Isamu Noguchi, 1940
Here we can see Japanese-American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi, surveying what would later become part of the Associated Press Building Plaque, an iconic feature installed in the Rockefeller Center and still standing to this day.
At the time, this feature was the largest-ever stainless steel casting—it was carved out in plaster, and then cast in stainless steel.
Isn’t it astonishing! Whereas nowadays we are used to seeing it installed as part of the building, here it is in its earlier form when nothing but a genius idea.
IBM Engineer, 1949
Look at this mess! It looks like this computer is broken or somehow unraveled, with this massive labyrinthine collection of wires and tubes. But believe it or not, this is actually how the first computers actually looked, way back before transistors were introduced in the 1950s.
Here we can see an IBM engineer working on one of the first computers in 1949, working his way through the myriad wires and switches. These computers were so complicated that they needed 50 engineers to work them!