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On the date

Tuesday, May 17, 1921

From the day

Perspective: The Future Historian · Sight

The violet-hued auroras still flicker against the soot-stained sky, a celestial ghost that has frozen our telegram cables and left the city’s sharpest silhouettes whispering of planetary doom. I watch a young woman in a dropped-waist chemise bypass the headlines of solar chaos, her eyes fixed instead on the stiff, striped legs of a Raggedy Andy doll slumped in a department store window. She laughs, a sound as sharp as the illicit giggle water hidden in her clutch, likely oblivious to the fact that these silent magnetic storms are the first tremors of a global connectivity we haven’t yet mastered. The neon signs of Broadway pulse with an unstable, shivering light that maps the future of a world just beginning to understand its own fragility.

Memories from that day

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The Headlines

CABLES DAMAGED BY SUNSPOT AURORA; Ships to Be Sent Out to Mend Lines Put Out of Service by Magnetic Display. ASCRIBE LIGHTS TO JUPITER Dr. Schlesinger of Yale Thinks Planetary Effect on Sun May Have Caused Disturbance.

Read in The New York Times →

Best-selling Sheet Music

The Sheik of Araby

Harry B. Smith & Ted Snyder

The must-have

Raggedy Andy

Slang

Slang of the decade

General

applesaucebaloneycheaterscrush

Flapper

bee's kneescat's pajamasgiggle watershebahotsy-totsy

Gangster

big cheesebump offstool pigeongatfall guy

Catchphrases of 1921

  • Ain't we got fun?

Tech Check

Robots (The Term 'Robot'), Polygraph (Modern) & Insulin (Medical Tech).

Cost of Living (1920)

Loaf of Bread

$0.11

Gallon of Gas

$0.30

Average Home

$6,296

New Car

$575

Meanwhile

  • Post-WWI RecessionSevere deflation and collapse of agricultural prices.

Time Elapsed

38,370 days ago

(105 years, 45 days)