for criticism. Soon it will be published.

Science: Gadgeteers Gather (Jan. 21, 1935)

They were the humble rank & file of U. S. idea men, indefatigable purveyors of small ingenuities, perpetual optimists who swell the total of U. S. patents to some 50,000 a year. For example, Albert Giese of Benton Harbor, Mich., had heard a shocking story that 15,000 to 20,000 milkers are blinded every year by the restless tails of cows. His patented cow-tail restrainer was on display last week among 484 other inventions.

Having pondered the fact that many a criminal knows how to slip out of handcuffs, A. C. Elliott of Denver, onetime Royal Mounted policeman, invented a pair of escape-proof steel mittens. Miss Iris Adrian was happy to demonstrate.

Another inventor observed that people wiping their feet on doormats all wipe with a rearward motion, which gradually flattens the bristles and decreases the efficacy of the mat. Some callers are too lazy to wipe their feet at all. Both problems are taken care of by his revolving doormat which gives the feet a circular scouring while the visitor stands still.

E. Carlstrom of Chicago contributed a tear-gas gun which a woman may conceal beneath her skirt, ready for use at the approach of a molester. Miss Catherine A. Moran pulled up her dress to show how it was used.

Science: Tugging at the Ropes (Jan. 21, 1946)

In the atomic age, 61 -year-old Dr. Jean Piccard, talking about his stratosphere gondola, sounds a little like a kind-faced granddaddy reminiscing about the fringe-topped surrey. Yet the Piccard plan for another balloon trip to the stratosphere—his first since 1934—interested scientists last week…

Now professor of aeronautics at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Piccard wants a gondola hoisted by 100 balloons arranged in a cluster. Each will be made of thin plastic material capable of swelling to 100,000-cubic-ft. capacity in the stratosphere.

Business: Disc Wars (Jan. 21, 1980)

The consumer electronics business has produced some fierce marketing wars, but none is likely to be quite so cutthroat as the struggle that is starting for control of the videodisc industry. Videodisc players look much like any stereo deck, but, plugged into a TV, they play prerecorded movies, sports events, opera, sitcoms and documentaries. They promise to advance significantly the cause of viewers’ lib, giving TV addicts freedom to watch what they want when they want to watch it.

Science: Better Spyglass on the Stars (Jan. 21, 1985)

Because the exceptionally dry and stable atmosphere over Mauna Kea makes the site among the world’s best spots for star gazing, six telescopes have been built on the volcano’s crest, and two more are under construction.

Now an extraordinary newcomer will join that celestial company. The California Institute of Technology, working with the University of California, will build the world’s biggest optical telescope on the volcano’s crest; construction could begin as early as 1986. The mammoth instrument, made possible by a $70 million grant to Caltech by the W.M. Keck Foundation, will have an innovative mirror system nearly 400 in. in diameter, which is twice the width and has four times the light-gathering capacity of today’s reigning optical telescope, the 200-in. Hale device at Mount Palomar, Calif.

VIDEO GAMES: Super Mario Takes a Dive (Jan. 21, 1991)

The ascension of Nintendo was one of the great triumphs of entertainment marketing. In just five years the Japanese company transformed a moribund U.S. video-game market into a $4 billion industry and created a video character, Mario, whose popularity rivals that of Mickey Mouse. But fads are subject to the law of gravity. Even as it was announcing record earnings for 1990, the world’s largest computer-game maker confirmed last week what retailers have been saying for months: the Nintendo market has gone into a spin.

A LOT OF MOXI (Jan. 21, 2002)

Probably the loudest buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week surrounded the new venture from WebTV founder Steve Perlman. Moxi is a set-top box that’s got it all: digital video recording (like TiVo, but even easier), a DVD player, 80 GB worth of storage for your music CDs, Internet access and, most important, wireless home networking (so you can access its features from any TV or PC in the home). Moxi will launch at the end of 2002 as part of the Echostar satellite system, which is itself likely to merge with DirecTV. Can world domination be far behind?

Reinventing The Radio (Jan. 21, 2002)

Two months after its national debut, XM Satellite Radio looks as though it may take off. The service has already signed up 30,000 subscribers. General Motors has invested $120 million and will offer XM as an option in 20 different models, starting with the Cadillac I took for a spin. Sony and others are selling after-market receivers for $300 and up that work in any car. And the subscription price of $10 a month seems pretty affordable.

More tech history here…

Aamoth handles news, reviews, how-to's and videos as TIME's technology editor. He lives in Boston and has spent more than 15 years in the tech industry.

Today in TIME Tech History: Thinking Machine (1949), Flight Simulator (1955), the Super BlackBerry eLink (2000) and More

Let’s hop in the TIME Wayback Machine to see which notable tech-related stories were published on January 24 between 1923 and today.

If you’re a TIME subscriber, you can click each headline to read the entire story.

Manual Voice (1938)

Oh, Lila, I love you.

Hello, London, are you there?

Minnie . . . father . . . upper . . . rather. . . tata!

Radio listeners in the U. S. heard gibberish of this sort one day last week, pronounced in a queer, blurred, atonal voice like that of a person who has been stone deaf since birth. As a matter of fact the words, which came from London, were not spoken by a human being at all but were uttered by an apparatus in the hands of Sir Richard Paget, 69-year-old barrister, linguist, musician, acoustician, who clings to the old British tradition that well-disposed people of the aristocracy should take an interest in the arts and sciences.

Sir Richard believes that human speech is primitive, that gestures could be much more expressive. His voice apparatus is largely a metal and fabric tube which has parts corresponding to the larynx, tongue, and palate.

Magnetism in Harness? (1944)

For about 700 years, magnetism has been known as the force that stands still. Last week a physicist claimed to have proved that magnetism moves. Professor Felix Ehrenhaft, formerly of Vienna, told the American Physical Society meeting in Manhattan that magnetism flows as electricity flows. If he is right, his discovery is at least as revealing as Benjamin Franklin’s kite, and technology has a new horse to harness.

The Thinking Machine (1949)

In the laboratory of Barnwood House Mental Hospital, on the outskirts of Gloucester, England, is a modest black contraption that looks like four storage batteries set in a square. Its only visible moving parts are four small magnets, one swinging like a compass needle over each box. Psychiatrist William Ross Ashby, who built the machine, thinks that it is the closest thing to a synthetic human brain so far designed by man.

Practical calculating machines, explains Dr. Ashby, merely take orders and act upon them, in complicated but predetermined ways. His machine, which he calls a “homeostat,” is different.

The Guiding Stars (1955)

The new D-2 High-Speed High-Latitude Celestial-Navigation Trainer was specially designed by Link Aviation Inc. to simulate the flights of jet bombers over the arctic, where the magnetic compass is practically useless and the sun often out of sight.

Inside the building, which is roughly cubical and 61 ft. long, is a three-quarter sphere made of a spidery crisscross of thin-walled steel lined with wire mesh. The whole thing, 30 ft. in diameter, is mounted so that it can be tilted 65° in any direction. It can also revolve, and a platform poking up to its center can revolve independently.

Washington’s Challenge to IBM (1969)

IBM’s future has been based on its computers and its competitive prowess. Now the future may depend on the courts. Last month the company was charged with monopolistic practices in a civil antitrust suit brought by a competitor, Control Data Corp. Two weeks ago IBM was the target of another suit, brought by a customer, Data Processing Financial & General Corp. And last week IBM was hit by the most important suit of all. The Justice Department climaxed a long investigation by bringing its own antitrust action—the biggest of the Johnson era—against the company.

Toward Better Quakecasting (1969)

Although scientists are powerless to prevent earthquakes, they have high hopes that they can some day forecast them with reasonable accuracy. That day may not be far off. By carefully measuring movements along the San Andreas and nearby smaller faults, Seismologist Renner Hofmann says, he has successfully predicted recent California earthquakes. To prove that he is not merely displaying scientific hindsight, Hofmann has issued a new U.S. quake-cast. Within the next 18 months, he predicts, earthquakes of at least moderate intensity will rock areas near Santa Cruz and south of Bakersfield.

Blackberry Jam (2000)

The new, new thing looks just like the old Blackberry but has some notable, hidden differences. Instead of relying on BellSouth, eLink sends its digital packets over the ARDIS network, which covers more territory–220 million people in the U.S., vs. BellSouth’s 175 million. ARDIS can also handle faster speeds–up to 19.2 kilobits per sec., according to the eLink folks, twice as fast as their competitor. Finally, the ARDIS network is renowned for its “in-building” penetration, which means that I can travel up, down and around the august Time & Life Building and never miss a bit…

I’ve been play-testing my eLink for three weeks now, and it’s been just super. E-mail keeps track with me even when I’m moving faster than a Long Island Rail Road locomotive. It leaps the tall buildings in a single bound. I’m told that the network is so strong you could send and receive e-mail while flying over big cities, though the FAA frowns on that kind of thing. One AA battery lasted two weeks, the little eight-line screen was surprisingly readable, and the “trackwheel” turned out to be an excellent way to navigate through menus.

More tech history here…

Aamoth handles news, reviews, how-to's and videos as TIME's technology editor. He lives in Boston and has spent more than 15 years in the tech industry.

My Kennedy Polaroids: Instant History

In 2013, there’s so much instant photography all around us that nobody bothers to call it “instant photography.” And it’s not just the photography that’s instant: At every public event of note, the audience includes people with smartphones who snap pictures and share them with the world, no wait required. It’s increasingly easy to forget that life was ever any different.

Back in 1960, though, instant photography was still remarkable, and still synonymous with Edwin Land‘s twelve-year-old invention, the Polaroid Land Camera. It was a pricey hobby — even the cheapest Polaroid cameras cost around $70, or more than $500 in current dollars — and considerably more cumbersome, complicated and glitch-prone than it would become in the 1970s, when Polaroid’s even more remarkable SX-70 camera came along. Instant-photography enthusiasts were far outnumbered by ordinary folk who used conventional film and couldn’t see what their snapshots looked like until they came back from the photofinisher days or weeks later.

On April 23, 1960, a Land Camera owner attended the 1960 Pear Blossom Festival parade in Medford, Oregon. The Grand Marshal that year was Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination; our Polaroid photographer captured the senator’s visit in at least two instant pictures.

Five decades later, those two photos wound up in a case at an antique mall in Portland, on the other side of the state. In late December, as I antiqued during my holiday break, they caught my eye — and when I flipped them over and saw POLAROID stamped on their backsides, I had to have them. There they are at the top of this post.

The John F. Kennedy in these instant snapshots is the same confident, smiling, well-coiffed figure familiar from a thousand other pictures I’ve seen. (All in a historical context — I was born slightly over four months after his death.) But these aren’t prints or scans or reproductions of any sort. The photos themselves emerged from a camera which had been held a few feet from their subject, looking almost exactly as they do today; they document Kennedy’s visit to Medford, but they were also part of it.

Here’s a better look at one of the pictures, in which the senator is apparently posing for our anonymous photographer. I don’t know for sure where it was taken, but the most logical guess is that it’s the lobby of the Medford Hotel, which was the location of a post-parade luncheon. The pictures were taken with Polaroid’s amazingly speedy Type 47 film, introduced in 1959 and rated at 3000 ASA, which would have let our shutterbug take this interior shot without the use of a flash.

Pierre Salinger on the cover of TIME’s October 16, 1964 issue.

The partially-visible man at the far left, in necktie and belted trenchcoat, seems to be Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary during both the 1960 campaign and his presidency, and later a European correspondent for ABC News. (I should have been able to figure that out on my own, but presidential historian David Pietrusza, author of 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon, identified him for me.) I’m not sure who the lady standing to Senator Kennedy’s left is.

And the bowtied gent in between Salinger and the lady  –  why, that’s Wally Watkins, the man who drove Kennedy in the Pear Blossom parade. Born in 1926, Watkins was a local businessman, involved at the time in real estate and timber. Almost fifty-three years later, he’s still a resident of the Medford area today. (Thanks to Paul Fattig of Southern Oregon’s Mail Tribune, who’s profiled Watkins in the past, for putting me in touch with him.)

Here’s Wally Watkins behind the wheel, driving JFK through downtown Medford.

Why did Watkins drive Kennedy’s car? Because it was his car  – Watkins happened to own a beautiful cream-colored 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark III. “I had one of those convertibles where you could fold the top down in back so a guy could sit up on top back there,” he explained to me. A friend of his at the Pear Blossom parade thought it would be the ideal vehicle for the Grand Marshal and asked Watkins to play chauffeur.  ”I said ‘heck, yes, I’m a Democrat anyway,’” Watkins remembers.

Getty Images

A Polaroid 110A Pathfinder camera, manufactured from 1957-1960 and one of the models which may have been used by our Kennedy photographer.

April 23 also happened to be opening day for the fishing season; before the parade opportunity came up, Watkins had been planning to go fishing with his son at Oregon’s Klamath Lake. He admitted as much to JFK, who, he says, told him, “I’ll make it up to you, don’t worry.”

And indeed, Kennedy later sent Watkins a letter inviting him to his inauguration. “But I didn’t go,” Watkins laments. “I figured that he’d be elected twice, and I’d go to the next one.” It was not to be, but Watkins did get to meet Robert F. Kennedy, who campaigned in Medford eight years after his brother had — and only six weeks before his own assassination.

Back on April 23, 1960, Watkins didn’t know that the man in the back of his convertible would become one of the twentieth century’s most iconic figures, but it was still a big deal for a leading presidential candidate to visit Medford, a city with a population of 24,000. JFK made the visit as part of a two-day campaign trip to Oregon, which also included stops in Portland and Eugene at high schools, a Methodist church and a company called Ozark Industries. His itinerary indicates that he arrived in Medford at 9:30 in the morning and was gone by 3:30pm.

I’m glad that our Polaroid photographer recorded part of JFK’s time in Medford, but there are subtle signs that he or she may have been less than an expert Polaroid user. The Land Camera prints of the time were  alarmingly fragile, prone to both damage and fading. The company addressed these basic flaws by bundling each roll of film with a tiny squeegee which the photographer was supposed to use — immediately — to swab down photos with a pungent protective chemical coating.

An excerpt from the manual for Polaroid’s Pathfinder 110A camera, explaining the crucial coating process.

In the case of these Kennedy Polaroids, this coating was done in a haphazard manner. You can see the result on the parade photo: The windshield of Watkins’ car is obscured by a streaky area, where uneven coating permitted the photo to age. Both pictures also have fingerprints along their edges, and the parade photo has an unexposed area along one edge which may stem from clumsy handling during the development process.

The intricacy of the Polaroid process may help explain why the bundle I bought at the Portland antique store contained only two snapshots. You couldn’t fire off a bunch of Polaroids in quick sequence, so it’s entirely possible that these two are the only ones our photographer got.

He or she (or someone else who came into possession of the snapshots) also chopped one border apiece off the pictures  – an act which, as Christopher Bonanos, author of the excellent book Instant: The Story of Polaroid, pointed out to me, was probably done to squeeze them into a standard-sized frame or album.

But you know what? The fact that the photos are imperfect makes them more interesting. They’re one-of-a-kind defects — birthmarks which the pictures have carried for more than half a century.

As you’d expect, Watkins and Kennedy’s procession through Medford was captured in other photos. (Non-Polaroid ones, at least in the instances I tracked down.) Here’s a wonderfully evocative one by banker and photography enthusiast Shirrel Doty. I found it at the site of his son, storyteller Thomas Doty, and it was the first evidence I had that my Polaroids were taken during the 1960 Pear Blossom Festival. (At first, I thought they dated from a March 1959 Medford visit which Kennedy — not yet a declared candidate for the presidency — made to speak at a Roosevelt Memorial Dinner.)

Doty’s photo is the only one I’ve seen that shows the day’s events in color. Our Polaroid photographer didn’t even have that option: Polaroid didn’t release a color film until 1963.

The collection of the Southern Oregon Historical Society contains another photo.

Southern Oregon Historical Society

Hubbard’s, a venerable Medford hardware store which the parade passed, has yet another picture of the Grand Marshal’s car, taken from the other side of the street, at its website.

In Doty’s photo, you can clearly see that the lady from my interior-shot Polaroid rode in the front passenger seat. Watkins doesn’t recall who she was, but says she was associated with the Democratic Party. Both the Doty and Historical Society photos also show a bespectacled man sitting alongside Kennedy: Watkins says that he was Bob Boyer, a local attorney and player in Democratic politics.

In my photo of the parade, Boyer is absent, and Kennedy is sitting on the back seat rather than perched on the back of the car. These two clues lead me to wonder if the photo was taken either before the parade began or after it ended.

The president-elect appears on TIME’s November 16, 1960 cover.

On May 20, 1960, Oregon held its primaries. John F. Kennedy won the Democratic one with 51 percent of the vote, a result which hadn’t always been a foregone conclusion. (He was running against Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, a favorite-son candidate who dropped out of the race shortly after receiving only 31 percent of the primary vote in his own state.) But when Kennedy won the presidency on November 8, Oregon went for Richard M. Nixon.

And that’s the end of the story — except for a grim postscript.

It’s impossible to look at a photograph of John F. Kennedy riding in an open car without thinking about his Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. When Kennedy rode into Dealey Plaza, he was sitting, once again, in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental convertible. This example was manufactured two model years after Wally Watkins’ Mark III, and had been heavily customized for presidential use.

After the assassination, that particular Lincoln was modified further, returned to service and used by four other presidents until 1977, when it was retired. Today it’s on exhibition at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

(I find the notion that other presidents continued to ride in the car deeply eerie, but maybe that’s just me; I also have trouble dealing with the fact that we still put on events at Ford’s Theatre, sometimes with the current president of the United States in attendance.)

Wikipedia

Mary Moorman’s Polaroid photo of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade, November 22 1963.

As Kennedy’s motorcade cruised through Dealey Plaza, a 31-year-old Dallas resident named Mary Ann Moorman was there with her Polaroid 80A Highlander camera. She’s visible in the Zapruder film, standing along the edge of the grassy knoll with her friend Jean Hill, Highlander in hand.

Moorman snapped a photo approximately one-sixth of a second after a bullet struck the president. You can see Jacqueline Kennedy, in her Chanel suit and pillbox hat, turning towards her husband, who seems to be slumping. Other than that, it’s not clear what’s going on. The general murkiness may help explain why the photo is beloved by conspiracy theorists, some of whom believe that it shows a second gunman who’s been nicknamed “badge man.”

Moorman’s sad little piece of history is the famous JFK Polaroid, the one which I’ve vaguely known about for years. But from now on, when I think of John F. Kennedy and Polaroid, I’ll think first of a 1960 trip to Medford rather than a 1963 one to Dallas — and I won’t feel quite so melancholy.