It is always enjoyable to
speculate about the future. Of course, our ancestors did the same. They made
predictions about life in the twenty-first century. Some of the most
interesting ones were about transportation.
In the earlier part of the twentieth
century, Popular Science Magazine often had covers that depicted commuters
buzzing around in tiny aircraft and landing on rooftops, or fanciful drawings
of vehicles that not only run on roads, but also float on water and take to the
air. Later years saw the prediction of a person strapping on a jetpack and
levitating into the air, allowing him or her to commute to work effortlessly.
(I always wondered how they would handle rain and snowstorms.) My father
collected every Popular Science Magazine since the 1920s, and I remember
spending many hours poring over those old editions when I was a child.
Some fanciful predictions
were actually built. For instance, how about the Beach Pneumatic Railway, New York City’s earliest subway? It was actually built; hundreds
of thousands of New Yorkers took a smooth ride on compressed air when this
model railway was open from 1870-1873. Newspapers and magazines of the era
predicted that subways would soon exist in every city, all riding on compressed
air. Despite commuter enthusiasm, this subway failed.
Of course, some of the
predictions did come true and were manufactured in large quantities. One early
1940s advertisement from Milwaukee Machine Tools boldly predicted that air
conditioning would become available for automobiles after the war. You can see
this at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/futuristics/auto/1.html.
The University of California at Berkeley has created an online exhibition of transportation
predictions made over the centuries. The exhibit starts with Leonardo da
Vinci’s visions of helicopters and airplanes and moves forward to recent times.
These are the same pictures and words that fueled the imaginations of our
ancestors. This is how they thought their descendants would live and travel. It
is fun to see which of those predictions came true as well as the many that did
not.
My favorites include the
flying automobile at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/futuristics/auto/
and the automobile-mounted paging system at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/futuristics/auto/2.html.
Even these futurists never envisioned a miniature beeper on a person's belt.
You can look at the future
predictions of the past at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/futuristics/
It is always enjoyable to
speculate about the future. Of course, our ancestors did the same. They made
predictions about life in the twenty-first century. Some of the most
interesting ones were about transportation.
