The Future That Never Was: Pictures from the Past

A Venetian-like plan submitted for Chicago solves transportation problems and allows for a pleasant day of shopping.

Among the modernistic buildings proposed by architects is that of a revolving restaurant mounted on a huge column. This affords diners an opportunity for sight-seeing while dining or strolling on platforms.

Cross section of the future city, with many traffic levels underground; top, street for pedestrians only, and airplane landing fields, above.

"The step-back skyscrapers of the future will have moving stairs on the outside of the buildings instead of elevators, with facilities for passengers to alight at any floor," declared Harvey Wiley Corbett, noted city planner. "Some of the skyscrapers will be a half mile high and will house small-sized cities."

Major Henry H. Curran of New York, opposes Mr. Corbett and points to the impossibilities of such buildings in terms of human happiness as well as construction, saying, "There are everyday workers who count their ribs on release from the elevators and subways that take them to their offices. They must pop out of kiosks like prairie dogs."

TRUE!

The tallest building in today's world is Burj Khalifa in Khalifa. At 2,684 feet, it's just over a half mile high, although its use is primarily commercial and it lacks the moving stairs.

In the odorless city of the future, automobiles will wear gas masks. Poisonous and disagreeable fumes from gasoline and oil-propelled vehicles will disappear, making it unnecessary for a city's inhabitants to wear gas masks. 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.

LEFT: The canary, little martyr of gas experiments; CENTER: An apparatus for purifying exhaust gases; RIGHT: Experimenter wears gas mask in fight to cleanse city's air.

The best way of visualizing the new world of A.D. 2000 is to introduce you to the Dobsons, who live in Tottenville, a hypothetical metropolitan suburb of 100,000. The highways that radiate from Tottenville are much like those of today, except that they are broader with hardly any curves. In some of the older cities, where it was difficult to alter the streets because of the immense investment in real estate and buildings, the highways are double-decked. The upper deck is for fast nonstop traffic; the lower deck is much like our avenues, with brightly illuminated shops. Beneath the lower deck is the level reserved entirely for business vehicles.

In the homes, electricity is used to warm walls and to cook. Factories all burn gas, which originates in sealed mines. The tars are removed and sold to the chemical industry for their values, and the gas thus laundered is piped to a thousand communities. But that's not the only source of energy in Tottenville. Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth's surface every day. Many farmhouses in the future will be heated by solar rays and some cooking will be done by solar heat.

The home of the future, as an architect envisages it in year 2000 was exhibited in London recently. The new invention Vitaglass admits the sun's ultraviolet rays in fair weather into each room, and produces artificial sunlight for cloudy days and night use to create a permanent summer-day effect.

Complete with convertible metal furniture; bunk rooms rather than bedrooms, laid out somewhat like steamer cabins; movable walls; a garage for a combination airplane-automobile with folding wings; and, on the garage roof, a second-story swimming pool, gardens fitted with plants in movable containers; and wireless power and program reception masts, the citizens of tomorrow will have a home full of sunlight.

An inches-deep rooftop lake may become an important air-conditioning method.

From the prairie schooner to the modern trailer coach is a vast step forward. More surprising is this prediction of Roger W. Babson, able statistician: "Within twenty years, more than half the population of the United States will be living in automobile trailers!"

Dresses of asbestos that will be as lustrous as silk and will give long wear, with ease in cleaning, are predicted by an eastern scientist. Fabrics are already being made from trees and vegetables and the Romans made a sort of cloth from asbestos fibers centuries ago, so this prophecy is considered entirely reasonable by experts. The use of asbestos in the early Roman days was confined largely to the weaving of shrouds. According to tradition, Charlemagne had a tablecloth of asbestos which was cleaned by throwing it into the fire. In the seventeenth century, Chinese merchants displayed asbestos handkerchiefs and the Eskimos in Labrador have used lampwicks made of an asbestos fabric for many years.

When the housewife of 2000 cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors—all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) she turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. She throws soiled "linen" into the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but she has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.

Pneumatic armchairs, with enormous inflated cushions built up in sections, can be deflated and folded up into a small space when not needed. A dining room table built in three sections can be completely set, even to the centerpiece of flowers, and then folded up as a three-story tea cart and wheeled in from the kitchen.

A glass-dome oven, a range that cooks by induction heating without warming its marble top and a refrigerator with revolving shelves are features of this kitchen. The uncooled top section of the refrigerator stores dry foods.

Fifty years hence, according to Roger W. Babson, internationally known statistician, the milk bottle will probably be a museum relic, along with the ice wagon, the coal shovel and the ash can, and our milk and butter will be derived from kerosene instead of cows, while most of our other food will be served in concentrated or pill form.

Cooking a ham sandwich in high-frequency radio waves. This method may be common in the home of the future.

Before long you may see frozen dinners served in hotels, trains, planes, ships, factories, offices and your own home. They probably will be sold in grocery stores and delicatessens.

A wide selection of frozen dinners is expected to be available soon in grocery and frozen food stores. Eventually, frozen meals will be delivered from house to house.

FACT: The first TV Dinner was sold by C.A. Swanson & Sons in 1953, spawning a huge frozen-meal industry.

Ordinary grass gives promise of providing low-income families diets more abundant in vitamins than are now enjoyed by the wealthy. Housewives soon may add nourishing powdered grass to recipes.

Foods and other items will be carried to the cashier not by the customer but by a conveyor belt in this "assembly line" grocery store. The customer is given with a roll of tape which is punched with holes when she inserts a key in a slot next to the item selected. When she finishes shopping, she hands the tape to a clerk who operates a combination "translator" and adding machine. This instrument interprets the punched holes just as a piano player plays from a music roll. Electrical impulses race to gravity chutes and release guards that drop unbreakable articles to the conveyor belt. More delicate merchandise is lowered to the moving belt by a tripper shelf, so all types of supplies—even eggs—may be handled by this system.

Manufacturers have come to look upon the design and distribution of home appliances as a long-term job of making electric homes. Today's house is a series of separate centers of electrification. Tomorrow's electric home will be build around the electric power supply and appliances.

This future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room in the house. Perhaps short-wave radio may be utilized for this purpose, as well as for answering the doorbell and receiving visitors by transmitting a greeting to them and unlocking the door.

FACT: A Japanese inventor patented a bar code-reading remote control for microwave ovens back in 1989, and a simpler controller was patented in America in 2005. For some reason, the idea has never caught on.

Push buttons are predicted to replace dial phones.

The 1963 Seattle World's Fair introduced the push button phone, and this soon overtook dial phones.

The nonstop delivery of airplane mail via parachute is being rapidly developed in the United States, France, and England. Valuable matter—the only kind carried by airplanes—must be carefully guarded, which means, among other things, that it must be landed within a few feet of the person authorized to receive it. At present the accuracy with which the bags are landed depends entirely upon the skill and aim of the airman. However, some astonishingly close "hits" are being made with, and still greater accuracy is expected from, a two-speed parachute which is being developed in France. In the meantime it is quite safe to predict that parachute delivery will sometime become the rule.