Category: Future, History of the

The Battle of Berlin, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 869

Well, it wasn’t really a battle, but the Nazi government was
getting ready for one. As reported in this 30 March 1935 issue of The
Illustrated London News. There was an
elaborate preparedness drill conducted in the Kreuzberg district of south Berlin ten days earlier—“the
most realistic air raid exercises ever planned”.

The Germans attacked themselves with scores of low flying
planes that dropped “deafening” false bombs; meanwhile the streets were swirling
with gases that smelled like poison gas, cars were blaze, abandoned buildings were
lit up with pyrotechnics, and there were heaps of rubble here and there. The population not otherwise engaged in
defense measures were all sent to evacuation shelters and centers. There were drills for gas attacks and
subsequent decontamination, firefighting, saving people from collapsed
buildings, caring for children and the elderly, aid stations, medical triage,
and so on. Anti-bombing measures were also
taken for nighttime raids, with blackouts, and general light-lessening measures
on all levels and quarters—for example, streetlights and street sign lamps were
replaced with much lower wattage bulbs. It
looks like it was a pretty big event–I’ll have to check my Illustriete Zeitung/Leipzig for the
German coverage.

Without being an historian of the 1930’s preparations for
war defense, it seems to me that there was an awful lot of this going on in England, France
and Germany
through most of the decade.

[The illustration above is a charming overstatement of the obvious, right down to the little flaglettes on either side of the (500-pound ?) bomb. The sign reads “Closed Thoroughfare//Danger to Life” (sorta).

I doubt that there would be that much need for a sign or flags, but if I was going to use anything at all I might place it a little further away from the unexploded device. (I can just imagine people inching forward to be able to read what the relatively small print on the sign actually said…)

At this point it may be interesting to have a look at an
older post here on the creation of the false Paris.

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The History of the Future of Skyscrapers: Thomas Nast, 1881

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Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was an extraordinary talent who created the politically/socially influential political cartoon. He worked tirelessly for Harper’s Weekly, joining the weekly illustrated newspaper in 1858 at the age of 19, contributing at least one large (usually front cover) political statement and two smaller cartoons every week, for 26 years.

He wielded an enormous social influence, electing a president (Hayes) and toppling Boss Tweed. He was a staunch Republican who endlessly fought for balanced budgets, free education, and equal rights for Indians and Blacks, fair economic play to the working classes, and was viciously anti Klan. He also created the popular images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, the Republican elephant Democrat donkey, and the Tammany tiger. The man got a lot of things right¹.

Another bit of the future that came to a pretty accurate light under his pen was this view of New York City. Printed in 1881, “New York in a Few Years from Now, View from the Bay”, shows a NYC skyline that—if the scale was returned to normal—would’ve looked pretty accurate at the turn of the century. Nast drew a grouping of large skyscrapers rising from around the battery (a ferry terminal visible at front-center), reaching about 30 stories or so. Since he was a caricaturist/cartoonist, the buildings are drawn out of scale to enhance the vision—given the other available details (including the way too tall Trinity Church lurking in the shadows), the skyline would’ve been about half the size if drawn for accuracy’s sake. But Nast wasn’t looking for accuracy, but a vision. If everything were scaled to a more accurate perspective, he would’ve been pretty close to the skyline in 1900.

It was a very commendable job by Nast, who produced the drawing at the very dawn of the modern skyscraper age, just at the very beginning of the building and design practices tat would make it possible to build structures that were dozens of stories tall. The greatest advance was the introduction of cage frame construction, which started to appear ten years earlier, but most of the other stuff necessary to have tall structures—heating and cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet toilets], elevators with dependable brakes—weren’t really introduced until just after this cartoon appeared. As a matter of fact, Nast’s work even preceded the great building boom that would occur just after publication, which was a response of sorts to the depression and malaise of the middle/.late 1870’s. The greatest of these early tall buildings, the Joseph Pulitzer New York World building, looked quite like one of these Nast structures—and was built in 1889/90, rising 300 feet or so into the air.

Nast’s buildings even preceded the invention of the word “skyscraper”, which would appear in his own Harper’s Weekly in 1893.

Given his workload, Nast’s drawing was undoubtedly a quick work. Greater, grander, more science-fiction-y views o the future of NYC were to come, but generally these were almost entirely post-airplane/automobile.

Works like King’s Views of New York ²(1911) featured colossal structures with roads connecting the tops of buildings, perilously airplane-congested skies, and so on—but generally appeared after the necessary technologically-based innovations supplied more necessary imaginative/creative tools to create more incredible cities. But that’s another story. As I said, I think Nast did a marvelous job with the materials on hand.

Notes:

1. “The Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast “Father of the American Cartoon,” Who Brought Them Into Politics.” (PDF). New York Times.

2. See Edison Effect blog, here, for a nice post on King’s Views.

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The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 877

This is a continuation of an earlier post on mapping the
invasion of America
in 1942.

[It starts: LIFE
Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942
issue. I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled
“Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its
readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix
(women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners,
Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack
Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and
Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover
photo. But once LIFE paid its bills, the article got right to business,
responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie on the possibilities
of the U.S.
losing the war…]

The article displayed six maps showing possible invasion
routes from the east and west. It was
also illustrated with four unusual graphic images depicting various parts of
the U.S.
attacked and pulverized by Japanese and German forces. [Images like these—outside the science fiction
world–were very uncommon.]

The first image shows the assault and capture of the town of
Dutch Harbor,
“the pivot of Alaskan defense” by Japanese forces. I guess we’re to assume that the American
military base on opposite the town has been overtaken already, with the assault
on the town being a mop-up operation. Odd thing here is that Dutch Harbor
and Fort Mears were actually attacked n 3 June
1942 by a Japanese aircraft carrier (and entourage) which inflicted moderate
damage on the harbor and fort, and killed 78 Americans. This was a diversionary movement, meant to
draw away American attention from Midway.
It didn’t work.

This image shows Japanese mountain troops rounding up the
locals after their successful attack on Mt. Rainier. I’m not so sure why the force was here and
not in Seattle, as (a) there is no port here, and (b) there wasn’t anything
going on so far as war production goers, which was definitely happening north
of here. That’s a very long column of
Japanese soldiers headed towards Rainier; I’m
not sure where they were going. Also
there are two large cannons (88s or thereabouts) taking aim at the mountain. Again, I think here that the mountain would
win in the long run.

The petroleum culture is under attack here in southern California. The Japanese tank commander is shooting a gas
station attendant who has just sprayed the tank with gas and set it on
fire. I’m not sure why the oil
facilities are on fire, unless we did it.

These Heinkel-177’s are bombing an unnamed East Coast war production
plant, crossing the ocean straight from Germany ?). They are presented here essentially as a manned
bomb—the crew was supposed to drop their load, destroy their secret equipment, then
parachute and surrender after auguring in their aircraft. This push-pull
engine configuration on this LIFE magazine
version of a bad aircraft—and the only heavy bomber the Luftwaffe ever produced
in numbers—never was able to drag this aircraft across the Atlantic.
Its maximum bombing range was about 925 miles,
which means even if the crew expected not to return it would still only get about
two-thirds of the way across the ocean.

I’d say that this article might well have established a new
fear-line in the minds of many of LIFE’s
millions of readers, introducing them to the possibility of mainline attack
just a few short months following Pearl Harbor.

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Bad Ideas Department: Really Big, Really Bad–Mussolini’s Monster.

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“Building
skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war. In fact, the analogy
is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where
maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of
construction against the forces of nature.” -Col. William A. Starrett, Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build
Them (1928)

Indeed! I wonder if Starrett (whose book, or at least
its cover, is beautifully designed and a roaring bore to read) had this
proposed building (below) in mind—if so, we could’ve skipped right past WWII
and declared WWIII.

It’s a good thing
that the Roman skyline isn’t punctured here and there by skyscrapers—especially
those that would’ve been built during the Fascist era. Take, for example, this planned 1100-foot
monster, proposed in 1925, in the third year of Mussolini’s government. This is an idealized cityscape of course,
created to show height comparisons with famous buildings, but this thing
(looking very much like Moscow
University) would’ve
created a hole in the sky and thrown a suffocating, shadowing presence all over
the city. Granted it isn’t as monstrous
as many of the international style buildings could’ve been had they been a fifth
of a mile high–that work was left to the cobbled hand of Philip Johnson in
America—but it is still horrible enough all on its own. More horrible to think that it could’ve
swallowed whole the seven biggest buildings in Rome, and was taller than the seven greatest architectural
wonders of the ancient world stacked one on top of the other.

It is curious to
note that this spaceship-like building was drawn for The Illustrated London News (24 January 1925) by Chesley Bonestell
(1888-1986), an artist and designer, and known as “the Father of Space Art”. The best thing that this building could’ve
done was to light its afterburners and take off.

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Poe and the Internet, 1845

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In one of his essays¹Edgar Poe wrote about the power of
writing for what he saw as a revolutionary form of information distribution—anastatic
printing. He was wrong about its instant
application in releasing the writer from the habits, time, expense and editing
of the printing process; he was wrong that it was the greatest achievement
since Gutenberg; and he was wrong about most everything else about the (real)
process. He was right though in his vision
for the distribution of information. I’m
participating in this vision right now, except there was no way that even the
supremely gifted Poe could have envisioned the way in which information was
being shared on 20^th November 2009.

Anastatic printing was a simple way of reproducing
handwritten documents for a mass audience.
The problem was though that the process tended to destroy the
original. Highly problematic. But Poe wasn’t interested in those aspects of
the technical problems of the process—it was the possibility of relatively
immediate distribution of the written word that had his attention. He wrote:

“The tendency of all this to cheapen information, to
diffuse knowledge and amusement, and to bring before the public the very class
of works which are most valuable, but least in circulation on account of
unsaleability — is what need scarcely be suggested to any one. But benefits
such as these are merely the immediate and most obvious — by no means the most
important.”

And so materials saleable and unsalable would have equal
access to a reading public, which is an enormous concept, to think that all
sorts of information could be made accessible regardless of the tastes of the
buying public. Exceptionally low
production costs would also make dissemination feasible for and to a wider
range of people—since the cost of production would be lower the cost of the final
product could/would be as well, making things within the reach of the working
poor (perhaps). This also means that
anastatic printing could also give voice to the working poor as well—a class of
writer little know before the time of Dickens.

Better yet if the manuscript was actually legible. In Poe’s mind, the importance of legibility
and prettiness was of a high order since your manuscript was the final product.
Poe writes:

“This consideration will lead to the cultivation of a neat
and distinct style of handwriting — for authors will perceive the immense
advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the
expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention
of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some
attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and
stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his
own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of
being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original
conception about him.”

Again, Poe was wrong about the medium but would be right
about the message. Perhaps his mind was
filled then with the very-new telegraph, imagining instantaneous communication
over distances and carrying that development sci-fi-forward. The telegraph (1837-1845) followed by the
telephone (1876) and then wireless telegraphy (1898) and television (1905-1927)
all would have enormous impact on our description of reality. But no technological change would encompass
Poe’s vision until 1979 (+) with the development of the internet. Poe’s technology was wrong, but his thought-prognosis
was pretty spot-on.

1. “Anastatic Printing”, in the Broadway Journal, April 12, 1845.

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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.

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History of the Future: Radio in the Classroom, 1945

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KDKA in Pittsburgh
was one of the first radio stations to broadcast in the USA in 1920—two
years later found another 500 licensed stations. By the time this pamphlet was
published nearly 95% of all homes in America were equipped with a radio,
the near high end of the Golden Era of the medium. (Perhaps there is no
greater, faster change in any sort of revolutionary change than there was from
radio to television. TV was basically an
insignificant spot on the radio horizon in 1945, and then in ten short years it
became radio’s great black sun, obliterating it as a competitor for
entertainment.) It is no wonder that radio was seen as a
potential colossus for an information delivery system, with schools making use
of whatever it was that they could squeeze from it.

This history of the future picture on the front
cover of this (1945) publication reminds me of the anxious moments in the opening
moments of 8^th grade when one of the teachers brought a television
to school (being in NYC) for us to watch the Mets in the 1969 World Series,
nearly 40 years ago next week. (There were series games played in sunlight
then.) Radio had great potential and
promise, and the kids crowded around this receiver/turntable tech center would’ve
been like kids 10 years ago crowding around a monitor to see their first
glimpses of the internet.

Radio didn’t make it.

There’s some interesting detail in this
photo. The programming on the blackboard
in the rear directed the children to classrooms for the different radio
lessons: “New Horizons”, “World of Wings”,
“Science at Work”. “By Freedom’s Light”, and a few others that I can’t make
out. All were CBS productions, which
evidently had nothing to do with the publisher of this pamphlet, Newsweek. The shows were being broadcast by WBEZ,
Chicago, which was actually a Chicago Public Schools station and intended for just
this purpose—real public broadcasting.

The girls in the front are looking at a user’s
guide for “CBS American School
of the Air”, which seems to have had some legs as an idea, or at least its
legacy looks really interesting. In the 1939/40 season of this “program” the
great music and sound geologist and proto-multiculturalist Alan Lomax¹ (1915-2002) wrote and directed “American Folk Songs”, “featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, the Golden Gate Quartet,
Burl Ives, Aunt Molly Jackson, and field recordings of square dancing,
French-Canadian, and lumberjack songs”.
Which means I guess that school kids were being exposed to impressively different
sorts of American music that they probably would not have hears anywhere else
as incidental sound.

But as I said, radio was swept away by the great leavener of
television. It looks like Alan Lomax
never did do anything for the TV, and its educational aspect (so far as
school-use goes) never really did get off the ground. Overall, it seems to me that TV never did get as smart as radio.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that because of Lomax’s one-world Lefty approach to the
appreciation of music–world music today, multiculturalism in another form—he came
to the squinty-eyed attention of the challenged J.Edgar Hoover, the FBI
managing to produce an 800-page file on the ethnomusicologist, all without a
single anti-American blot. Lomax’s total
body of work is astonishing, and we all owe the man a strong salute.

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Paleo-futurology: Solar House, 1946

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This
interesting 1946 pamphlet combines tow modern interests in one package: Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home
presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar
friendly. The architect and engineer was
George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of
the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933.

The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house
location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the
storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and
lots of transfer-friendly double-paned windows, all of which were
forward-thinking ideas for 1946. In
addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and
quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time. There was also an impetus for quick, good
construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans.
The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are
instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of
years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale
dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas–and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.

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History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research
Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the
vertically integrated food production business in the United States .
Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research)
directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the
contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover
intimates. There is a giant series of
silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted
agribusiness. The simple farmer on his
tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course
the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”,
but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would
become. The family farm would be
absorbed by the skyline of major business:
at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population
was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped
to about 1.5%. The small, independent farms
had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production,
controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil
erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic
chemicals, and on and on.

So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be
prescient after all, and pretty much true:
except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much
absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.

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Anti-Nazi Propaganda and the Triumph of Nazism in the U.S., 1943

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This striking image appeared in LIFE magazine for 4 January 1943 as an appeal from American Locomotive for the American people to be aware of what might be expected of them in the very near future if the war did not go as planned. It is doubtful that this ever could have happened, even if the tide of combat had not turned against the Germans by this point–the enormous sucking sound began in the war in the East as 90,000+ German soldiers surrendered at Stalingrad at about this

time in January, the fate of the Nazi regime had been decided at Potsdam, the war in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, Midway) was going the way of the Allies, and the invasion of North Africa was well underway, the noose beg

inning to tighten on Axis Europe. This is a little fast-and-loose on the history of the war, but I think it generally accurate to say that no Nazi flags would be displayed in American courtrooms. The other, last nail in this coffin was the beginn

ing of the Manhattan Project in June 1942, an undertaking which would lead to ultimate domination. I think it safe to say too that there was no way that any other country (or alliance) could have produced the necessary (and terrific) amounts of energy, plus large manpower, plus expertise, plus the ability to maintain the massive project (all in s

ecret)–it was all simply too much. Had the Nazis been more successful in Europe and less adventurous in the East, and was somehow able to conquer it all (and this removing the U.S. from the equation), well perhaps then it could have been possible for Germany to develop the bomb. on the third hand, given the rest of the development in the American war as dynamic, the U.S. would’ve bombed Germany (and etc.) with atomic weapons before they could have developed anything on their own. all of this is trivial rumblings to be sure–I just wanted to survey the possibility of the Nazi overthrow of America. The U.S. would’ve been too terribly much for anyone, especially given the experiment in the desert.

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