My old Master of Arts (Honours) History dissertation on retrofuturism, a topic about which you can read much more at Paleofuture (a fascinating blog which is also full of stunning images). I also thoroughly recommend this book from Popular Mechanics:
The Future by the Past: visions of tomorrow’s life in Popular Mechanics magazine 1920-1970
Introduction
‘What will the world be like in A.D.2000?’ This was the opening question asked by the article Miracles You’ll See In the Next 50 Years in the February 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.
The miracles which the title alluded to included cooking by solar heat, shopping by television, eating food made from sawdust, and travelling to sootless garden cities by rocket plane. The article, written by New York Times science editor Waldemar Kaempffert, attempted to give readers a glimpse half a century into the future by examining the lifestyle of the theoretical Dobson family and the metropolitan suburb of Tottenville in which they were said to live. As far as Kaempfeert was concerned, ‘the only obstacles to accurate prophecy are...vested interests, which may retard progress.’
Kaempffert was asserting that tradition and conservatism were obstructions to a march of technological progress which would eventually bring about his predictions.
Presumably without these flaws himself, he felt confident making predictions about what the world would be like in the year 2000. Despite the seeming optimism and fantasy which guided many of them, Kaempfeert felt these predictions were nevertheless grounded in reality, for ‘if we confine ourselves to processes and inventions that are now being hatched in the laboratory, we shall not wander too far from reality.’
This is typical of the predictions made in Popular Mechanics; the views of the future could be wonderful if they could be grounded in reality.
That the writer attempted to ground his predictions in reality is vital to distinguishing the predictions made in Popular Mechanics from the pure science fiction of the age. The article was not, at Kaempfeert’s insistence, a piece of science fiction, nor a purely theoretical work. Rather it was a scientific attempt to predict the miracles which would arise by the end of the 20th century; the vital condition was that steps were already being taken in this direction. ‘You don’t realise what is happening because it is a piecemeal process,’ he proclaims in his opening paragraph, as ‘The jet-propelled plane is one piece, the latest insect killer is another. Thousands of such pieces are automatically dropping into their places to form the pattern of tomorrow’s world.’
These comments were being made in an age where the writer and his audience were experiencing technological advances all around them in the wake of the Second World War, and life was changing along with them.
The leap from real-world advances like insect repellants and jet planes to the more advanced technologies discussed in the article, such as passenger spaceships and rub-on hair-melting chemicals to replace shaving razors may seem like a large leap of the imagination. But this is far from a singular example. It was a product of an age, starting in the first decade of the 20th century and continuing on roughly to the beginning of the 1970s, in which predicting the future was developing as a scientific endeavour, one which was infused with an optimism which was in turn spurred on by real technological advances. By the 1950s, every tech-savvy individual knew that their grandchildren, if not their children or themselves, would each own a personal helicopter and eat better than any Roman emperor.
These were typical of the kinds of predictions that would be made in Popular Mechanics from its original publication year in 1903 until the 1970s. Popular Mechanics was one of the earliest ‘hobby’ magazines, a new type of publication which aimed to report on scientific and technological changes in a way which was aimed primarily at the common person rather than the trained professional.
Professional scientists and inventors were counted among the visionaries who contributed across the history of the magazine, a history which spanned immense technological changes as steam was replaced by electricity, stone buildings by skyscrapers of concrete and steel, and advances in transportation and communications which began the age when the world seemed to begin shrinking.
The target audience was always the common person who possessed an interest in technology, and although its fantastic optimism meant it no longer represented the orthodox view from around the 1930s, it thrived for much of a century which knew technology drove the world and was destined to take an even more powerful role in the future.
It is for this reason that magazines such as Popular Mechanics are important in understanding the past. They were technology magazines for the technology enthusiasts, but they were made to sell. People were reading these magazines because they enjoyed reading what the future might bring, when it might bring it, and how their lives might change because of it. But apart from predicting what the future might be like, Popular Mechanics more importantly reflects the society and culture which produced it; the ideas which these people had about the future, what could and should come, can inform us about what their present was like, their attitudes to the world and what did, and did not, need to change.
Predictions of the future were destined to go hand-in-hand with capitalism in this fashion, for apart from their distinctly American optimism they were also highly marketable. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Science and Invention were called ‘hobby’ magazines because they usually contained details of activities their readers could engage in at home, but their most alluring factor on the shelves was their predictions of what the future world might be like. Through articles predicting the way technology would bring pleasure and gain in the coming decades,
and which were often illustrated with beautiful and fantastical illustrations which some might mistake for works of pulp fiction. In the first half of the 20th Century, these two genres of magazine - hobby magazines attempting to predict the future scientifically, and pulp magazines illustrating the future through imaginative eyes - were indeed strongly related.
One of the strongest links was in the person of Hugo Gernsback, founder of Modern Electrics magazine in 1908, which aimed to make science, especially radio, accessible to young readers.
By 1913 the magazine was known as Electical Experimenter and became well known for its cover illustrations which often depicted futuristic war machines.
Again the magazine had a name change in 1920, when it became Science and Invention, and though still predominantly a science magazine, stories of pure science fiction were also mixed in.
By the time science fiction had become more entrenched in popular culture in the latter half of the 20th century, the days of pulp magazines would be seen nostalgically as the era when young people first discovered the future.
Although the readership of both these genres strongly overlapped, particularly between the World Wars,
and at a glance both can seem to contain equally wonderful visions of a scientifically advanced future, they were fundamentally distinct entities.
Pulp magazines were the descendants of the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, science fiction writers whose popularity would put visions of the future firmly in the American consciousness. While early forms of written science fiction would introduce the idea of imagining the future to American audiences, it was an idea that duly split in three directions. Serious, written science fiction stories would continue the social and political messages of Wells and Verne; pulp magazines would focus on the adventure and fantasy elements; while hobby magazines such as Popular Mechanics would continue to predict the scientific and technological elements of the future with the philosophical overtones firmly removed, and the results presented as a genuine academic attempt to predict the wonderful world of A.D. 2000.
Science fiction novels and pulp magazines therefore catered to a different audience than the hobby magazines such as Popular Mechanics; science fiction was an exercise in creativity about what the future may bring, pulp magazines were largely for entertainment only. It is the likes of Popular Mechanics, then, which expressly predicts what could have been on the popular horizon, distinct from its siblings in futurism which did not necessarily need a scientific bedrock. Further, they were aimed at audiences which primarily wanted to be entertained. The purchasers of Popular Mechanics, while no doubt expecting to be entertained, also expected to be educated with facts and reasonable predictions. This is why I have chosen to examine Popular Mechanics, as well as a few other select primary materials which also sought to legitimately predict the future.
The predictions made in Popular Mechanics were a result of real technological innovations which were permeating the culture which produced them, and were a genuine attempt to predict the future using legitimate, science-based means and theories. This distinguishes them from science fiction stories and pulp magazines, which were primarily a form of entertainment rather than education, although they were far from sterile; the excitement which their predictions could exude and were meant to produce in their readers are exactly why these sources are an excellent indicator of the time and place which produced them, if one accepts the theory that the visions people have of the future is representative of the perceived issues of the present. Furthermore, they represent a continuous period of technological optimism, barely hindered - and more often spurned on - by such cataclysmic events such as the two World Wars. The apparent inability of political and other real-world issues to dampen the spirit of futurologists is indicative of a society which over time came to look upon technology with awe rather than dread, and continued to expect great things.
The predictions made in Popular Mechanics vary wildly, from the conquest of space to new medical treatments that often seemed to be crossing over from the realms of science fiction. I have, however, chosen to focus on the predictions which deal directly with daily life in the future. The first chapter deals with the synthetic home of tomorrow. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Popular Mechanics often sought to imagine the conditions of daily life, and the synthetic home was a common solution to the housing shortage which afflicted the United States during the Great Depression. The second chapter is related to home technologies, where we can trace the use of new technologies taking over, and improving, life in the future. The third chapter focuses on the city of the future, as it evolved from a chaotic place of uncontrollable growth to an ordered utopia and finally a pleasant greenbelt landscape. The final chapter describes future forms of transport in Popular Mechanics, as Americans began to embrace the automobile and aircraft and imagined a fantastic future to come.
1. The Synthetic Home
The October 1942 issue of Popular Mechanics published the article ‘Your Home of the Future’, which asked the magazine’s readers to ‘look ahead to your postwar dwelling five or ten years to picture possibilities like these,’
and continued on to describe a potential home of the future. The typical family dwelling, according to this article, would be rapidly constructed within days of spotting ‘a piece of land which has caught your fancy.’
This home would also be highly modular, allowing the exchange within days of entire rooms between families, with the article providing the following example: ‘Wanted to exchange one bedroom, style X2-A, of the Jones Corporation line, for a darkroom.’
In this vision of the future, families could buy and sell entire rooms through simple newspaper advertisements.
The rapid construction and re-construction of this home of the future was dependent on the use of pre-fabricated materials, particularly plastic. The article quotes the architect Paul Nelson as saying ‘this process would be almost as simple as plugging in your refrigerator or washing machine.’
Further, these homes of the future would be produced at a cost ‘almost unbelievably low’ and lead to a luxurious lifestyle for even the lowest income groups.
This prediction, made a year into the United States’s involvement in the Second World War, is a firm declaration of the optimism Americans had in the prefabricated future, and their faith that it would lead to a life of luxury after the defeat of the Axis. The description of a modular home marks this vision as unique, but it is also a typical sample of the American conception of future life which had existed from the 1920s until the postwar years. In these synthetic home-based visions of the future, which were found regularly in Popular Mechanics, plastics lowered the costs of, and increased the living standard of, family life in the future.
Optimistic predictions of a plastic-based future were a regular feature in Popular Mechanics from the 1920s to the 1940s, and represent one of two major trends of home predictions. After co-existing since the 1920s, this type of article was replaced in the 1950s by the second trend, as Popular Mechanics came to focus primarily on the kitchen and home appliances. Just as the pre-war home of the future was a reaction to new developments in synthetic materials and mass production, the post-war home of tomorrow was a reaction to changing social, cultural, and technological factors which placed futuristic utensils in the limelight. This was a future where ‘dishes are washed in three minutes by ultrasonic waves’
and women clean their synthetic-based homes by ‘[turning] the hose on everything.’
The home of the future, as presented in Popular Mechanics between the 1920s and 1960s, can therefore be separated into these two strands. The artificial home of the future, which was going to lead to a life of luxury and ease, shall be investigated in this chapter, followed by an examination of the technological home of the future which came to dominate post-war predictions in the next.
The prevalence of the synthetic home in Popular Mechanics in the 1920s and 1940s was a result of technological innovation and social necessity. By the end of the 1920s, the housing crisis in the United States had developed into a veritable crisis.
At this time, a sizeable group of architects, businessmen, and engineers began to use the slogan ‘Houses like Fords.’
Ford’s mass production of mechanically complex automobiles using assembly lines was an exciting development for housing visionaries in the 1920s,
as the ability to rapidly produce automobiles seemed to suggest that the same could be done for houses. For this group of visionaries, factory-built homes were an ideal solution to the housing crisis.
The benefits which this home of the future must bring were clear, and these values were often repeated in Popular Mechanics articles. The synthetic home should be low-cost to produce and purchase, allow quick assembly on site if possible, be long-lasting, and provide a decent standard of living for an American population which was suffering through the Great Depression between the 1920s and 1940s. The homes of tomorrow which appeared in Popular Mechanics in these years reflect these values and necessities, consistently promising a pleasant and easy future which would have been comforting to a populace suffering from economic hardships.
The base material for this home of the future was undoubtedly plastic, a material which is easy and cheap to use in the mass production of automobiles.
Further, plastic was often portrayed as something of a ‘wonder material’, such as in a 1937 article which confidently stated that ‘Houses of the future will be built of plastic and synthetic materials that should outlast materials used today.’
This point is important; the plastic home of the future was rarely intended to be a brief solution to a contemporary problem, such as the self-assembled houses used in the California Gold Rush,
but were always described by Popular Mechanics as a comfortable place to live your entire life, becoming the standard home type of the American landscape, at least outside of the city.
Popular Mechanics also consistently stated the sanitary and lifestyle benefits of the plastic home across the decades of the Great Depression. These new homes were to emerge and be ‘noiseless, sanitary and proof against fire, vermin and weather.’
The advantages of these new building materials were not restricted to the sanitary and sensible, however, but were often given a futuristic twist to heighten the impression of the luxurious future lifestyle. One article from 1928 reported on a London exhibition whose home of the future used the material Vitaglass to produce a ‘permanent summer day effect’
by using the sun’s ultraviolet rays to illuminate the whole house even on cloudy days.
The description of this home of tomorrow (dated for the year 2000), which was based on Vitaglass, movable walls, and convertible metal furniture, appears to be for a high-end futuristic home. This impression is heightened by the inclusion of a garage for housing your airplane-automobile with folding wings, a second-story swimming pool, and wireless power and program reception masts, all brightly illuminated in what Popular Mechanics called ‘a home full of sunlight.’
As optimistic and wonderful as this house seems, it was in fact following the tradition of predicting the common family home of tomorrow.
It was a regular feature to see the home of tomorrow described as both cheap and luxurious, even when the level of luxury appears incongruous. Plastic and mass production methods were seen to be brilliant new technologies which were capable of producing a home of the future which was the best of both worlds; as the 1942 ‘Your Home of the Future’ article claimed, ‘The reason we could have such seeming luxuries is that mass production could produce them at a cost almost unbelievably low.’
This trend was inspired by the necessity to house America’s population during the Depression and the endless benefits which new technology seemed to offer. This was a popular line of thought for those in the business of predicting the home of tomorrow, and was encouraged by the hype surrounding such experiments as the Dymaxion House.
Buckminster Fuller produced a model of his Dymaxion House in 1928, calling it a ‘4-D Utility Unit.’
Fuller’s model home of the future was ahead of its time in many aspects, with as strong a focus on the technology to be found within the house, some of it available at the time, some of it still the work of science fiction,
as on the materials it was made from. These ideas would later be taken forward to dominate the postwar home of the future. However, the Dymaxion House was also designed as a home for mass production, a process Fuller believed in earnestly.
Despite the futuristic technology and exceedingly high standard of living within his theoretical house, he intended his home as an assembly line product, rejecting an offer to build a full-size prototype for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition and demanding one million dollars to begin mass production.
The Dymaxion House was never put into production, as no investors were willing to take such a large financial risk on a property which was so unusual.
The elemental flaw of the synthetic house in practise is visible here. These visions of the plastic home of tomorrow were visions only of what the future home could be, based on optimistic appraisals of new technology, rather than attempts to create or describe homes of tomorrow which were compatible with contemporary technology and economy.
The predictions of Popular Mechanics were not science fiction, however. The technology and social conditions which spurned on these optimistic visions were very real, and even when the predictions were naive or even ridiculous to modern readers, they were generally based on real developments. The technologies were sometimes nebulous; the 1928 article ‘Home, Sweet Home of the Future’ describes a ‘hornlike substance, currently in the experimental stage in a London laboratory’
which could be used as walls in the home of the future, coloured and patterned to the customer’s desires and finally installed on steel foundations. However fantastical, articles such as this were more than flights of fancy, but genuine attempts by Popular Mechanics to report on real developments and real solutions which could give their reader a glimpse of the presumably synthetic future.
Each occurrence of the home of tomorrow which appears between the 1920s and the end of the Second World War is primarily concerned with the dual qualities of low cost and high living conditions, in which the advent of plastics and mass production has led to a sanitary and comfortable future. In practice, Americans were due to be let down by plastic homes when they did become manifest, and serve as part of the explanation for why they died out in the pages of Popular Mechanics. The closest Americans came to living the synthetic dream was when General Houses, founded in 1932, began an attempt to actualise the prefabricated home, and went so far as to involve large companies such as General Electric, The Pullman Company, and Inland Steel in its ventures.
One advertisement in Fortune Magazine in 1932 promised that General Houses would let you ‘pick out your house as you do your automobile’ and with all the amenities of plumbing and heating, at a cost which was ‘even more amazing,’
seeming to fulfil the promises of Popular Mechanics. The accompanying illustration failed to hide the fact that the house was bland and blocky, however, and gives lie to the reality of the synthetic home. The venture proved to be a failure, selling very few units; it has been suggested that Americans were not then ready for synthetic housing, despite the seeming popularity of the idea.
The real problem, however, was that the reality of the synthetic house was far removed from the predictions made in Popular Mechanics. Many of the technological marvels, such as the house of perpetual daylight, or the modular home, were dreams technologically impossible to live up to or financially impractical. One much closer prediction made by Popular Mechanics was made in 1935, when a Popular Mechanics article quoted the statistician Roger W.Babson as saying that ‘Within twenty years, more than half the population of the United States will be living in automobile trailers!’,
and is accompanied by photographs of regular, if seemingly comfortable, caravan trailers. While the percentage of the US population living in caravans did not reach that level (a 1954 article in Popular Mechanics, ‘Trailers are Stay-at-Homes Now’, quoted a figure of 2,000,000)
this was nevertheless the truest and most successful fulfilment of the idea of the assembly-line home.
Though the public was let down by the concept of the synthetic home, the promise of the technological home - also predicted and illustrated by the Dymaxion House and within the pages of Popular Mechanics - was much more successful. The mass produced synthetic home was, ironically, not a technologically or economically viable construction for the world it was designed for. The technological home, however, was due to take over the hearts and minds of Americans in its place.
2. The Technological Home
The technological home, a concept where the home of tomorrow was not futuristic because of the materials it was made from but because of the advanced technologies which were found within it, began to appear in the 1920s and continued through the Second World War, and became the dominant form of prediction in the 1950s.
Early concepts such as the Dymaxion House suggested to the public how modern appliances could improve their lives in home of the future. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House is in this sense a prime example of the technological home of the future. The materials it was constructed from, and the mass production methods by which it was to reach the public, followed the same set of rules as the synthetic home of tomorrow which was so popular before the end of the Second World War, as part of Fuller’s campaign for luxurious mass produced homes. It was the technology to be found within, however, that defined the Dymaxion House as the quintessential home of the future. The model featured a self-activated laundry unit to wash and dry clothes in three minutes, an electric generator, air compressor, and humidifier, as well as a ‘get on with life room’ which included a typewriter, telephone, television, mimeograph and other technologies which could allow a man to work from home.
All of these technologies were designed to meet the internal needs of its occupants through communications and labour-saving technology, and independent of urban power and sewage systems.
While Fuller’s Dymaxion House ultimately proved too risky to produce full scale and for general consumption, the idea of a future home where life was made easy through modern utilities was proved to be enduring. In the 1930s and 1940s, Popular Mechanics often featured wonderful new technologies which would be commonplace in the home of tomorrow. Cleanliness was, as with the synthetic home of tomorrow, a major concern; a 1938 article predicted ‘dust-free air’ in the ‘not distant future by [the use of] a “dust magnet” developed by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing company engineers,’
in which annual Spring cleaning would be eliminated by the wonderful dust magnet. A 1944 article again looked forward to a future with ‘completely air-conditioned homes with dust and dirt collected from the air electrostatically by home-size Precipitrons,’
as well as more technologically probable household helpers such as electric driers and washing machines.
Comfort and ease of living were also important aspects, as evidenced by the ‘Home, Sweet Home of the Future’ 1928 article which described an evolution in home equipment, with pneumatic chairs, inflatable cushions, and a dining room table which could be folded up into a tea cart.
As early as 1928 Popular Mechanics reported statistician Roger W. Babson’s prediction that ‘Fifty years hence...the milk bottle will probably be a museum relic,’ as will most cooking utensils as ‘food will be served in concentrated or pill form.’
We can see here a significantly different strand in the projected views of the future home. The focus on these articles is not on the materials that the home would be built from but on the technologies that were found within.
During the Second World War, the vision of the future home most often presented in magazines and newspapers was focused on the kitchen, which would be filled with modern appliances,
and this focus was only intensified after the war until the ‘home of the future’ in Popular Mechanics was primarily concerned with the kitchen as well as role of women more generally. The recognition of women as the primary consumer in the postwar economy and society was the motivating factor for this, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s it is almost universally women who demonstrate the home of tomorrow within Popular Mechanics. The articles focus on conventional ‘women’s work’ in the home of tomorrow, aided by new technologies which make their work easier.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the mere presence of modern appliances, which had previously sufficed to make a home seem futuristic, was no longer enough to warrant the futuristic label as many of the features of the Dymaxion House were now widely available.
This led to a deep change in the way the kitchen of the future was portrayed in Popular Mechanics after the Second World War; the emphasis was now on applied science, which was seen as the winning factor in the war.
Inspired by the likes of RCA/Whirlpool Corporation’s Miracle Kitchen, which was designed as a ‘travelling ambassador’ for the company to stimulate sales in existing products by teasing model futuristic ones (with the promise that ‘those appliances will be engineered for production and for sale to the public’
if enough people expressed a desire to to buy existing products), Popular Mechanics was filled with depictions of the technological kitchen. A 1956 article described a kitchen designed by Frigidaire with ‘a host of startling features such as dishes which could be washed by ultrasonic waves, a ‘hands-free, distant talking TV telephone’
which allowed various parts of the kitchen to be controlled remotely, and a motorised serving cart.
The technological enhancements were not entirely limited to the kitchen, however. The values of synthetic materials were still relevant, as plastics were used in modern appliances, and imaginative predictions of where the technology could go were still to be found. One example is an illustrated 1950 article in Popular Mechanics which depicted a woman spraying a sofa with a garden hose, with the explanation that ‘Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.’
For the synthetic and technological world of the future, the use of plastic was once again on full display, though in a different form. The article also claimed that housewives of tomorrow would wash dishes down the drain as they were made of meltable plastic, and old nylons would be taken to chemical factories to be converted into candy.
The 1950s home of the future, as presented in Popular Mechanics, can therefore be seen to embrace new and futuristic technologies, once again promising a future lifestyle of ease and comfort. Again the predictions were optimistic about what technology of the time could do; food in pill form has remained the domain of science fiction, as have dust magnets which suck the dirt out of the air. Many of the more humble predictions, such as frozen TV dinners and air conditioned homes, did become reality however and are now common features in American homes.
The home of the future was a concept that consistently changed to try and represent the needs and desires of the time. Rapid production, delivery, and construction of synthetic homes was seen as a cure for the housing shortage, as well as a beneficial permanent home. These predictions were doomed by the failure of these homes in practise, as the benefits and business practises of mass producing cars failed to transfer over to the housing industry.
Instead it was the technology inside the home which was to take hold of the American imagination and become a tangible reality. The benefits of synthetic materials were not forgotten, and appeared again in the 1950s, this time as products of the science laboratory rather than the assembly line, which would make life within the house - rather than creation of the house - an easier experience. But it was the use of modern appliances which truly took hold. Many predictions were optimistic; too much so to have a chance at becoming technological reality within the timeframe given by Popular Mechanics. But in the postwar years the market for modern appliances boomed, and it was these lifestyle products which came to dominate ideas of what future homes should be like.
3. The City of the Future
‘The best way of visualising the new world of A.D. 2000,’ according to one 1950 Popular Mechanics article, ‘is to introduce you to the Dobsons, who live in Tottenville, a hypothetical metropolitan suburb of 100,000.’
This hypothetical suburb was a pleasant, green town with multi-decked highways and farmhouses powered by solar energy, and was the culmination of an evolving image of the city of Tomorrow which can be seen to transform in Popular Mechanics from the 1910s until the 1930s.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, the popular image of the future city - the one most frequently advanced and accepted by the general public
- was largely provided by artists and illustrators. During this period, the future metropolis evolves from a clustered, manic scene of urbanisation gone awry in the 1910s to a landscape of ordered skyscrapers in the 1920s and eventually a greenbelt landscape from the 1930s onwards. Over these decades, America was transformed to a thoroughly urban society,
and the form which the predictions of the future city took in Popular Mechanics were indicative of both the hopes and fears which this engendered in the American public.
Before the 1920s, popular magazines such as Judge, Life, and Puck regularly published images of fantastical and futuristic urban landscapes. The depictions were usually a negative or satirical commentary on contemporary urban life in the United States, expressing the concern many Americans had about the chaotic urbanisation of the US which had started in the 1880s and 1890s.
New York, which had experienced massive growth since the turn of the century and which was where many of these publications were based, was the city most usually depicted.
In these cartoons, urbanisation was portrayed an uncontrollable force, which would produce a future of impossibly tall towers, linked by numerous massive bridges, and often with skies dominated by personal flying machines.
Popular Mechanics, inherently an optimistic and pro-technology publication, took little interest in these negative portrayals of the urban future, and did not begin extensively reporting on it until the 1920s, after the 1920 census which evidenced that the United States was now predominantly urban, with increasing urbanisation and centralisation a likely feature of the near future.
It is worth noting that even articles prior to the 1920s possessed a more balanced appraisal of the urban future, such as a 1907 piece ‘Skyscrapers 100 Stories High Possible, But Drawbacks Many’, which only went so far as to claim that ‘We may not be ready for [larger and higher buildings] yet,’
but asserted that they were the future. By the 1920s, another line of thinking had become dominant among futurologists. As early as the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, some architects like Daniel H. Burnham were putting forward the idea of the reformed city of the future.
Although the chaotic, uncontrollable city remained the standard in print before 1920, in other areas the idea of the city as a utopia can be clearly seen. The Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 presented a beautiful and clean metropolis, and the City Beautiful movement which followed went on to continue this trend. The ideology of the City Beautiful movement was that the ills of modern city life could be cured by making buildings look beautiful.
The City Beautiful movement had some tangible successes, such as the Senate Park Commission Plan (1902) for Washington, D.C., which was planned by many of those responsible for the Columbian Expedition. Though it was not fully realised, the SPCP was an important point in the history of city planning and set the ball rolling for more utopian images of the future city to appear in the 1920s.
The advent of urban planning in the 1920s also helped to produce a new image of the future metropolis which would now find a home in Popular Mechanics, and is seen by Carol Willis as the major factor in this change, who asserts that in the 1920s it was a few farsighted architects who envisioned a city which was not only technologically advanced but controlled and rationalised by planning, and it was this view which commanded public consciousness by the second half of the 1920s
and led to the period of urban optimism. The concept of city planning - that urban growth could be centrally controlled and directed - was to be the death knell for the pre-1920s dystopia. The kind of ordered, well-planned city which urban planning could lead to was exemplified by a 1928 article, ‘Have Skyscrapers Reached Their Limit?’ by Uthai Vincent Wilcox, which depicted a multi-layer metropolis with different levels for traffic, pedestrians, and of course airships.
Combining this concept of order with the ideas of the City Beautiful movement, the new image of the future city was not something to panic about, but to celebrate.
Colossal scale was one of the few features carried over from the 1910s, such as in Wilcox’s aforementioned article, where towering pyramidal skyscrapers reach far above the pedestrian and traffic levels below, which also featured a massive bridge that was to carry over the tower tops.
The skyscraper utopia was becoming a regular feature in the popular media, appearing in newspapers, books, movies and more, as well as exhibitions and department stores;
one such example was the 1925 exhibition “The Titan City, a pictorial pageant of New York, 1926-2026” at the John Wanamaker department store which displayed a future New York City complete with multilevel transit systems, arcaded skywalks, and pedestrian bridges which spanned the upper levels of the colossal setback towers which made the futuristic New York skyline.
The city of the future was therefore still dominated by massive, towering buildings which reached to dizzying heights, but were now thoroughly under control. Architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hildersheimer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others associated with the Bauhaus movement made such a strong impact on modern design that it became a brand in and of itself.
These architects embraced the skyscraper future, and became the main visionaries of the ordered city of tomorrow which inspired the articles of Popular Mechanics.
Le Corbusier presented his ‘City for Three Million’ in Paris in 1922, via a diorama and a series of drawings, which presented a future city centre made of widely spaced skyscrapers connected by rail lines and subways, which was the city’s ‘seat of power...clothed in a dazzling mirage of unimaginable beauty; the people swarm into it.’
This would become the archetype of the future metropolis; a landscape of glorious and ordered towers.
Popular Mechanics became an avid promoter of this skyscraper-based future city. A 1924 article presented a future city whose skyline was dominated by massive skyscrapers, which featured the receding and terraced design which was becoming the staple of modern architecture and of popular predictions of the future metropolis.
The article further described that ‘the future office building will rise majestically in tiers.’
The popular features of the future metropolis were described avidly within the pages of Popular Mechanics, including ‘Elevated sidewalks and sunken streets’ which would ‘relieve traffic congestion’, as well as triple-decked streets for the sake of vehicles and pedestrians.
This image of the future city remained popular throughout the 1920s, however, and came to be accepted among futurists as the ultimate progression of urban form. Francisco Mujica used this style in a ‘City of the Future’ which appeared as the final plate in his History of the Skyscraper in 1929. This vision was subtitled ‘Hundred Story City in Neo-American Style’ and was intended as an expression of the strengths of American capitalism.
As the 1920s came to an end, the critic Sheldon Cheney proclaimed “Let the vision of a city beautiful...with a lift toward the skies...Thinking about it, visioning it, will make it come true some day.”
This form of the future city would dominate thought within and outside of Popular Mechanics until the 1930s. The level of control offered by zoning allowed the city of the future to be reigned in and formed into something which fit the needs of its people in an artistic and humanist fashion. Apart from zoning, Carol Willis identifies another fundamental factor in encouraging this optimism; an enthusiasm for new materials and technologies,.
As Willis points out, dreams of 1,000 foot towers were not, very new in the 1920s. They appeared in architectural journals from the beginning of the 20th century and were considered quite possible to build.
The idea that the city could be controlled and formed into something beautiful was utopian itself, but technological advances made since the 19th century turned the aeroplane and automobile into essential elements of depictions of the future because their technology was wondrous.
The predictions of Popular Mechanics and individual architectural visionaries seem unconcerned with such issues, instead preferring to envision what might technically be possible, in the form which they believed best suited the humans that would live and work in these metropolises of the future. Modern viewers might interpret these skyscraper mega cities as oppressive, monotonous, and sterile,
and these architects views of the future have indeed been called authoritarian and megalomaniacal.
As we have seen, however, this was not their intent; rather, this vision of urban order, brought about the new idea of urban planning, was meant to be democratic and liberating.
The vision of the urban future promoted in Popular Mechanics alters significantly in the 1930s; the massive, pyramidal structures which were so popular in 1928 recede in place of more modern urban landscapes, where the quality of life has been improved through the use of new technologies.
It is no accident that these predictions occurred at a time when the idea of the self-contained, decentralised community gained governmental support. Led by President Roosevelt’s chief of the Resettlement Administration, Rexford Tugwell, a nationwide plan for a network of ‘Greenbelt Towns’ was put into action, with three thousand ‘rural-industrial communities’ being planned as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Several Popular Mechanics articles in the 1930s identified the problems in contemporary urban life, and reported on future cities which would be much cleaner and quieter. One 1931 article predicted that ‘Within ten years the modern city will be a comfortable place in which to live, as far as noise is concerned.’
This article envisioned a future metropolis where the noise and bustle of the modern urban landscape had been eliminated, quoting Edward F. Brown, director of the noise-abatement commission of New York City, ‘who believes that in another decade the large metropolis will enjoy silent riveting machines, more melodious auto horns, quieter subways, and sound ventilators for windows which will keep out all unpleasant noises.’
An article the following year would be entitled ‘Autos to Wear Gas Masks in “Odorless City”’
and reported that ‘Poisonous and disagreeable fumes from gasoline and oil-propelled vehicles will disappear, making it unnecessary for a city’s inhabitants to wear gas masks.’
The article was illustrated by several men in white coats, a canary in a bird cage, and an automobile being attached to several empty jars. The article explained that ‘By running an engine in a tightly closed room, experimenters protected by gas masks seek to determine how much poisonous matter must be removed from an automobile’s exhaust to make it harmless and inoffensive.’
These articles were an attempt to imagine the city of the future not as an ordered paradise, but simply as a cleaner and quieter version of the contemporary metropolis. The idea that the city in its current state was in need of cleanup can be found in the concept of Tugwell’s garden cities, which would not be near other major urban areas but would be self-sufficient towns surrounded by farms and parklands.
The idea of a decentralised population moving out into the countryside was taken up by Popular Mechanics, which during the 1930s came to predict that the countryside would be indistinguishable from the city. A 1931 article quoted the vice president of American Airways prediction that ‘Suburbs of the future will be from fifty to 100 miles from the present centers [sic] of modern cities’ and that ‘Men will live where they want to live and work where they want to work.’
In this vision of the suburban future, new advances in aviation and communications technology have shrunk the world and rendered the congested city a thing of the past. ‘The congregation of men in cities will become superfluous,’ ran one article by Winston Churchill in 1932, who asserted that in the future ‘there would be no more reason to live in the same city with one’s neighbor’
because ‘wireless telephones and televisions will enable their owners to connect to any room similarly equipped to hear and take part in the conversation as easily as if he put his head in through its window.’
None of the completed green belt communities managed to become self-sufficient, though they did attract attention as laboratories of future planning principles, and a documentary film entitled ‘The City’ was screened at the 1939 New York World’s Fair which contrasted the squalid urban present with the beautiful greenbelt future.
By this point the project was nevertheless considered a failure, and Tugwell’s agency was abolished by Congress. The dream of greenbelt towns has resurfaced occasionally since the 1930s, but never with the same visionary optimism
that excited Popular Mechanics.
While they were published, Popular Mechanics’ articles on the decentralised urban future were in line with a persistent strain of anti-urbanism in American culture and social thought, which was the motivating force behind many visionary planning ideas in the 1930s such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Broadacre City’, which eschewed the modern phenomenon of increased urbanisation and centralisation in favour of carefully planned communities where modern urban ills had been avoided.
Equally as determined to reverse the process of centralisation was the ‘Futurama’ exhibit and ride at the 1939 New York World’s Fair by Norman Bel Geddes, which presented a world 21 years into the future. This ride took viewers into the world of 1960, which Bel Geddes imagined as a utopian city with modern industrial districts, a glamorous metropolis, and high-speed transportation.
The massive systems of highways had a particular purpose; to allow citizens to escape the city. Life magazine suggested that the people of 1960 ‘do not care for possessions…they are not attached to their homes and hometown, because trains and express highways get them across America in twenty-four hours.’
Futurama may have featured a glittering metropolis, but in this exhibit the world of 1960 was one of satellite towns and suburbs, all connected by high-speed highways which opened up the United States to the common man. 1939 was therefore a last hurrah for the city of the future; the real impression that Futurama and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 would make was that the future would be brought by the vehicle, not the city.
4. The Transport of Tomorrow
Although the 1939 New York World’s Fair presented a wide and spectacular vision of the world of tomorrow, it was the future of transportation which had the most significant effect on Popular Mechanics. Not only did large car manufactures such as Ford display their newest cars on the Road of Tomorrow,
but the spectacular world of tomorrow in the Futurama exhibit featured many miniature futuristic cars on the roads in and out of the city, implying that the future was one of rapid personal transport. In the 1940s and afterwards, the speculative articles in Popular Mechanics therefore came to regularly feature fantastic urban landscape to a lesser degree, instead switching attention to the personal, and less often the public, vehicle of tomorrow.
Prior to the 1920s, when personal car ownership became much more common
(and the popular Ford Model T was, importantly, still in production),
the brilliant transportation of the future was often focused on wonderful new public modes of transportation, such as in a 1922 article which depicted a small rotor-less glider that landed passengers from a larger aircraft at intermediate points on the aerial highway,
and a 1905 article which discussed an electric locomotive which could carry 2,000 tons in its train and travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour, described as a ‘dream of modern traction.’
There are two significant explanations for this early focus on public transportation. First, at any time when only a small percentage of Americans owned their own cars, it was difficult to imagine a future which was any different; even in the fantastical landscape of the ‘Future New York’ in King’s Views of New York, with its massive towers and a sky full of flying machines, there are only a few personal vehicles to be seen.
Instead, this city is dominated by railways and public airships, as these forms of transportation were large enough to accommodate many passengers and would appeal to a society which had not yet had the opportunity to fully embrace the automobile.
This is connected to the second reason for the lack of private vehicles in the pre-1920s city of the future. These forms of public transportation, although linked to the industrial works which had created the problems of the modern city, were also seized by many visionaries as solutions to these problems. Efficient and varied transportation was intended to eliminate chaos and corruption.
The American belief in all forms of transportation as a cure for social ills and a source of personal ecstasy is evident in these visions,
but in these early visions of futuristic public transport, which ran into the 1920s and did not die out until the 1960s, public transport was a particular wonder. In 1922, one article even went so far as to compare public air travel to Jules Verne’s 1,000 Leagues Under the Sea, reasoning that since submarines had become a reality, so too much luxurious air travel.
Public transportation as the ideal transportation method was therefore common before the automobile was commonly available, and at times when the future of the car industry was in doubt, such as during the Depression and in the early 1970s. Public transportation was never able to excite Americans in the same way that private vehicles could, however,
and it was on this form that Popular Mechanics focused most of its excitement from the 1940s and onwards. Even when private vehicle ownership was less common due to economic circumstances, it was the car, and the personal flying machine, that most successfully appealed to American individualism.
The 1939 New York World’s Fair ‘Futurama’ exhibit, a presentation somewhat tellingly made by General Motors, presented visitors with the city of 1960, and it is not too cynical to say that it was something of an elaborate car advertisement. There was no railway system, and only a few buses to be seen. There was, however, a seven lane highway system crawling with streamlined cars of the future, with traffic directed from a control tower and split into lanes for speeds of 50, 75, and 100 mph each with their own exit ramps so speed could be maintained. Futurama exhibited a future of transportation very different from what had come before, now focused on the automobile of tomorrow, and it is this phenomenon which stands out in Popular Mechanics through the 1940s.
The singular defining feature of the car of tomorrow was its streamlined design. This aesthetic feature was entirely universal in Popular Mechanics’ vision of the future automobile, and had its origins with the 1927 LaSalle, produced by General Motors and designed by Harley Earl, who had been a designer and builder of custom cars for Hollywood stars in California before moving to Detroit to work for GM.
Largely beginning in the 1930s (though Scientific American published a vaguely streamlines ‘car of the future’ in 1913) the American public began to see self-proclaimed prophetic automobiles in magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Sunday newspaper supplements. It was at this time that the formula for the future car appeared, and remained consistent for the two following decades; cars of tomorrow were invariably sleek and often teardrop-shaped, with large glass ‘bubble’ canopies and a streamlined aesthetic. Depictions of such also tended to be very colourful and shiny, giving the vehicles a ‘futuristic’ appearance. One excellent example from Popular Mechanics is found in a 1940 article, illustrated by a bright red automobile with the typical bubble canopy. The article explains that ‘Outstandingly different will be the motor car of the future’,
explaining that it would bring living room luxury and many other innovations. The futuristic exterior contrasts strongly with the people inside, a man and a woman in smart 1940s clothing, as the man steers and the woman (presumably his wife) powders her face. The chairs appear to be comfortable leather, and the streamlined aesthetic continues on the inside.
This streamlined style, exterior or interior, was the universal fashion rule when designing the car of tomorrow and hints at the vehicle’s technological aspirations. There were only a few practical benefits for the streamlined, bubble-canopied style, however; it made cars easier and cheaper to manufacture, and easily mouldable plastics also lent themselves to streamlined shapes. This was not their real value, however, and in fact many of the proposed models would have performed poorly in practise. The importance of the streamlined car was its message; the aesthetic was designed to impart a sense of modernity and hence the future, and the rounded shapes and smoother surfaces suggested ‘an easy passage through the era’s turbulence and troubles.’
Thousands of miniature streamlined car models were found in the GM Futurama exhibit, and Norman Bel Geddes had designed and built larger models as early as 1932. Yet few cars were actually built which adopted this streamlined aesthetic, at least to such a strong degree. The fact was that most of these car designs were highly impractical; the bubble canopies which were promoted in Popular Mechanics and other magazines were technically impossible to make out of glass at the time, and if made of plastic they would distort the driver’s vision.
Further, the very shape of the cars would make them difficult to drive, not to mention park safely. A more extreme example of this was found in a 1914 article which depicted a halo-shaped vehicle with an air propeller for propulsion.
Although this stands at the extreme end of the spectrum of unusual futuristic vehicles found in Popular Mechanics, it is nonetheless illustrative of the low priority given to practicality when designing the car of tomorrow.
Many existing cars which were on the market at the time were indeed aerodynamically inefficient, and ideas continued to be introduced to try and solve this problem. Examples were the Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car, a streamlined and three-wheeled vehicle was also intended to be useable on land, sea and air - an ‘omnimedium, wingless transport’
which was sadly involved in a fatal accident and the chances of it ever being produced were gone.
The 1934 Chrysler Airflow was produced, however, and while its design was much more conservative than the bubble-canopied vehicle popular in Popular Mechanics - a 1940 article had another bubble-canopied vehicle with a circular lounge, drawn specifically for the magazine
- it did inherit some of the ideals of streamlining, and one 1934 advertisement boasted that ‘You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow Chrysler.’
The car sold poorly, however, and its innovative design may have been a contributing factor.
Although one could speculate that the American public was not ready for the car of tomorrow (as they were not ready for the synthetic home of tomorrow) in the popular press, it was the bubble car which remained king throughout the 1940s.
After the Second World War, the car of the future became a powerful force in popular imagination, as Detroit car manufactures began to design and heavily promote for the first time cars which embraced the future. Futuristic automobiles, often called dream cars,
were sometimes fully operable, while some remained as mock-ups or 3/8 scale models, and often they gave rise to features which would eventually appear on real cars.
For the first time automobile manufacturers were joining the industry of predicting the future, as a way to promote their current products and display the imagination and genius present in the company.
Ford Motor Company displayed some of the most futuristic and visionary displays of the car of the future in print form; unlike their competitors, Ford was more than willing to display the future in printed form, rather than attempting to create working models,
so the Advanced Styling staff were were given ‘a business of letting their imaginations run free.’
This produced such exotic results as the 1956 series of renders called ‘Life in the Year 2000.’ One panel, the ‘Twenty-first Century Traffic Arrest’ shows a sleek vehicle with a bubble canopy and large tail-fins being pulled over by a science police officer, in a night scene full of stars and an unusual aircraft which makes the image draw comparison with works of space opera.
Aerospace, alternate energy sources, and automatic driving were the main themes for cars of this period. The influence of aeroplanes after the Second World War is evident in the tail fins which begin to adorn the car of tomorrow, as do the rockets for propulsion,
and a 1967 article in Popular Mechanics predicted that in the future ‘Acceleration, braking, and steering are all combined in [a] single airplane-type control.’
Many concept vehicles were also given ‘streamlining’ parts which would in practise do nothing of the sort, such as front ends in the shape of fighter craft nosecones, while other features bordered on the ludicrous: the 1955 Lincoln Futura had two cockpit domes, one for a driver and one for a passenger, which effectively eliminated communication.
While there fuel prices in the 1950s and early 1960s remained relatively low, and there was little fear of supplies running out, some speculation and interest in alternate fuel sources for the car of the future did exist.
Some car designers experimented with gas turbines, fuel cells with electric propulsion, and even compressed air.
General Motors and Chrysler built and tested gas turbine automobiles, and Ford in fact conducted studies of levitating vehicles, although a Ford public release for the experimental Volante Tri-Athodyne, which was built to 3/8 scale in 1956 and could theoretically with its titular three-ducted fans, admitted that ‘The day when there will be an aero-car in every garage is still some time off,’ although it went on to suggest that ‘the Volante indicates one direction that the styling of such a vehicle could take.’
Popular Mechanics occasionally dealt with alternative energy sources in various articles, such as the turbine-powered unicycle discussed previously. However, speculation on these potential alternatives was never a major point of discussion, although one exception was a 1957 article which predicted that ‘by A.D. 2000 roads and streets will be replaced by a network of pneumatic tubes’, and that family vehicles will only need a small amount of power to travel along them as ‘They will be pneumatically powered to any destination.’
The other major idea which featured in the car of tomorrow in the 1950s and 1960s was that of the self-driving car. Many of the dream cars which were designed, illustrated, and described in this period attempted to take control away from the driver, essentially making him into another passenger. The Ford FX-Atmos had no steering wheel but ‘two pistol-like hand grips so that either or both controls might operate the power steering unit and eliminate all effort’ while the Buick Century Cruiser’s was a ‘four-passenger car of tomorrow’ designed for ‘rapid cross-country travel on automatic highways.’
The popularity of this idea can be traced to the expectations of social scientists that Americans in the future would be working less, and the automatic car fit in with this ethos of greater leisure and less effort.
Examples abound in Popular Mechanics. A 1965 article explained that General Motors’ new ‘Autoline’ system ‘is a complete speed and directional control system for vehicles, using remote-control electronic signals’
and would allow vehicles to travel at high speeds bumper-to-bumper without fear of crashing. Further back in 1932, an article in the magazine predicted there would be a reduced responsibility for the driver as new instruments would show upcoming traffic lights. The easy and safe future of the car was further enhanced by descriptions of its ability to be turned into a comfortable room, complete with refrigerators and cupboards.
The dream car disappears from the pages of Popular Mechanics after the 1960s. One contributing factor was competition from foreign car manufacturers, whose cars invaded the United States in the 1960s. These foreign vehicles were of a higher quality, cheaper, and often better looking than their American counterparts, putting pressure on the home industry and were a primary reason for the re-focus on engineering and away from ostentatious design.
Further, the restriction on limited resources, as well as several attacks on car safety caused engineers to be reinstated to the jobs they lost to stylists in the 1950s and ‘visioneering’ became a lost form.
Although the automobile was a popular topic in Popular Mechanics, personal flying vehicles were also fairly common. Wilbur and Orville Wright’s successful flight in 1903, the year Popular Mechanics first began publishing, opened the skies to humanity. In the early decades of aviation, the idea of humans flying in machines eventually became no more controversial or ridiculous than travelling by railroad or steamship, and many predicted this would be in the form of large public aeroplanes throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The more popular vision of the future of flight, however, and the most common to be found in Popular Mechanics, was that of the personal flying vehicle. The effects of mass production on popular thought are again evident; if cars could be produced in such great numbers and so cheaply, then why not aeroplanes?
Popular Mechanics became filled with wonderful visions of the future of flight in these decades. In 1943 the magazine reported W.B. Stout’s prediction that postwar transportation would rely largely on the aerocar, a theoretical vehicle which would be an aircraft first and car second.
At this time, some individuals built aircraft prototypes which were heralded by some as the future air vehicle for the masses, and these were usually aeroplane-automobile hybrids; the Pitcairn Autogiro Company’s AC-35 in 1936 was a cross between an automobile and a helicopter, although it could not take off or land vertically, and Robert Fulton’s Fulton Airphibian in 1946 promised that even a woman could convert the vehicle from aeroplane to automobile in five minutes.
This concept of the car which was also an aeroplane can be seen in a 1957 article which features a vehicle shaped very much like a dream car but which was capable of flying through the use of four massive fans on the body. The article explained that ‘The “flying fan” vehicles of the future will be easier to fly than helicopters, and should cost a lot less.’
The Second World War had heightened expectations that family flying vehicles were on the horizon, with several American communities building ‘air parks’ in anticipation of new levels of personal aerial traffic, and one survey even concluded that one out of three automobile retailers expected to add personal air vehicles to their repertoires after the war.
There was a booming phenomenon of inventors and manufactures designing and promoting air-land hybrid vehicles for the family market.
While there was surge in small plane sales in 1946, the market sagged the next year and by 1950 it was clear that the personal air vehicle was never going to be a common luxury, and the air-land hybrid remained a fantasy. After the war, the automobile industry was experiencing a surge itself;
the future was most certainly going to be the automobile.
Conclusion
The pages of Popular Mechanics are an expression of the great optimism which was infused in Americans from the turn of the 20th century, even on those occasions when the news, or contributors, came from outside the United States. The future, as predicted within each issue, is a wonderful place where modern technological advancements have brought in a new age of ease and luxury. These two themes, ease and luxury, are almost universal in the magazine; whatever form the house, the kitchen, the city and the transport of tomorrow were predicted to take, they were always going to be as affordable as they were comfortable. It is not hard to glean the ideas Americans had for the future; Popular Mechanics was a magazine made to sell for a profit, and it is not overly cynical to say that they did this by telling the public what it wanted to read. The future Americans wanted, the one they wanted to be told was coming, was one which had left behind the low years of the Depression and of the two World Wars.
Of course, the predictions of Popular Mechanics could not have been made without these events. The prefabricated homes of tomorrow which promised cheap and clean housing for all came at a time when many Americans were going without such a habitat; without the urgent necessity of solving this problem, such fantastical predictions as the modular home would not have been made. The same goes equally for the city of the future; the first newspaper depictions of the city of tomorrow show it grown out of control, and it was the proposed solutions to rapid urbanisation that drove and inspired the more utopian images which appeared in Popular Mechanics.
The need to predict the future because of existing problems was only half of the motivating force, however. Again these predictions could not have been made if not for the astronomical advances in technology which render the 20th century unique in world history. It is a truism to say that Popular Mechanics was a technology magazine, and its wonderful predictions were, no matter how fantastical, dependent on a level of technical legitimisation. Many of the machines described were never likely to be a reality, at least within the given time frame. Flying cars and washing the house with a hose stand out as two examples of predictions made by Popular Mechanics which would not pan out in real life; hover vehicles are a reality but are much more humble, and while easily cleaned synthetic materials are widely available none dry at such a rate as any sensible person would hose down their living rooms.
That the technology often failed to pan out in the real world is missing the point, however. The predictions in Popular Mechanics were often optimistic, one might even say naive, but so were many aspects of their predictions. It is very telling that the future presented in the magazine was static socially and politically. Even in landscapes which clearly must be set far in the future, where technology has permeated the lives of every American, the humans which inhabit these images are perfect fits for the years which predicted them. The idea of technology as a massive force in social change never deeply effected the predictions of Popular Mechanics, even when social revolutions and massive lifestyle changes were altering the United States more than many of the technologies which the magazine discussed. But the views in Popular Mechanics, although often based on real science, were fundamentally optimistic, and this should not detract from their use a source which can tell us about the social and technological aspects of the United States across the decades discussed.
Within Popular Mechanics, the restless, explorative, and independent nature of the American character and culture is firmly evident. The nation which is reflected in these predictions is one which can be boundless in its optimism, and obsessed with the future. Predicting the future was a big industry in the time of hobby and pulp magazines, because they showed the American public a glimpse of a world which often seemed only just out of sight, where the technology that was already beginning to change his life had given the man a life of resplendent luxury, endless excitement, and an end to chores of daily existence which had too often been the reality for many decades. In light of this, and in mind of the sound technological base which Popular Mechanics so often sought to establish, the eccentricities of many articles become more than science fiction, but a very real example of the American spirit.
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