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Tales of the Future Past
atlacatl writes "One of the coolest sites I've been to: Tales of the Future Past -
It tells the story (In pictures) of the predictions of the new millenium, early in the 20th century. I had forgotten the web was actually fun and interesting - use at your own risk."
Not millenium.
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There is actually a travelling smithsonian exhibit going across the country to smaller communities on this ery subject. You read read about it here, it is currently in Rexburg, Idaho.
There's quite a lot posted there. Mostly referring to images, but here's a couple excerpts -- It was slashdotted while I was reading it...
TALES OF FUTURE PAST
It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.
A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we're there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o'clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.
Boy, were we off base. It isn't simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
FUTURE CITY
This is Frank R. Paul's depiction of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, Roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Smoise regulations.
The iconic image of the future is the city
Blah, I'm still waiting on the crater-front property on the Moon that I signed up for :(
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The images are doctored/faked. Check out the ferris whell of death, the picture of the magazine cover it was printed on says more about it can be read on page 666. Too many other mistakes to mention, looks like someone was looking for some /. attention
http://leela.lasthome.net/www.davidszondy.com/futu re/
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
More on Brasilia's depressing architecture here.
The Army reading list
Here. Although that link seems a bit slow aswell... *sigh*
Silly rabbit
A nice and cheap book about the future as imagined in the early 20th century :
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/3822815667/
They cut the professors line "Sweet zombie Jesus!"...
The professor had quite a lot of quasi-blasphemous lines, like this one:
"All videotapes were erased in the year 2500 due to the second coming of Christ."
I have many old Popular Mechanix and Popular Science (and a few old Popular Electronics, etc) from the 30's-60's - and the old issues most certainly had wacky imagery on the covers - I have one showing these huge planes (like, Spruce Goose size or larger!) getting a "boost" for launching by rolling down a very tall and big "ski jump"-type ramp, catupulting off it into the sky! I have another issue, which at least looks more real, but is scary in the image it portrays (Science and Mechanics, April 1963): "Wonderful Machine That Stops Parkinson's Disease" - shows this guy laying on the table with these probes in his head (no "halo" or anything like you would see in a real radiographic surgery today - don't twitch!) - the crazy thing is while this is an illustration, the inside article shows the real thing, and no halo there either! Supposedly developed at the "State University of Iowa Hospital", the equipment being developed by the "University of Illinois" - it supposedly worked via ultrasound. This is a real article, real pictures - enough information for you to follow it up if you so wished (makes you wonder if it worked?)...
The image published of the "Ion Propelled Aircraft" (Popular Mechanics, Aug 1964) - that is a real issue, I am looking at it on my desk right now (cost me $5.00 to buy the issue, originally priced at 35 cents!). What is interesting about this article (if you read the actual article), you would see what was being demonstrated are actually what we /.'ers know as "Lifter" technology (I had to sneak in a JNL ref!) - do a google on "lifter", "jnl", and "Major de Seversky" for more info - all real stuff, he was demoing this long before the internet (but still no progress made toward a real craft) - the article is fun though - Seversky's crafts look no better or worse constructed than "modern" versions (likely he used nearly the same materials - balsa wood and tinfoil).
Finally, yes, these magazines were dedicated to helping the common man learn about science and technology, and the impact they had on the normal joe's life. In most of them (the good ones), there were many "do-it-yourself" artciles on building all manner of devices and such, from simple barbeque grills, to more complex devices (answering machines, garage door openers, electric edgers, helicopters, small planes, small cars, both gas and electric, etc). At the time, people were more willing to build such devices (people also were less stupid - and less litigious - probably because TV wasn't as prevalent) - many items shown were either not available for the homeowner, or only at a great cost (many articles showed how to build things that could be bought for much more, out of stuff most people would throw away - for example, the electric sidewalk edger I mentioned used a discarded vacuum cleaner motor for power). All of this "do-it-yourself" stuff declined rapidly throughout the 70's-80's, and these magazines all dropped off, or changed radically from what they once were - leaving the husks of "Popular Science" and "Popular Mechanics" as they are today.
Sad, really - and reflects an even sadder state for the people of today's society - who couldn't "DIY" to save their life, it seems...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon