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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson

Vacuum Suit  
  An early description of a space suit, and the first use of this now archaic phrase.  

How to survive the rigors of airless space?

The Professor next placed the transparent head gear over my head and secured it with attachments to my vacuum suit. A strange feeling of quietness and solitude came over me. While I could still see the Professor, I could hear him talk no longer as sounds cannot pierce a vacuum.
Technovelgy from The Man from the Atom, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1926
Additional resources -

Here's a quote from Doc Smith's Skylark Three:

They were wearing vacuum suits and were very short and stocky, giving the impression of enormous strength.

Eando Binder didn't think much of them, as seen in this quote from Murder on the Asteroid (1933):

Their faces were red and puckered, not only from the coolness they constantly lived in, but also by reason of the many times they had ventured out in vacuum suits. The constant use of these suits was influential in promoting skin troubles and stomach disorders, for they were the acme of stale, uncomfortable, unhealthy confinement.

And from Tidal Moon by the Weinbaums:

Amherst zipped the parkalike garment closed about his long, muscular body, pulling the sillicellu visor before his rugged features before he stepped from the autobus. The cold was penetrating. Even vacuum suits — misnamed, for they did not work on the principle of the thermos bottle but had the inner layer held from the outer by thin, radium-warmed wires — were scant enough protection.

Here's another quote Using this phrase from Diamond Planetoid (1939) by Gordon Giles:

...he zippered shut his neck-piece.

He stood still while Welton fitted the glassite helmet over his head and smeared instant-drying rubber cement over the zipper runs at the shoulders and neck. After clamping an oxygen bottle to Osgood's back and connecting the triple tubes, Welton came around to the front of the grotesque figure in micromesh rubberized silk...

Welton watched the bloated vacuum suit, inhabited by his friend, crawl slowly and carefully over the microbe world of rock. He looked like a gigantic black frog in the dull Saturn shine.

For purposes of comparison, check out the space-suit from The Emperor of the Stars by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat) and the air-tight suit from Garrett Serviss' 1898 story Edison's Conquest of Mars.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Man from the Atom
  More Ideas and Technology by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
  Tech news articles related to The Man from the Atom
  Tech news articles related to works by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

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