Archive Gallery: PopSci's Very First Laser, and Other Groundbreaking Moments

The First Cassette Tapes Popular Science, June 1968

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In PopSci's 138 years of publishing, we've seen some things. For instance, we were around in 1877, when Professor Alexander Graham Bell successfully used his telephone on wires between Boston and Salem. We were there when movies first started to talk. We've been here throughout the audio evolution, from LPs to cassettes to CDs to MP3s. We witnessed the birth of the Internet. We've seen a lot.

For this gallery, we've hit the archive and assembled a few of our often-breathless first looks at these now-ubiquitous, then-revolutionary technologies that went on to reshape our modern lives.

Some inventions, such as the fax machine, excited us, and others we approached with surprising caution. MP3 players didn't appear on the cover until 2001, three years after we first covered them.

The unveiling of the telephone received only a simple news brief (in a section called "Popular Miscellany").

Sometimes we were right and sometimes we were wrong, but regardless of the thinking of the time, we've got it all documented for your browsing pleasure. Click through our gallery to see PopSci's first stories on everything from the introduction of talking motion pictures to the unveiling of the first MP3 player.