The Future in 1939: Microfilm and Electro-Moto Man
The Future in 1939: Microfilm and Electro-Moto Man
By Glenn Adamson | Published: 2024-12-03 14:00:00 | Source: The Future – Big Think
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“I am confident that future generations will read these statements with a sense of justified pride and superiority.” This is how Albert Einstein signed his brief letter to the people in 6939 AD, having already told them that despite the amazing progress made by the people of his time – “we cross the seas by force (and) have learned to fly, and are able to transmit messages and news without any difficulty to all parts of the world by electric waves” – there was also terrible poverty, inequality, and violence, such that “people living in different countries are killing each other at irregular intervals of time.” Einstein wished the citizens of tomorrow all the best, but in general he considered that “everyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”
This remarkable statement by the great physicist was prompted by an equally brilliant exercise in corporate branding: a time capsule for the Westinghouse Electrical and Manufacturing Company, made for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to 1940. The time capsule was a highly appropriate choice for an event dubbed “The World of Tomorrow,” and it was also an ambitious cataloging of the present. Inside was a collection of “items of common use,” some of which had clearly been chosen with product placement in mind—a plastic Mickey Mouse cup, Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, and of course several items manufactured by Westinghouse itself. The seeds of the plant were placed in the capsule, which was a dollar bill and a copy of the Bible.
Einstein’s letter to the distant future was one of several letters requested by “outstanding men of our time.” One such novelist was the German novelist Thomas Mann, who struck a more desperate tone: “We now know that the idea of the future as a ‘better world’ was a fallacy in the principle of progress…. In general terms, you will in fact resemble us very much as we resemble those who lived a thousand or five thousand years ago. And the condition of the soul among you will also be very bad.” Then there were the documents: a newsreel of important events — President Roosevelt’s speech, Jesse Owens’s speech at the 1936 Olympics, the Soviet rally in Red Square, the Japanese bombing of Canton — and more than 22,000 pages of information captured on microfilm, a magical new technology that Herbert George Wells described as “the complete planetary memory of all mankind.”
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Finally, there was the time capsule itself, a streamlined torpedo of the future, beautifully crafted from a custom corrosion-resistant copper alloy and buried fifty feet deep on the fairgrounds in September 1938, long before the event opened. Lest the time capsule be forgotten, three thousand copies of A Log book“Printed on permanent paper with special inks” and distributed to libraries around the world, with a list of its contents and its exact location in latitude and longitude. Thinking it all over, organizers at Westinghouse placed instructions to build a microfilm reader into the capsule, as well as an “English key,” in case, after five thousand years, it became completely unusable.
Like every futuristic gesture, Westinghouse’s time capsule represented a moment very much of its own: an expression of technocratic confidence shadowed by the return of war. The same applies to the World’s Fair as a whole; It radiated future-facing optimism, with its theme “The World of Tomorrow” and its dynamic central features, Trilon and Perisphere, the largest abstract sculptures anyone had ever seen. But current events cannot be ignored. By the time the Expo closed in 1940, many of the countries that participated no longer existed; They have been invaded and occupied. Meanwhile, the Soviet Pavilion was dominated by a 188-foot tower, topped by a disturbing stainless steel statue of an unidentified worker, whom the American press dubbed “Big Joe.” The Soviet message: The future had arrived, and it was them.
The Soviet message: The future had arrived, and it was them.
As for the Americans, they had Norman Bel Geddes. His General Motors Futurama car was a favorite among showgoers, reportedly seen by about half of the visitors, more than twenty-four million people. And he wasn’t the only industrial designer to contribute. Commissioned by Chrysler, Raymond Lowe imagined a sci-fi launch pad for interstellar rocket travel. Henri Dreyfus produced Democracy, a model of a future utopian city located within the periphery. Walter Durwin Teague, a stalwart of the design scene, was commissioned for no fewer than seven corporate suites. The most ambitious of these projects, for Ford Motor Company, was the “Road of Tomorrow,” where red, yellow and blue cars would constantly rotate on a half-mile track.
There were also new machines throughout the show. This was the first time the general public experienced air conditioning (displayed in “The Conveying Igloo of Tomorrow”), fax machines, and television broadcasting, as well as new industrial products such as nylon and Formica. In addition to its time capsule, Westinghouse introduced a robot similar to William Richards’ RUR.-Inspired by Eric, named Elektro the Moto-Man; Seven feet tall, he smoked cigarettes and spoke phrases to visitors, such as “My mind is bigger than yours.” The Borden Dairy Company had great success with their “talking cow” Elsie. It was flesh and blood, but it welcomed visitors to the “dairy world of tomorrow,” which featured a massive rotating platform called the Rotolactor where cows were mechanically milked, with integrated equipment for pasteurization, irradiation, filling, and capping—a vast improvement over the cream separator in the Eisenstein system. Old and new.
The Futurama ship was a marvel in its own right, both in its size—thirty-five thousand square feet and a third of a mile long—and in its detail.
However, nothing can match Bel Geddes’ Futurama. Visitors to this attraction enjoyed an eighteen-minute ride sitting on a conveyor belt, taking them on an easy flight above a diorama showing America in 1960. life The magazine noted that this imagined future seemed “full of tough people who have in twenty years learned to have fun,” then added more seriously that it showed “what Americans, with their wonderful resources of men, money, materials, and skills, could do for their country by 1960, if they wanted to.” That aspirational tone rang throughout, as spectators soared over one futuristic wonder after another: experimental farms, clusters of skyscrapers, private planes on rooftop landing pads, and, most important from GM’s point of view, multi-lane highways crowded with cars, cars, and more cars, some remotely controlled from towers, to aid the flow of traffic.
The Futurama ship was a marvel in its own right, both in its size—thirty-five thousand square feet and a third of a mile long—and in its detail. Every feature was handcrafted: rivers of polished steel, roads made of rubber, hills built of stucco and variously covered with velvet or ground cornflakes. Bel Geddes drew on his theatrical experience to devise a scheme of five hundred hidden floodlights to simulate the passage of the sun from afternoon to dusk to dawn. The exhibition thus consisted of a topographical map, based on specially prepared aerial photography, and a clock that immersed the visitor in his own time. At the end of the ride, visitors descended into a full-size, futuristic model of a traffic intersection, which also served as a display platform for GM’s latest vehicle models. Finally, each person was given a badge that said: “I have seen the future.”
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