夏季旅游季节到了. Nowadays, travelers look for amenities such as free WiFi. Not long ago, other comforts lured visitors off the road. Motels and stores no longer advertise these “modern” conveniences. Either they have become so common that now they are taken for granted or they have been replaced by newer innovations. Remnants of our roadside past, however, survive at 霓虹博物馆. The signs continue to charm visitors with old fashioned advertisements for refrigeration, 蒸热, 彩色电视和电影.
空调
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What would Las Vegas be without air conditioning? Before the arrival of this cool convenience, 拉斯维加斯人依赖冰, evaporative cooling and stubborn persistence to get through the summer. 威利斯·开利(1876-1950), 谁的公司还以他的名字命名, designed the first modern air conditioning system in 1902. In its infancy, air conditioning was sometimes referred to as “manufactured weather.” The first air-conditioned building in Las Vegas was the El Portal Theater, opened in 1928. 这张照片摄于1934年左右, 传送门剧院的广告, “Manufactured Weather by Carrier Refrigeration System.”
拉斯维加斯很快采用了新系统. By 1945, while many areas of the country sweltered during the summer months, most homes and public accommodations in Las Vegas had some form of cooling. 20世纪50年代, motels such as the Nevada Motel and the Mid-Towner used another term for air conditioning, promising guests rooms cooled by “refrigeration.”
蒸热
广告“蒸热”,” the Chief Hotel Court (sign circa 1940) promised winter visitors to Las Vegas a warm welcome on chilly desert nights.
Steam or 蒸热 was a product of the Industrial Revolution in 18th century England. Inventor James Watt was one of the first to install a residential system. The innovation came to the United States in the 19th century, its popularity propelled by the development of the radiator. Grand hotels touted 蒸热 on a par with other luxuries such as gas lighting and elevators. 到20世纪40年代, roadside motels were offering travelers 蒸热 and other cozy comforts such as hot water and carpeting.
彩色电视
Motel entertainment was a gray affair before RCA invented the world’s first electronic color television around the late 1940s. A rival system developed by CBS began broadcasting in 1951 but soon failed. RCA started selling color television sets to the public in 1954, the same year NBC debuted the first coast-to-coast color program, 玫瑰大赛游行.
The first RCA television set delivered a small, fifteen-inch picture for the handsome price of about $1,000英镑(价值约9美元),500 in 2019). The expense was due in part to RCA’s compatibility with existing black-and-white sets, which was achieved by packing two sets of circuits into one set. For a while, a color television was out of the price range of many American households. No wonder motels beckoned travelers with signs that advertised, “Color Television by RCA.” Consumer taste began to change in 1961 with the premiere of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. 仍然, it would take years of price drops and technical improvements to bring color television into the average home. By the 1980s, color television had almost completely replaced black-and-white.
照片拍摄
If vacationers dreaded going away and running out of film, a mini-mart on the 拉斯维加斯大道 soothed their fears, offering film to visitors coming into town and “免费的阿斯匹林和温柔的同情” to those leaving.
Our addiction to film photography dates to 1889, 当乔治·伊士曼, 伊士曼柯达公司的创始人, 发明了一种可弯曲的薄膜, 坚固的，能滚动的. Photographic film allowed cameras to be mass-produced, making photography available to everyone. The most popular film format, 35mm, was introduced by Kodak in 1913. Color film first appeared in the 1940s, but it was not stable and deteriorated quickly. Kodachrome was the first long-lasting color film. Edwin Herbert Land’s Polaroid Corporation introduced instant photography film in 1948. The beginning of the end for film photography came in 1969 when Bell Labs created a device which converted light to an electronic signal. Six years later, Kodak produced the first digital image to be taken by a camera. 数码相机出现在美国.S. 1990年的市场. Sales of digital cameras outpaced film models by 2004 and today many travelers are equipped with smartphone cameras.
