If your vision of the Big Apple somehow includes bright yellow taxi cabs, flashing lights, and a phone booth on every corner, then it might be time to recalibrate. The city simply moved its last freestanding payphone from the street to the closest museum.
It’s yet another precious reminder that nowadays the newest, fastest, and best technology could soon look like a relic. With every new update, release, product, and revision, the last version instantly feels more primitive. Some products last only a couple of days; others endure for centuries. One thing is for sure: obsolescence is more often than not, inevitable.
Film
Back in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre surprised the entire world by freezing a glimpse of time in the world’s first photograph. From that point forward, film photography would dominate for over 150 years. Even if the first digital camera was made in 1975, the 1999 Kodak DC210 really pinpointed the beginning of the digital camera revolution, as well as the beginning of the end for film. In May 2018, Canon announced it had ultimately sold its last film camera, eight years after it stopped making them. It took quite a long time to deplete the unsold inventory.
Highway maps
The first road maps came around at the very dawn of the automotive era. They were meant to help drivers of “horseless carriages” navigate the few horrendous roads that existed up until that point. Around a century later, GPS was available to the masses, which ultimately led to the decision to reduce print runs or stop printing the traditional American highway map altogether.
Phone booths
Before phones were pocket-sized supercomputers, people were forced to stop if they wished to make calls on the go.
The places they decided to make such calls were phone booths. Once a familiar sight, phone booths, such as the landlines and phone books within, were dealt quite a mortal blow by the arrival of cell phones. Even New York City, once filled with phone booths and freestanding pay phones, decided to ditch them for the street payphone.
Typewriters
In 2011, the world’s last manual typewriter manufacturer closed its business in Mumbai, India. It was actually the demise of an office and a literary icon. Nevertheless, typewriters came to an end, replaced by the arrival of word processors, and then by personal computers.
Alarm clocks
Before the year 725, no one was ever on time for anything. Well, there wasn’t even such a thing as being on time, I suppose. However, that year, someone in China had enough of it. That’s when Yi Xing invented the very first alarm clock.
Then and there, it was the start of something that would later turn into the clock radio, spelling the beginning of the end for the standalone alarm clock. Now, we have cell phones to do that, rendering the single-function timed noisemaker no less than a relic of the days of yore.
Bench seats in cars
Chevrolet introduced the bench seat, which was far cheaper and allowed for more room than individual seats. But by the mid-1980s, cupholders and center consoles came around, which signaled the downfall of the old bench seat.
Landlines
Alexander Graham Bell efficiently revolutionized human communication when he decided to make the first phone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson. At the time, the landline was invented, and it dominated the market for over a century.
The mobile era signaled the end of the old-fashioned landline. In 2017, lawmakers in Illinois decided to vote for the demise of the state’s 1.2 million remaining landline customers.
Answering machines
Back in 1971, the world met the telephone answering machine quite nicely, with the debut of the PhoneMate Model 400. Since then, you weren’t obliged anymore to be home and know who called and what they wanted; the device efficiently changed telephone communication forever.
Then, it came to the voicemail, which instantly made countertop machines with little tapes inside feel rather primitive. Then came the cell phones. Then the smartphones, and the rest is history, as you well know.
Vinyl albums
Even if vinyl records would still play for a few more years, whether in jukeboxes or DJ turntables, the vinyl album was all but extinct back in 1993, because of the skyrocketing popularity of the compact disc.
Many music lovers kept on clinking to the easily scratchable black disks, and vinyl loyalists helped drive quite a recent resurgence in both production and sales. The rise of CD signaled the end for the record, which was first introduced in 1948 by Columbia Records.
Encyclopedia
Back in 2010, the Encyclopedia Britannica decided to publish its final print edition. It was quite a massive, 32-edition collection that closely followed the footsteps of the seven million similar sets bought by academics, students, as well as hobbyists throughout the company’s 244-year history. The encyclopedia met its demise in the form of the internet, which offered plenty of knowledge at the click of only one button.
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