I doubt if that would really come as much of a surprise, didn’t FDR refer to his cigarettes as “coffin nails?”
As for what people in the 50s would find outrageous, I imagine one big but unspoken item would be the level of integration in society, including high-profile interracial marriages. Even among relatively progressive families, I had the impression that among whites and blacks back then there was an attitude of “birds of a feather should flock together.”
This thread reminds me of a commercial I saw the other night. It was the “droid” commercial and I was thinking how someone in the 50’s would not have a clue what the product was.
Not everybody drinks bottled water, and even today, a lot of people see it as a ridiculous luxury.
I’m not sure I’ve ever bought bottled water.
I remember seeing a print ad from 1950ish in which a doctor extolled the virtues of Camel cigarettes as a cure for chronic coughing. Not sure how many people were actually fooled though.
Same goes for any number of drug commercials today which barely reference the product at all.
“Who’s ED and why does he need so many pills?”
If you pay $4 for a cup of coffee, they certainly do pour it for you–the reason it costs $4 is because you have a guy standing there making you a personalized cup of coffee exactly how you want it. If you want a cup of drip from a coffee stand you’ll probably pour it yourself, but where are you getting charged $4 for a cup of drip?
Satellites don’t do anything nowadays? Ever heard of the Hubble Space Telescope? Or the hundreds of weather and communication satellites? I suppose they might be surprised that there are hundreds of satellites in orbit, but no humans in orbit to service and repair them.
And bottled water has been addressed already, but drinking water is better than ever. Back in the 50s if your drinking water tasted bad, you shrugged and drank it anyway, or drink something else. Nowadays people can pay a dollar for a bottle of water if they don’t like the taste of their tap water, or they can do what they did in the 50s, drink the tap water anyway.
Everyone knew smoking was bad for you back in the 50s, they just didn’t know how bad.
Just think of all the terms we use in ordinary conversation that people in the 50s would have no clue.
download
Fax
MP3
cellphone
ADD
blog
Hell, people in the 90s would have no clue what a blog was. It was still a web log then.
FDR was a cigarette smoker.
Um, yes . . . . ?
I seem to recall a Laugh-In special I saw once, well a retrospective on Laugh-In. They were doing one of their “News from 25 years in the Future” segments, so the rough time frame for this “fictitious” newscast would be 1987. The anchor led off with “President Ronald Reagan” - huge laughs from the audience.
So I would definitely chalk this one up as being surprising to those back then.
The special mentioned a few other of these “News from 25 years in the Future” segments that turned out to be prescient (but meant as comedy), forget what they were, but they would be good litmus tests of what people would have found ludicris back then and actually happened.
I wonder if we’ll look back at Demolition Man and its Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library joke the same way.
dhkendall, your claim that this item on Laugh-In predicted that 25 years in the future Reagan would be President and that this would mean that it was in 1987 must mean that you think that the program was on in 1962. That’s really strange to anyone who remembers the program. I’m sorry, but maybe you’re just too young to have been alive then. 1962 was greatly different from 1967, which was when the show actually started. It’s hard to imagine it being on in 1962.
In fact, that particular episode was broadcast in 1968. “News of the Future” was not about what would happen twenty-five years in the future. It was about various times in the future. As it happens, they predicted that Reagan would be President in 1988. In a later episode, they predicted that the Berlin Wall would fall in 1989.
Sadly, I am. (Born in 1972). One of the big regrets I’ve had in life is that I’ve yet to see an actual Laugh-In episode, I’ve jsut seen skits, and specials like the aforementioned. Far and away, it’s my favourite show I’ve never seen.
Well, unions were a lot stronger in the 50s 
I was born in 1975, but was obsessed with the 60’s when I was a teenager. Laugh-In used to be on Nick at Nite. Now they have DVDs of it, if you really want to see it…
Laugh-in ran from Jan 1967-Mar 1973.
There are so many little things we take for granted now that would have surprised someone from the 50’s. Remote controls, solar powered calculators, rolling tennis shoes for kids! Wii games, video games of all sorts, movies on itty-bitty records.
The speed of technology might give them pause, too - look how fast cell phones have come in such a short time.
I’m pretty sure mechanical and/or analog versions of all of those things could be found in the 50s. Didn’t someone already mention remote controls in the 50s upthread? You also had mechanical adding machines & slide rules, skates and indoor games. I believe even the film on disk thing was possible by recording to phonographic disk, wasn’t it?
What’s the mechanical/analog version of a Nintendo Wii?
Are we being technical or practical? Technically, an abacus.