Do you remember a time before the Internet? Of course you don’t. Don’t lie. However, there was such a time when you had to look in an encyclopedia to find out something or just live with not knowing it. But then, there was also a time even further back when reference books were rare and many people would write into certain magazines with questions that would be answered in a regular column.

Now imagine this: you have things you want to Google. Pick just one question and write it down. Mail it to a magazine. Wait a month or two. Hope it gets picked out of the hundreds of others they receive and then gets published for the whole world to see (nothing NSFW). Things have hardly changed a bit!

The following are excerpts from a magazine called Current Events. All of these are from 1915, which for historical context means that World War I had just started but the US was still neutral. The questions may surprise you as much as the answers.