Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.
Too bad I don’t live in the 1920s or I’d purchase one of these Boggin’s Window Cribs, a 2′ x 2′ x 3′ metal box that you could store your baby in at night (kind of like an air conditioner, but for babies). According to The Health-Care of the Baby by Louis Fisher (1920), window cribs were “admirably adapted for city apartments.”
Twenty-plus years later, B.F. Skinner made a more sophisticated version, with temperature and humidity controls, clean modernist lines, and no danger of falling several stories down to the sidewalk. (Photo here.)
