The 1920’s gave us bathtub gin, flapper dresses, and stock market tips from cab drivers. But for those who wanted to get serious about concentration, there was The Isolator — featured years later in SAGA Magazine.
The idea was simple: block out distractions, pump the user full of nitrous oxide, and reduce your field of vision to one sliver of text at a time. Productivity soared — right up until you passed out cold on the typewriter.
The inventor promised it would sharpen the mind. What it mostly sharpened was your medical bills. The thing weighed a good 20 pounds, generated a steady hiss of NO₂, and made you look like a rejected extra from a Jules Verne submarine.
Of course, my family insisted on modifications. A beak slot, a comb port, and reinforced straps for when the laughter gas made you keel over mid-sentence. I wore it once while writing a letter. By the time I came to, three pages were covered in doodles of pyramids, mopery citations, and one unfinished grocery list.
The ad claimed “total isolation.” They weren’t wrong. It isolated me from consciousness.
