technology

We were talkin gabout a holiday a load of us were going on with our school when one of my friends commented on the fact she was gonna take diposable cameras so hers wouldn't get lost when another girl piped up "i don't see the point of disposable cameras, you spend all that time trying to get the pictures right, then you throw the camera away!' She was 13 at the time...

Sophie

Well when I was little I used to beleive that fax machines rolled the paper into a little roll and then send them through little pipes to the owner. It took me years before I relized that they just scanned them.

Talk about a paper jam!

Anon

I used to believe that if you peeled the white border off of a Polaroid picture, the people inside would come out to visit with you.

Michelle C from Michigan

When I was little I beleived there was a factory in Germany to which you could send money and a blueprint of anything at all, and they would build it for you.

Magnus

I used to think that a "photocopier", was a machine that made duplicates of photographs as good as the originals, glossy paper and all. Ordinary Xerox machines were just plain "copiers".

Anon

When I was about four, a friend and I thought we were quite the scientists. We planned to build space ships to fly into space, and always wanted to build robots. I used to spend all my library time at school reading up on how to build spaceships, and decided that we would have to be able to go faster than the speed of light to get where we wanted to in time.

One day I was visiting my friends house, and we were supposed to be building as robot, but my friend had lost the "chip" before i came over (the "chip" is the part that makes the robot work). I was really upset, until we decided we could just get a new chip from inside a battery. We started attacking a AA battery, but only black goo was coming out (battery acid). I told my friend, and he said, it's ok, the black goo is just in there to protect the "chip". I never found it, but for years I believed all i needed to make a robot work was the illusive "chip".

Geek

I used to believe that contact lenses were made out of fish scales

ddm

My dad had a very strong flashlight and he told me if I switched it on and opened the window when it was dark outside and dark in the room, the neighbors on other streets could see it - which was probably true. However, what I understood from it was that I could see them too. Until I was 9 or so I thought the flashlight was magic and I only didn't see these people on other streets because I wasn't doing it right.

Jo

When I was young I saw my Dad's Popular Science magazines and they would talk about the "Internet Super Highway" that was coming. I thought it sounded way cool. I assumed we'd all be literally surfing on a crazy highway in the sky.

Christy

When I was growing up in the early 80's, I thought that when my parents called the "operator", they were calling this one lady that they knew, and she knew everyone's phone number, her name was "operator"

Anon

I used to believe (because a relative told me) that if you didn't jump off an escalator or moving walkway when you got to the end, you would get sucked underneath and chewed up by the mechanism.

Fi Craig

When I was little I thought the microwave was the Michaelwave because my name is Michael.

Michael

When I was a kid, I asked my dad about the meaning of the AM/FM switch on the radio. He said that if you changed the switch, the radio would turn into a different radio. I had the image of doors folding and unfolding and the radio becoming much bigger -- more like a home stereo (AM -> FM ?). I was very careful *never* to touch that switch, because I didn't want my daddy to lose his portable AM radio.

Greg Conquest

I once told my sister, when she was about 6, that she was being too noisy and I couldn't concentrate on my work. She, really believing she was being helpful, advised me to play a blank tape to myself on a Walkman so that I wouldn't hear her!

Jude

I use to think that I would be able to emit light from a regular piece of paper by coloring it with the three special colors(green, blue, and red)TV pixels showed when zoomed in. I believed these three colors were what gave luminition to any surface!

Armando

When I was really little my mother told me the vacuum cleaner would suck my lungs out if I touched it, and I believed her. Vacuums STILL scare me, a source of great amusment as I'm now 19 and in college.

NotAnotherExit

I can't believe I still remember this.. but... My parents had this stereo with an 8-track. I would open the door to the 8-track and look for the little men playing the music.. strange, I could never find them.

Denis Osborne

I used to believe that you could tell how much room there was on a blank video cassette tape by how much writing was on the label. If the label was completely covered with writing the tape was all full, and if it was only half covered the tape was only half full, and so on. It didn't matter if the person who wrote it just had really big or really small writing, or whether what was on the tape was a movie or just a TV show - as long as the label still had room on it, you could still tape more stuff.

So when I decided to tape my favorite show one day, I chose a tape that only had a tiny bit of writing at the very top of the label, thinking I'd have lots of room to tape as many episodes of my show as I wanted. I couldn't believe it when the tape ran out after only 1 1/2 episodes. Turns out almost the whole tape was taken up by three of my parents' movies that had short titles, but were about 2 or 3 hours apiece. That blew my theory out of the water.

BandGeek

When I was really young, I thought you had to be silent to take a photo - if not, the picture would display the sound for ever; I remember not wanting my mom to play the flute while my dad was about to take a photograph...

Mariane

When I was 23 my sister and I were driving in California on a road trip when I looked up at the power lines and said "Isn't it amazing how the power is in those lines and then it just shoots into your house through the air?" She turned her head around in shock and questioned my statement. I further went on to detail how I thought power just shot around the air like cell phones or tvs. She set me straight on how power arrives at my house and the dangers of electricity loose in the air.

Ashley