Since the launch of Facebook in February 2004 and the beginning of the Twitter project in late March 2006, the compulsive need for chic teens, budding celebrities, and soccer moms to digitally broadcast their daily lives has run rampant (Gigaom, Mashable.com). But the social broadcasting genius of Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter (created with Noah Glass), apparently isn’t original: a Twitter-like prototype had already surfaced in London in 1935 (no that's not a typo).

Dorsey’s original conception of Twttr, as it was called then, was a way for people to send mass text messages from their phone to everyone in their social group, primarily as a means to distribute location information, mood swings, and which clubs were hopping that night. Since then, Twitter has shifted its focus to the web, nearly usurping the position of Facebook status updates. Thanks to a recent bid by Apple, the social networking website’s rumored value is about $700 million. Marketing companies, the History Channel, and even the US Army have jumped on board the Twitter rage.

But before computers came vending machines, and before Twitter and Facebook statuses came the “notificator,” a machine installed in stores, streets, and train stations of London in the 1930s that was “similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.” Like a candy vender, the machine even required that users drop a coin into a slot before their handwritten message would be fed up behind a glass display panel (now there’s an idea, Twitter). Messages would remain visible for at least two hours. The so-called “robot message carrier,” like modern-day Twitter, was a way for users to relay location information, make or break appointments, or announce to their friends which pubs were hopping that night, assuming the intended recipients were lucky enough to spot the message before it disappeared.

Why the social announcement system moved from the streets and storefronts of London into seven decades of oblivion, it’s difficult to say. The popularity of the original machine is unclear, as are the ways in which it was actually used – anonymous, publicly displayed messages could have easily been scandalous or politically subversive – and the reasons for its disappearance (Dead Media Archive). Either way, Mark Zuckerburg and Jack Dorsey shouldn’t be so smug; their billion-dollar ideas are 70 years late.