Cars Driving in the Sky: the Future of the City, 1930's

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

In an earlier post here I wrote about  living a big life in a big airplane--I saw this weird little print and was attracted to its unrepentent awfullness and the sleeky bulbous nature of this exotically unflyable aircraft.  I guess it bothered me becuase even though it was unsupportably  big it didn't bother to have any of the luxurious features that other, similarly bloated-enormous aircraft had at the time:  swimming pools, greenhouses, landing strips for other planes...  This one didn't have anything like that, and didn't really seem to make any sense, unless that big belly part was actually a zeppelin or something like that, filled with helium--but even that doesn't make sense.  Perhaps we need to assume that it is supported in the air by something yet named and unknowable, powered by engines that were far advanced.  But what is more interesting in the print are the multi-tiered auto-skyways and suspended nonsensical roads that hang between the skyscrapers like a gravity marble game.

These other cities of the future at least take a greater leap of faith in the belief of extraordinary inventions and abandon the generally stylized shape of known aircraft and propulsion systems.  At least for the next two images, even the architecture is mostly new.  What I'd really like to know is what people were doing in those buildings and where they were going in those hover cars.  For the most part in stories of the future like this people were simply going to work as they would in 1937, driving off with anti-gravity sumpin' to Spacely Sprockets to do office work as it was in the past. 

 

 

For the most part future vision seemed grounded in the past, techno-wizzardry  carved into the fabric of existing society.  I'm not so sure what was so "futuristic" about elevated railways stacked up on top of each other like flapjacks, but to someone there in the 1930's past it looked like a great thing about to happen....in 1965. 

Comments

[Jeff]

That plane is an early vision of the discount airline. It actually holds 5,000 people, with a crew of 50 partying and Twittering in that ample cockpit. The hopeful thing in those visions of future cities is the ignorance of the Second Law and the likely discounting of depreciation and a general Pollyanna view of human nature. Fortunately, there are also plenty of dystopian visions in which the infrastructure is properly decayed, the auto bridges collapsed, the 5,000-seat discount aircraft wrecked and stripped for parts. However, I think that in each vision, the people in those buildings are doing the same thing.

[John Ptak]

2nd Law be damned I say...plus I think the plane is ALL cockpit. It would make a nice setting I agree for a post-dystopian landscape for a story of people trying to recover their Lost Lives in the Office. Or something. Also, apologies for all of the bleepin' typos which I hope didn't make your eyes burn too much--I sent that one out into the world by mistake, publishing it instead of drafting it. So it goes.

[Jeff]

Don't worry about typos, John. In fifty years, they will look quaint.