“The World of Tomorrow”
The Future Is Now—Don’t Get Trampled The Modernism that defined the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago presaged a related yet fundamentally different philosophy, futurism. Less apprehensive about industrialization than the Modernists, Futurists celebrated industry’s dynamism, and the sheer, aggressive joy of technology. In his 1909 “Manifesto of Futurism,” Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti celebrated “a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” He gloried in what he saw as a perfect symbol of the age and the movement: “[a] racing car with its trunk adorned by great exhaust pipes like snakes with an explosive breath, a roaring car that seems to be driving under shrapnel. . . .”
Futurism manifested itself most strongly in painting and poetry, and although much of it focused on the startle effect of a new visual aesthetic, it also was heavily philosophical. Marinetti’s “Manifesto” expressed an overheated fondness for “the box on the ear, and the fisticuff,” and for war, which Marinetti recommended as “the only hygiene of the world. . . . the fine Ideas [sic] that kill, and the scorn of woman.” This sort of distinctly male, essentially adolescent coffeehouse-and-garret rhetoric encouraged some dramatically fresh literature and visual art, but for everyday applications, futurism suggested only a way of thinking, rather than a material way of life. For the latter, we must turn to an offshoot of futurism, which can usefully be called Practical Futurism.
Practical Futurists found excitement in industry and cities—and speculated on how to remake our urban centers, our factories, our agriculture, and our homes. It is because of Practical Futurism that America and the larger industrialized world developed an openness about technology’s possibilities—the openness that allowed popular acceptance of a unique concept: unidentified flying objects.
By 1920, amateur and professional explorers had mapped the poles, the Amazon, “darkest Africa,” and other points that had been inaccessible just a generation before. Technology to allow extensive undersea exploration had still to be developed, so Practical Futurists and exploration enthusiasts—cognizant, of course, of rocket technology—began to look seriously at places located beyond Earth.
The Technocracy movement of the 1930s posited that society could be made efficient and productive with rule combining production economics and technology, administered by elite technicians and engineers. So bloodless that it shortly came in for spoofing by W. C. Fields and others, Technocracy did not go easily: much of its love of order and high-tech autocracy manifested itself in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which was abuzz with robots and autogyros, and mechanistic visions of near-future highways, factories, cities, and homes. The Future had arrived.
Signposts on the Road to Practical Futurism and UFO Culture Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: Albert Einstein’s famed theory is actually two: his Special Theory of Relativity (published 1905) and his Theory of General Relativity (1916). Together they encourage thoughts of practical, long-distance space travel.
The Special Theory is premised on the assumption that the speed of light is absolute. If you stand in place and switch on, say, a portable spotlight, the light will travel at 186,000 miles per second. Nothing can travel faster. But what happens if you switch on your spotlight as you run forward? Logic suggests that the beam will travel at the speed of light plus the speed at which you’re running.
However, because we’ve already accepted that light speed is the ultimate, our logic (which is, in this case, based in Newtonian physics) cannot lead to a true conclusion about the plus-light speed of the spotlight beam. Einstein said that space and time are interconnected, in a fabric or a continuum, called space-time.
He thus postulated “time dilation,” by which objects approaching the speed of light cause time to slow down, and scale objects’ speeds to the speed of light. Speed and time are relative rather than absolute.
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is a refinement and expansion of his Special Theory. It holds that gravity is a curved field created by the presence of mass. The mass of a great star or planet causes distortion in the space-time continuum. Here on Earth, we feel that distortion as gravity. Light moving toward a great mass appears to slow down; it also bends more than Newtonian physics predicts. Light moving away from a great object is stretched into longer wavelengths (which is why light from stars in a strong gravitational field manifest closer to the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum).
Einstein’s theories suggest that distance and time need not be restrictors of space travel. Assuming a method of propulsion suitable to generate sufficient sub-light speed (see chapter three), spacecraft from Earth, or elsewhere, could travel enormous distances without prohibitive aging of the crew.
Speculative Magazine Fiction
Science-based adventure stories appeared in periodicals that encompassed the whimsical super-science of the Frank Reade Weekly Magazine, the Tom Swift adventures, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (with colorful and imaginative future-oriented cover paintings by Frank R. Paul), John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction and other science- based story magazines; plus Air Wonder Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Captain Future, and numberless other “space opera” SF pulps.
The remarkable airship on this March 1930 cover is the work of illustrator Frank R. Paul.
Science Fiction Comic Strips
Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Dick Calkins and Philip Nowlan’s Buck Rogers, William Ritt and Clarence Gray’s Brick Bradford, and other SF newspaper strips offered lively, fanciful visions of technology and other worlds.
Science Fiction Comic Books
Four-color depictions of space adventure leapt from the pages of Planet Comics, Fantastic Comics, Marvel Comics, and superhero comics (many of which had SF elements) led by Action and Superman.
“How-to” Popular-Science Magazines
Popular Science, The Electrical Experimenter, Mechanix Illustrated, Popular Mechanics, Modern Mechanix, Science and Mechanics, and others gave “new science” a practical edge, giving equal space to sump pump installation and gaudily illustrated notions of future personal aircraft; rockets, airships, and atomic ocean liners; automated houses; atomic cannons; stereoscopic movies; and much more. 1939 New York World’s Fair: Like the 1893 Columbian Exposition, this gala exhibition at New York thrilled visitors with technological achievements— existing and near-future—destined to make everyday life easier, more convenient, less stressful, and more enjoyable.
In this, the Fair functioned as a trade show underwritten by Ford, General Motors, Westinghouse (showing the talking robot Electro and his robot dog, Sparko), Kraft, the American Tobacco Company, and many other highly visible sponsors. Many of the more popular exhibits, such as GM’s Futurama, celebrated automobile culture with visions of roadways and other aspects of life in the scale-model City of 1960. Streamlined “future” cars, locomotives, airplanes, and other transportation suggested the rapid shrinking of the world. Special exhibits highlighted long-distance telephone technology, television, 3-D movies, and hydroelectric power. The Fair’s signature buildings, the giant white Perisphere globe and its companion, the towering, slim obelisk called the Trylon, symbolized the promise of a fresh future—a future previewed just months before the world slipped into war.
Futurist-Oriented Industrial Designers
Led by Raymond Loewy (whose work could be seen at the World’s Fair), Harley Earl, and Henry Dreyfuss, forward-looking designers brought streamlining and aircraft cues to lipsticks, automobiles, locomotives, appliances, furniture, and other elements of daily life.
Futurist-Oriented Urban Planners and Architects
Soaring, preplanned, multiuse skyscraper visions (often with provision for saucerlike commuter aircraft); and streamlined, functional single-family homes came from King Camp Gillette, Jules Guerin, Richard Rummell, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Francisco Mujica, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Wallace Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux (designers of the World’s Fair Trylon and Perisphere), Hugh Ferriss, Frank Lloyd Wright, R. Buckminster Fuller, William Lescaze, and others. One of the greatest of these, Norman Bel Geddes, designed much of the 1939 World’s Fair.
Motion Picture Production Designers:
Moving visions of futuristic urban life, often with unusual aircraft, distinguished German, British, and American work by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht (Metropolis, 1927); Andrew Mazzei (High Treason, 1929); Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras (Just Imagine, 1930); Erich Kettelhut (F.P.1 antwortet nicht [F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer],1933); Otto Hunte (Gold, 1934); Ernö Metzner (Trans-Atlantic Tunnel, 1935); Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come, 1936); and Ralph Berger (Flash Gordon, 1936). Why were rocketships real?
Because they were there, twenty feet high, on movie screens.
The Future Comes Home The pop-, design-, and tech- culture elements described above washed over America and the world like a wave, stimulating imaginations and opening minds to speculative ideas that would have seemed absurd just twenty years earlier. The World of Tomorrow took hold in the 1930s, and that world included notions of space travel, and what would shortly be called UFOs.
As discussed, technological innovations of World War II, particularly those related to flight, predisposed the public to a heightened awareness of aircraft.
Postwar, German-influenced rocket development in America and the Soviet Union excited scientists and dreamers alike. Laypersons with “practical” turns of mind scoffed at the notion of a manned trip to the Moon until the mid-1950s, when rocketry achieved quick progress that culminated in the dramatic 1957 Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and the USA’s simultaneous program of “catch-up.” By the late 1950s, Americans felt at once threatened and heartened by rocket science. Nobody wanted enemy space satellites to drop things on their heads, particularly not atomic bombs.
On the other hand, America’s accelerating military and industrial interest in rocketry and space encouraged citizens to feel patriotic and proud. America’s notion of itself—clever, aggressive, forward-thinking—meshed well with the invigorated scientific atmosphere. Then, too, rocket and other space development promised enormous economic gains. Los Angeles had become a center of defense manufacturing and new aviation during the war, and moved easily from traditional aircraft to jets and rockets. Thousands of people, with varying levels of training and skill, would be needed to fill jobs that hadn’t existed just a few years before. The inevitable ripple effect of job growth in and around postwar Los Angeles brought new homes and new jobs, many tied to L.A.-area defense contractors.
“Space Age” evolved from a child’s notion to a way of life—and earning. The vaguely amorphous concept called “the future” brought tech and tech-support jobs not just to L.A. but Denver and San Diego; New York and Los Alamos; Sacramento and Detroit; Buffalo and Seattle; Ormond Beach, Florida, and Watertown, Massachusetts. Many companies—including Lockheed, Bosch Arma, Douglas, Martin, Bendix, Northrop, and Convair—already were well known, and nicely positioned to further define themselves via technological futurism. Others, such as Ball Brothers, Hydro-Aire, Kaylock, Electro-Tec, JPL, Lummus, Marquardt, Rocketdyne, Hallicrafters, and Ex-Cell-O, had kept lower profiles, or were new altogether.
The companies devoted themselves to communications systems and solar arrays; high-heat insulation and plasma thermionics; microwave antennas and missile-guidance systems; satellite mapping and solid-state electronics; nuclear engines and spacecraft navigation—an endless stream of systems, components, and concepts.
Print ads appearing in trade and consumer magazines during the 1950s and early 1960s could be especially telling. Because the essentially fanciful nature of advertising illustration had not yet been superseded by the literalness of commercial photography, postwar rocket-and-related ads did not restrict themselves to visualizations of the missiles and jet engines of the present day; artists were encouraged to depict many other wonders of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, too. Cultural historian Megan Prelinger has smartly discussed the colorful, aggressively modern Abstract Expressionist look of some tech ad art of the period. The unspoken message: If you don’t “get” this, you don’t get the future.
Most pieces, though, were considerably more literal. Many visualize graceful, finned rockets resting on the Moon. Others imagine revolving-wheel space stations, and nuclear-pulse rockets. Lockheed depicted a dramatically delta- shaped “Space Transport” rocket. An artist working for Bosch Arma rendered a titanic “lunar unicycle” on the Moon, a sophisticated gyroscope designed to carry a crew during lunar exploration. Another Bosch ad shows a graceful “solar wind ship” traveling in deep space without need for fuel. A Convair artist positioned a great, quadruple-sphere “fusion-proton intergalactic space vehicle” against the splendor of the Great Spiral Nebula. And a Douglas ad with a cheeky, rhetorical question about Moon vacations is dominated by an elliptical lander that is very like the classic flying saucer.
Most importantly, nearly every corporate tech advertisement depicted the endless sky, splashed with stars, meteors, and other planets. Whatever the wonders of the future, they would come from the sky.