Twenty years before Slaughterhouse-Five, a broke Kurt Vonnegut came up with an idea for an atomic bow-tie. While he became known for his environmentalism later in life, in 1950, Vonnegut—like America at large—seemed ready to cash-in on the atomic.

“By the the mid-twentieth century, Americans had waded through the muck of the Great Depression and then World War II. In the early Fifties, a desire to be done with self-sacrifice and world war released a sense of fantastic acceleration.  The word “super” captured the promise of technology ushering in a better life.”

(Via Maud Newton)