I’ll never forget the day I first saw these. About 35 years ago, I was at one of those “whole house” garage sales (the kind where the owner has died and the heirs are selling off everything). I was in a musty barn, and there was a pile of these magazines sitting on a shelf. I glanced at the covers with fascination and horror–was this real? I later saw a few of these covers in a PBS documentary about the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Now we have the Internet, and an image search brings forth many resplendent-yet-creepy examples of this 1930s “World of Tomorrow” commercial art.
“Queer Vehicles Inventors Produce.” Oh, indeed! You have to try to look at these through the eyes of someone living at that time. The Victorian and Edwardian Ages were ending, and a new age was dawning. The Old World-based archetypes of florid decoration in machines and architecture were giving way to never-before-seen, Streamlined-Modern, spare lines suggesting speed and efficiency. Mankind is making another bold step up that great pyramid of civilization!
This point was really brought home to me when I visited the [re-created] 1876 Centennial Exposition at the Smithsonian Institution. In the 1800s, machines were not just machines–they were expected to be works of art! Anyone who has seen an antique cash register, sewing machine, or stove from the period knows what I’m talking about.
The unknown artists who created these covers did a spectacular job! The ironic thing is that very few of these wild creations were ever built. However, they did sell a lot of magazines, and perhaps inspired engineers to reach for higher levels of mechanical and aesthetic achievement.
As the title of this post suggests, I find there is a certain grotesque quality to some of these–something overpowering and out of control. Like, this is too much to take–the future is overwhelming and scary. There’s no concern for what these streamlined monstrosities do to the earth or society itself. The seeds of books like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are already being planted.
So what’s Popular Science doing today, now that we’re actually living in the World of Tomorrow? To find out, I picked up a copy of the latest issue so I could do a point-by-point comparison:
First of all, it’s now quarterly instead of monthly. The cover price is $7.99 not 15 cents. And for nearly eight bucks you get 134 pages, not the 226 pages you typically got in the ’30s. Today’s Popular Science gives you 32 articles; in the ’30s there were well over two hundred, with enough do-it-yourself projects to keep you busy at home or on the farm for a couple of years!
Take a look at the cover–no more streamlined cars or rocket ships. Now the focus is “We can transform“, i.e. we can save the planet from all the bad things we’ve done to it with our polluting cars, factories, and industrial advances that Popular Science proudly hailed decades before! Whereas in the past, an article would instruct us on “How Steel Rebar Does a Better Job Reinforcing Concrete,” now we see a butterfly . . . perched on the ruins of post-industrial civilization.
Many of the articles are now about people working together to solve global environmental and social problems. The illustration above is from an article entitled, “5 Famous Environmental Disasters where Humans and Nature Healed Together.” There’s an article about the importance of sharing, and one encouraging us to eat bugs because “they’re 65% protein by weight” and are “an eco-conscious substitute for meat-based nutrition.” Oh, and they also apologized for endorsing eugenics in 1914 by stating, “If certain people didn’t reproduce in the United States, the genetic ‘stock’ of the population could remain pure, thus leading to a perfect civilization.”
Another interesting change I noticed–the Editor-in-Chief and about half of the magazine staff are now women.
Each magazine is a product of its time. Whatever is produced becomes part of the permanent record. Historians and future archeologists will look at them and say, “Ah, yes. That’s what people thought back then. That’s what they were going through. This is what was presented as new and good and right. How different things were back then!” But will there even be magazines in the future? Right now I am typing words into WordPress, forming a post which is published on a website, the data of which is stored in enormous servers, owned by what may be ephemeral and capricious corporate entities. It’s not a paper magazine–something physical you can hold, which, like the clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, will survive the ravages of time. This is a problem that not even the 1930s dreamers of Popular Science could have imagined!
I learned when I was cleaning out my parents’ house that old newspapers, magazines, etc; are called “Ephemera” in the antiques market. I also learned that they are not worth what I thought they would be. . .
To me and as you point out, they are a wonderful resource that illustrate not just what was going on at the time, but what people’s thoughts, dreams and aspirations were. As such, they seem of equal historical value to works of art or machines.
As you also point out, it’s not clear what the ephemera of this age will be. A pile of old magazines draws you in to spend some time with them; a thumb drive or a data card could just be anything, and it takes some work to see what’s on it. I wonder how many future people will take the time.
This stuff is amazing and without the titles I’d guess fantasy/sci fi paperback novel covers of the era, not PS/etc.
Like most here I remember PS covers largely being photos or realisticish, except perhaps for space travel-adjacent stuff, and the most-anticipated articles were cars, motorcycles, boats, and house/workshop tinkering. (My Dad was a very handy fellow on all four.)
These are proof that every era thinks it has science all figured out. And every era looks back at the unenlightened rubes who thought that in an earlier era. It will be interesting to see how the thinkers of today are thought of in thirty or forty years. I’ll bet they don’t hold up as well as they think they will. The hubris of today will remain hidden until it is exposed by the hubris of tomorrow.
I think it was Popular Science Magazine that educated me in the early 1970s that it was much better to collect waste motor oil in plastic milk cartons and throw it in the trash than to pour it out on weeds “the way they used to”. Yessir, problem solved. 🙂
I do love diving into the thinking of an earlier era. If nothing else it shows that “my adult lifetime” is not the only time period that has things to teach us – particularly when we get outside of the areas of science and tech that has a shorter shelf life than many other fields of human endeavor.
No.
Scientific knowledge advances inexorably, despite cul de sacs and outright unreason, and inevitably arrives at new things that are irrefutable and permanent. For just one example, I am firmly in the camp that accepts the travel of the earth round its sun rather than the opposite, a thing disparaged in its religious times until hundreds of years later gave it proof. Science, in so many ways, DOES have it all figured out: it is for mankind, on her journey, to find it. This has nothing at all to with the scientific hubris of a given time. Insofar as such hubris applies, it is always a manifestation of the un-objective, and usually marshalled as such in service of a political or religious aim.
Where I would agree with you is the circumstances when the certainty of a current science in a given time gives rise to a social prescription – and even then, science often works at a distance in front of prejudice and habit, but that is to digress – and that for sure is when it over-steps its role and looks laughable to those who come later.
Agreed.
These covers and stories have quite little to do with actual science, hence the title “Popular Science” rather than “Scientific American” or some other serious journal of true science. There’s a huge difference.
These contraptions fall into two categories: sensationalized depictions of devices that have some basis in logical engineering progress (there’s a difference between engineering and science), And others that are just engineering flights of fancy.
In either case, science is only a factor inasmuch as certain scientific principles underpin these devices, and they actually do. I don’t see a single one that doesn’t have a scientific basis. But it’s the engineering and most of all the economics that are shaky, not the science. If there was a good economic reason to build any of these, they could have been built.
So the issue is wishful thinking, in economic terms. Who needs a single wheel motorcycle? Or a tank to explore the jungle?
Science is always “figured out”. Good science has been verified by the scientific process. It’s almost always true. Its practical application is quite a different thing.
Which is why these covers are much more suitable to “Popular Mechanics” or “Mechanix Illustrated” than a rag called “Popular Science”.
But then the popular understanding of what science (and the scientific process) really is is obviously not popularly understood. Hence the colossal mess we’re in as a planet.
The science of global warming was completely and fully understood quite some decades ago. When it was presented to Pres. Bush the elder, as an intelligent man he fully understood the science and its impact, and fully intended to make it an emergency cause of his administration. But then the political reality of doing so was made clear to him, and he almost totally backed away.
Humans inherently don’t trust science, as they’d rather trust their emotional and subjective feelings instead.
Science is the only way to find the truth about the world. But truth is not a desired commodity to a large percentage of humans.
I also found myself wondering what these things had to do with science. They seem much more like the results of bizarre engineering fantasies. As a kid I liked these kinds of things, though I saw them as more akin to science fiction-type fantasies than realistic depictions of future things.
Though, as some have noted, versions of some of these things, like some science fiction devices, have come to pass.
Science, which is about figuring out how the world works, is a different thing. Willful ignorance of scientific knowledge, as is demonstrated by falsely repudiating the facts of evolution, the dangers of smoking, and the reality of anthropogenic contributions to global warming among other things, is difficult to deal with and very harmful to our society.
My grandparents, until they died, and my mother, for much of her life, which, like those of her parents was cut short by smoking-related disease, parroted the claims, publicized by the cigarette companies and their paid and elected representatives, that the links between smoking and lung disease were weak, unproven, and likely false.
As a kid who saw the effects and had a vague notion that smoking might be unhealthy, I was annoyed by the fog and stench, and saddened to see loved ones decline and die young.
As an adult who now understands the craven economic reasons for the misinformation campaigns, I am angered and frustrated that so many people willfully ignore the science, often to our collective detriment.
I a very pure sense, science does indeed find new and deeper levels of truth in our physical world. But for that science to stand up to time, time must pass. And in another sense, those of us who are not in the labs only interact with science as it is put into practice.
So while it is true that science has proved that the earth rotates around the sun and that antibiotics can kill microbes, science has also proved the efficacy of drugs like Thalidomide and practices like eugenics that sprang from Darwinism. Nobody today would even think about justifying “race science” as was “established” in the 19th century. And how many times in our lifetimes has the science of nutrition changed? Nobody argues that diets should consist of “the four basic food groups” as was done when we were kids or that we can safely X-ray kids’ feet in shoe stores.
I think we can agree that there is certainly new areas of science that will prove to be of great worth as time progresses. But evidence and history suggests that there are other new scientific theories that will be in the dustbin in another thirty years of testing and discovery. Which is which can be hard to distinguish in the here and now.
You’re conflating real science with pseudo-science. There’s a world of difference. Eugenics was never a real science. The concept goes back thousands of years (selective breeding). Rather than writing it out for you, here’s a little excerpt from Wikipedia:
The idea of a modern project for improving the human population through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton, and was initially inspired by Darwinism and its theory of natural selection.[22] Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.[23] In 1883, one year after Darwin’s death, Galton gave his research a name: eugenics.[24] With the introduction of genetics, eugenics became associated with genetic determinism, the belief that human character is entirely or in the majority caused by genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Many of the early geneticists were not Darwinians, and evolution theory was not needed for eugenics policies based on genetic determinism.[22] Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained controversial.[25]
Note that it’s based on Galton’s “beliefs”, and not actually on Darwin’s theories.
As it is, Darwin’s theories were still far from fully proven at the time. All theories require extensive proving by others, which is the essence of the scientific process. Until proven, it’s just a theory. Same for Einsteins theories; they’re still being tested (and mostly proven, with some exceptions in certain circumstances).
As to Thalidomide, it’s a perfectly effective drug for a number of applications, and is fully certified and even available over the counter in the UK and some other countries. The science behind it is 100% solid.
The problem is economic greed and the lack of a robust governmental oversight to ensure new drugs are tested widely, including on pregnant women. The Thalidomide crisis resulted in a much stronger FDA, as a critical regulatory hurdle for the marketing of new drugs by the pharmaceutical industry, which as we know is a rather rapacious one.
The whole incident confirms how important governmental controls are essential to protect consumers from the free market, as one can see so starkly this past week in Texas.
I hope that this does not come across as nitpicky, but a theory, in the scientific connotation of the word, is not an idea wanting for proof. Rather, it is an overarching explanation that unifies a significant body of evidence. It is quite a different thing from the more colloquial connotation of the word as something akin to a hunch, or perhaps little more than a guess.
A scientific theory, by integrating the ideas that were used to create it, allows scientists to make logical predictions that lead to experiments which add to future data that may be used to modify the theory. It doesn’t really get proven, rather supported, modified, or undermined by additional evidence.
Conflation of the different connotations has been used to push the incorrect idea that evolution, is “just a theory” and therefore little more than an educated guess, lacking in proof and therefore not worthy of much regard.
Evolutionary theory, as originally laid out by Charles Darwin, was based on a mountain of evidence when first published in 1859. Its importance was immediately evident to scientists of that day. Modern evolutionary theory goes well beyond that, and encompasses entire fields of science that have since come into being.
I suspect that Darwin would have been horrified to learn of the pseudoscience that has been attached to his name and ideas.
Though he trod very lightly on the idea that evolutionary theory applied to humans as to all other species in “The Origin of Species”, he knew that this must be the case.
In a subsequent work “The Descent of Man” he proposed, based on meeting people from cultures around the world, that all of these peoples must have come from a common ancestor, and that the differences between them were a result of evolving under different environmental and cultural influences.
Darwin was a deep and critical thinker who well understood the implications of his theory, and in fact had to recognize and confront the cultural biases of his own preconceived notions in order to create it. I think the would have found great fault in the logic behind the pseudoscientific justifications for eugenics, slavery, and racism.
“… much better to collect waste motor oil in plastic milk cartons and throw it in the trash than to pour it out on weeds…”
In the late 1950s my father had me upgrade the gravel driveway in front of our cabin, using an Old Dutch potato chip can with several holes punched in the bottom. Waste oil from the neighborhood Conoco was poured into the can and I would swing it like a
pendulum as I slowly walked the drive. It did keep the dust down, at some risk to my bare feet in the summer.
I’m sorry, environment.
To me, those covers represent the process of invention. Let’s start with the odd flying wing airliner with propellers in tubes. That tiny plane below is the Stipa-Caproni, which was the first plane to successfully fly using what we now call a “ducted fan”. Increase the number of blades in the propeller from, say, 2 to 20, add a more powerful engine (like a gas turbine) rearrange the packaging, and it becomes the modern “turbofan” engine, which power every “jet” plane we ride in today.
That odd amphibious land ship? Look around for pictures of the vehicles used to haul supplies to build remote arctic radar bases. Those strange bi-wheel vehicles? When we had the technology to do it properly, it became the Segway (which is nonetheless strange). The train with the propeller that lifted clear of the rails? That train was actually built, but impractical. When I was a kid in the 60s, the magazine covers often showed equally impractical magnetic levitation trains. Now I can ride one, and will soon be able to travel between Tokyo and Osaka on one in an hour.
And, in years past, every big city science museum had a giant electrical theater, just like the one displayed on that cover. No Nikola Tesla, but they had Tesla coils and Van de Graaff generators, and we would sit an watch in awe as lightning bolts flew around creating a bright noisy spectacle, complete with a guy in a metal suit who would get zapped as he wandered about.
Not grotesque, just progress…
There’s a hint of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser in that amphibious vehicle
That’s well stated, Marc.
I reckon these covers here are flights of fancy largely done to get circulation, but it’s not as if they’re based on fantasy entire. They’re variations, if fanciful, on things that did come to be.
I took my son to the Boston Science Museum about 10 years ago. They had an electricity show with a giant Tesla coil and a person in a metal cage surrounded by the discharge yet unaffected by it. It was quite good, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such shows still happen.
The “coming in 2 years” 1940s car looks like a 1920s Rumpler Tropfenwagen, famously featured in the classic 1927 film Metropolis.
Looks like what we’re all driving now, everyone sitting high up, minimalist dashboard, panoramic roof, and totally freakin hideous!
Google Books has the actual magazines archived for free viewing. Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Life, etc., hours and hours of interesting stuff.
This stuff is sort of tame compared to the old (from 1800s) Frank Reade Jr. stuff; sort of a Proto Tom Swift. Lileks.com has a lot of this stuff http://lileks.com/misc/frankreade/index.html
As a matter of fact, I have to check out the Tom Swift stuff!!
Popular Science has been missing my favorite feature for a long time now: Gus Wilson and the Model Garage. It might not be the same now with cars being plugged into PCs or laptops using expensive manufacturer-dedicated software. Cleverness is still often required but when a diagnosis starts off with “P0700, P0887″…
All of the Model Garage series is on the Web. All the stories are at
http://www.gus-stories.org
That rolling machine gun firing ball thing is Pure Evil !!!
Yes; I thought the same thing. Clearly designed to clear out a WWI-style trench.
It is hideous, direct from a nasty nightmare.
It’s clever, though, a stark visual metaphor for just how dehumanized war really is.
I am so thankful Hitler never had these.
As a kid I was always confused by the similarity between PopSci and Popular Mechanics. I was under the impression that science and mechanics were two different disciplines, so how could these two magazines have almost identical content. But that wasn’t as odd as Mechanix Illustrated. I mean, I grew up in world of Lite foods and Alinement shops, so I was used to marketing spelling, but a magazine was journalism, and journalism should use proper grammar, spelling, and style. I never bothered to look at it at the newsstand.
I confused these two as well, though that’s mostly because I rarely looked beyond the car-related features. Both seemed to often be the first place I’d see spy photos of upcoming cars. Occasionally there’d be a non-car article that caught my eye. Popular Science was more likely to feature new tech stuff; Popular Mechanics usually had articles about how to build something.
As a kid in the early 60’s, I had a couple buddies with parents who had boxes of these that went back decades. spent many a summer day in the cool of a basement paging through pre and post war Science and Mechanix. My house was the one with endless boxes of science fiction.
Well, I’m not going to sleep for a few nights now.
I’m sure the threatening nature of nearly all these covers was an intended outcome, to grab attention with the shiver of a thrill. It’s almost like a form of gossip, or headlines that vastly inflate the actual content: “Oooh, look what’s coming, how dreadful, how could they (but I must just take a look)” It works! Even 80 years on, I want to know.
It also strikes me that, for all the imagination, they’re not terribly well-drawn. Perhaps not enough money in 15c copies of the Future to cover high-quality? They should have looked at one of their own money-making ideas….
A really intriguing and excellent post.
These covers look a lot like the images that showed up on publications by Hugo Gernsback over the years. Popular Science was not a Gernsback publication, but these examples sure look like it.
Some call this style Raygun Gothic. Now it turns up as retrofuturistic science fiction – “A tomorrow that never was.”
I love-love-love this stuff, both the artwork and the excited forecasting–a fun idea for a column! My father would have been an adolescent during this time, and perhaps his dreams included these things. As a child of the 1960s, I guess I viewed all of the Detroit’s “concept cars” as realistic projections of the future, too—-and I admit disappointment when I learned that those vehicles were often not, uh, “fully functional.”
I look at film and photos and “ephemera” of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, and dream—-but if I ever invent a Time Machine, it’s gonna be one of my first stops!
For those who don’t know of it, here’s a webpage with this-and-that from Popular Science/Mechanics, Modern Mechanics, etc.: http://blog.modernmechanix.com
Some of these illustrations remind me of Tintin-style comics of that era. Very nice as a piece of artwork, but also completely weird.
Thing is, they did build a few vehicles that might qualify as real “fantasy machines”. Flying wings were made in Germany by Horten and the US by Northrup by the late 30s. And as far as land vehicles are concerned, the US-made 1939 Antarctic Cruiser looks like it was designed by the Popular Science editorial board. It was also a dismal failure…
All sorts of strange things were built, simple testing of that Antarctic cruiser on snow would have saved mailing it to Antarctica to fail.
Wonderful piece, with stimulating comments from the “audience” as usual. These magazines were on the stands when I was a kid in the postwar years. My dad, born in 1914, had an earlier publication to inspire him: The Boy Mechanic. Here’s a nice sampling of typical content—beautifully-illustrated how-to articles, an engineer’s primary education in print ?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44585/44585-h/44585-h.htm
Every now and then, the things on the cover do get built!
Popular Science remains a fun magazine even if more down to earth nowadays. It’s one of a handful of periodicals that can still be found in most libraries. Back in Junior High my favorite magazine was OMNI. Got to ride my Schwinn Varsity to the library every few days during summer time.
For years I had subscriptions to Popular Science, and later Omni as well. Loved them both, though for different reasons. In the summer when I had run out of novels to read I would dig through the boxes of old magazines and revisit my favourite articles from years past. My family and friends think it’s odd that I have terabytes of internet content saved, everything from individual web pages to substantial chunks of entire websites, but this is kind of why. I thought of those magazines as not just entertainment, but as reference and resource as well. The fact that they were rarely ever used as such wasn’t important; it was that they could be if needed or desired that mattered. In much the same way I like to collect tools. I may not have a current use for them, but they represent a wonderful potential; all of the projects I might undertake using them! Just like the ideas and technologies in the magazines, most of that potential will never be realized. What’s important are the feelings of optimism and ever immanent potential that are fostered. Something to look forward to in the future. Who couldn’t use some of that these days?