| "Science unleashes a tremendous new source of energy," trumpeted Collier's magazine in story and illustration in its July, 1940, edition. "Here are the things, fantastic only yesterday, that you'll probably live to see." |
 Gary Meek |
n illustration in the July 1940 issue of Collier’s magazine shows people lounging in an underground bunker that looks a lot like the set of the 1960s sitcom, the “Dick Van Dyke Show.” Above them, nuclear-powered cars glide along straight highways; airplanes take off like rockets straight into the air. One floor below, farmers tend corn and other vegetables growing strong and straight in rooms flooded with artificial light.
Welcome to The Future, scheduled to arrive somewhere around the year 2000. What happened?
Some predictions did, of course, come true. Glow-in-the-dark medicine helps people beat cancer; central air conditioning cools windowless buildings. Submarines prowl the darkest depths of all the oceans while astronauts have lived, albeit uncomfortably, in orbit for months at a time. The “mimex machine” envisioned by scientist Vannevar Bush in 1945 now goes by the colloquial “desktop computer with graphics interface and a scanner.”
But in other ways, The Future got mugged.
Was it in the ’60s?
In that decade, Vietnamese peasants trumped the U.S. military. Environmentalists forced us to confront the terrible price our bodies and our environment were paying for air and water pollution, and nuclear byproducts. Thalidomide babies gave a heartbreaking warning that new medicines came wrapped in unintended consequences. Hippies turned the corporate motto “better living through chemistry” into a joke DuPont executives never anticipated. The futuristic World’s Fairs that energized and enthralled people got co-opted by television—announcements of one breakthrough at a time, on the nightly news—and Disney, whose theme parks became a sort of permanent World’s Fair.
Only in 20th century America did people so enthusiastically embrace the idea that tremendous change was always just around the corner, that utopia was just one “Eureka!” away. It was a belief bolstered by incredible optimism and the hard-won realization that technology was a key factor in military and economic superiority. It was a belief also bolstered by gnawing fear—of another Depression, another world war, social chaos.
“The 20th century has seen an exponential growth in technology. Also, we have seen technology become institutionalized in national policy. The impact of World War I and World War II are key: Technology is the key to victory, to having a role in the world, to being a global economic power, to having influence and strength,” says Gus Giebelhaus, Callaway Professor of the History of Technology at Tech.
It’s also the century when the largest businesses created their own research and development arms: General Electric, DuPont, Standard Oil, Bell Labs, for a few names on the honor roll.
It’s not that discoveries and inventions of previous centuries weren’t of at least equal value, Giebelhaus says.
For example, the medieval invention of horse collars that allowed farmers to yoke two animals together revolutionized efficiency and output, notes Giebelhaus. But there was no Dark Ages version of Popular Mechanics to spread word of the invention, no Bell Labs to figure out other ways to use horsepower, no government grants to support the nimble thinkers who might have come up with more had they not had to go out and plow.
| The Year 2000 |
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As Viewed in the 1990s |
“When we’ve thought about history, it’s in terms of the ecclesiastical, the military, the dynasties,” says Giebelhaus. “But, for example, the Protestant idea of ‘every man his own priest’ was only possible when every man could have his own Bible, after Gutenberg invented his printing press.”
Americans’ enthusiam for technological change seems to have begun with the novels of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and George Orwell, even though the authors included dire warnings in many of their works. Wells, for example, predicted a return to the Dark Ages following a global war ended by a single horrible weapon of mass destruction—a premonition of the horror that struck Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But Wells did not anticipate that a nation caught in the devastating theater of a World War would come out of that brutal conflict capable of the Marshall Plan, or of rebuilding Japan.
At about the same time these authors were spinning their tales of globe-circling balloons and such, Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity. With e=mc², the shy, slight physicist plunged into the mysterious connection between matter and energy, the two building blocks of the universe. Fast-forward just two decades from Einstein’s 1905 pronouncement: One year, 1927, saw Charles Lindbergh fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, talking movies, the first television, the Model-A Ford. Just as scientists were unravelling the secrets of the cosmos, they were making life on Earth a lot more entertaining.
No wonder people thought the sky would soon be no limit.
But The Future we were all careening toward dived nose-first into the Great Depression. It was a mess that Herbert Hoover, one of the nation’s foremost engineers and humanitarians before he became president, couldn’t figure out how to fix. It led to deep doubts as to whether capitalism was really a workhorse that could sustain long-term prosperity.
It took Big Government to pull the nation out of that hole, with lots of money paid for old-fashioned, backbreaking labor such as building trails through national parks and leveling roads. But once out, Americans embraced The Future again with fervor.
One model home was built of glass that, in addition to looking really neat, was supposed to turn the occupants’ focus “outward instead of inward,” according to Folke T. Kihlstedt in the collection of essays, Imagining Tomorrow.
The utopia envisioned at these world fairs was, for the first time, primarily urban. America had pretty much run out of frontier, so visionaries waved bye-bye to Thomas Jefferson and his antiquated utopia where everyone milked cows.
Why would The Future be so much better than the present? We’d have a lot more free time, be happier, and ultimately become a much nobler species. For example, people thought laying telegraphic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, accomplished just over a century ago, would signal the beginning of world peace. No misunderstood messages, no wars.
Moving ahead to 1927, one well-received design for mass-produced, aluminum houses included a “creative room.” In a house with time-saving devices ranging from vacuum toothbrushes to self-activating washers, humans would have plenty of time to do what they wanted.
We did, in fact, get a lot of labor-saving devices in this century. What no one predicted is that we’d let work grow exponentially to fill the void.
“Washers and electric irons didn’t liberate women at all,” as one example, says Giebelhaus. “It simply made them more productive; everyone started wearing clean underwear every day. Women simply started taking on new tasks. Freed from the home, they started driving their kids around in station wagons.
“This is one way technology can be seen as exploitive.”
Neither have our wireless phones and palm-pilots turned us into the happy, shiny people who lounge or play in all those illustrations about The Future. Why not?
“The simple answer is that people are never satisfied,” says Steve Usselman, a technology history professor at Tech. “What was underestimated is the ability to maintain desire.”
Right after World War I, The Future was radio and X-rays. Just before World War II, The Future was plastics. Poor plastic—it went, in one decade, from being the “Next Big Thing” to a synonym for “cheap.” This is a cautionary tale about how The Future can get knocked on its backside by even a handful of people—if they happen to be the people who command the world’s armies.
Before World War II, plastic—the first all-synthetic material, originally a replacement for ivory billiard balls—was envisioned as the cradle-to-grave answer to everything, according to Jeffrey Meikle in Imagining Tomorrow. In houses with all-plastic furnishing, there would be nothing for babies to break. Schoolkids couldn’t scuff plastic walls. Old folks outfitted first in plastic teeth, then plastic coffins, would be “Exhibit A” for the ultimate in hygiene.
World War II stopped that. Plastic was put to work in soldiers’ gear. But, unfortunately, it also got put to work back home prematurely as a consumer-goods replacement for the steel, textiles and other durable goods that had gone off to war—many times in inappropriate ways. But when it broke or melted, people didn’t think of the metal it was trying to mimic: they just saw “cheap plastic.”
And once the war was over, a worn-out American populace returned to traditional products and architecture. That meant stone fireplaces in wooden houses, built with the straight edges and angles of the Colonial style—not the sleek curves of shiny plastic popped whole out of molds.
And, of course, by war’s end, the world was both horrified and intrigued by yet another new thing: nuclear energy. It seemed imperative to take this power, which proved, finally, that humankind could exterminate itself, and make it benign, to gloss over its chilling capabilities in silly ways such as advertisements that compared the bomb’s flash to the brilliance of a particular floor wax.
Each house would run on its own typewriter-sized nuclear reactor. Nuclear generators would make so much electricity, so cheaply, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to charge for it. We’d drive Nuclear-8 sedans. Nuclear power would somehow eradicate world hunger. It would blast a new “Panatomic Canal” between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It would power desalination plants large enough to make the Sahara bloom. We’d go joy-riding through the planets.
Great, but the devil was hiding in one detail—what to do with nuclear waste. There’s been no real answer to that question; it pretty much stopped large-scale nuclear progress in its radioactive tracks.
Nuclear waste is also the uninvited guest at the whoop-it-up party known as Silicon Valley. “Of the EPA’s SuperFund sites, four of the top nine are in Silicon Valley, with waste coming from the processes used to make semiconductors,” Usselman warns. “We don’t hear about it; we don’t want to think about it, because Silicon Valley is one of our successes.”
And finally, the century has had its share of surprises. Few visionaries foresaw that computers would ever be used for much beyond mathematical processing, for example.
“People didn’t anticipate the World Wide Web at all, the various uses of the Internet,” Usselman says. “There was no sense that people would use the Web like they do, the chat rooms, e-commerce.”
In the early days, in fact, experts thought computers would never become part of the mainstream because there wouldn’t be enough skilled mathematicians to program them. No one imagined that computers would someday be programmable via buttons, allowing even toddlers to work them.
Computers may also have gotten caught in a backlash against the way-too-wild claims made on behalf of nuclear energy. “A machine that could be programmed to do anything seemed absurd, like a toaster that could also sew buttons on a shirt,” notes Paul Ceruzzi in Imagining Tomorrow.
Now, however, visionaries see computers as the next great way to make life perfect, or at least a lot better.
The November 1999 issue of The Futurist magazine shows a face-off between a silver robot wearing yellow goggles, with a glowing red button where his heart should be, and a gorilla-ish creature, wearing a red-striped necktie and carrying a notebook. The cover story inside predicts that by 2009, we’ll have computers embedded in our clothes. By 2019, they’ll be embedded in our bodies. By 2099, there’ll be no such thing as a plain old human. We’ll be “spiritual machines,” part human, part computer.
We’ll see.