Mental Floss http://mentalfloss.com/node/20757/atom.xml 2016-07-30T23:00:27+00:00 http://mentalfloss.com/article/20757/twitter-1937 2009-01-30T19:01:00+00:00 2011-06-21T23:53:48+00:00 Twitter from 1937 Chris Higgins

Blogger David Griner recently came across a "line-a-day" diary kept by his great aunt from 1937 through 1941. Griner's great aunt (Genny Spencer) kept the diary during her early teens, while she lived on a farm in rural Illinois. The entries in the diary are all very brief -- one line a day -- which caused Griner's sister to observe, "This is the Twitter of the 1930s." A bit of planning and programming ensued, and now we've got it -- a day-by-day Twitterstream of entries from more than seventy years ago. Here are a few recent posts:

Daddy went to town. Creeks got up. Rained. Fred much better now. Mrs. O'Farrell died.

Had a squabble with the boys over skating. Got Mamma a lot of persimmons.

Stayed home from school because of a bad cold. Kerby went to Johnsons'. Norman shot a rabbit. He is 8 years old. First one.

Got 2 calves from Akins. 3 days old. Mamma and Daddy spent the day with Akins. Peggy Lou, Wallis Warfield are calves' names.

Anyway, it goes on. Some days are more eventful than others, but frankly there seems be a lot of illness and suicide -- at least in the first days of the diary. Follow the diary as it's posted here, or read more about the diary written by David Griner. (Including the interesting information that Genny Spencer is still alive, though suffering from severe dementia.)

If you like this kind of thing, also check out The Orwell Diaries. Apparently there's also a Twitter diary of a 99-year-old from 1974.

(Via Fake Plastic Noodles.)

January 30, 2009 - 9:01am
http://mentalfloss.com/node/20757/atom.xml
mentalfloss.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-30
4429
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6OHOOZKQKGQASRJVE5JTO236NBED3EWV
<urn:uuid:349241dc-f77d-41c9-8eb2-2c993e9c7955>
2016-07-30T23:00:28Z
50.19.117.93
sha1:R24QB77CZSXZNQYLVEHHDWHRPMSYLYSK
<urn:uuid:16e44834-1fcd-4572-ba2c-82159086cbf9>
http://mentalfloss.com/node/20757/atom.xml
response
<urn:uuid:73444c23-23b1-4c6c-a94d-194e9015fbca>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-30
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf