70s Thermostat

My Mom's house is kinda like a time machine. She's been living there for some forty-some-odd years now, and things tend to accumulate. Many years ago my friend David Winstead commented on a room in her house the she never used as being a "60s museum" because she never replaced the original furniture.

So I found this little brochure for a timer thermostat from Sears. In the years before the microprocessor and the digitization of everyday life, this was cutting edge technology. The future in the 70s (just like the present in the 70s) was going to be analog. The ideas are the same now as they were then -- thermostats on a timer, playing your music for a long time automatically (cf. lp record stacks). But the implementations were going to be bulky and a bit of a kludge.

For this thermostat, you had another device (the timer) that you had to plug into an outlet and also wire back into the thermostat. Today it's all in one and run with batteries and you can adjust the time almost as much as you'd like.

There's still no flying cars (much to my personal disappointment), but overall the future has turned out to be much more spiffy than the 70s led me to believe. Devices are smaller and less wired than anyone imagined. My house now is cooler than that Monsanto House of the Future that I saw in 1975 an Disneyworld's Tomorrowland. And with far fewer mannequins. Couple of more brochure pics after the jump.