I grew up reading my grandfather's collection of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. The heady postwar exuberance for technology as the solution to all our problems intrigued me greatly. I inherited his magazine collection, and over the years I've collected hundreds more. I still love them, but I now see that much of what was proposed was actually horrible in practice, environmentally and socially. I'd love to see a return to the lovely aesthetic of that era, combined with our hard-earned knowledge of the consequences of unbridled faith in technology.
I did the same, although he had Popular Mechanics only. Every month’s issue for decades. I spent hours, days, and weeks leafing through them. Unfortunately they weren’t preserved. That naive optimism that the advancement of technology could resolve all of our problems and improve humanity was really thrilling. So sad that we now know differently :(
If you ever watched "Star Trek: Voyager," you probably saw Tom Paris engaging in retrofuturism in the holodeck with his Buck-Rogers-style adventures (one time Captain Janeway joined in).
I recently popped on the TV and an episode of the Jetson's was on. Elroy was faking he was sick (to stay home from school). Jane brought a monitor of some type (iPad/tablet?) and Elroy had a telemedicine visit with the doctor. Some things do come true!
The wildest part about these covers- about a quarter of them are based on prototypes at the time, and a lot of them are artistic representations of radical new engineering principles of the time.
The giant flying boat on the cover of the March 1930 issue of Popular Science at 2:22 is not a speculative design but an already-existing aircraft, the Dornier Do X, which first flew in July 1929. In 1930, it was announced that the Do X would soon be making a transatlantic crossing to New York, hence the article titled “America Gets World’s Biggest Planes” in the list of contents. The cover illustration shows the aircraft with its original Bristol Jupiter engines (12 engines mounted in tandem push-pull pairs), but these were replaced with more powerful Curtiss Conqueror engines for the transatlantic flight. The Do X set off from Friedrichshafen, Germany, in November 1930, but as a result of various accidents and delays en route, it did not reach New York until August 1931.
Powered exoskeletons have become a thing. Currently the largest markets appear to be medical, such as giving mobility to paraplegics but industrial applications are beginning to evolve.
And we are still at it! A hundred yesrs from now, there will be other people looking at todays 'quaint and weird' ideas and concepts. Thank you for the fun reminders.
Thanks again for another great breakdown~ I'm only in my 30s, but my dad is a boomer and I definitely had stacks of the old PopSci mags around to read growing up without internet so this video is a fantastic bit of nostalgia. Always adored the cover art. Hell, even kept a subscription to the magazine myself until the early 2000s~ Would love a lens into an alternate universe where those old predictions had come true~
A common error of prognosticators is that they can't anticipate paradigm shifts in technology, so they can only extrapolate quantitative advancements in the tech they know. Thus atom-powered dirigibles instead of jet planes, and city-wide pneumatic tube systems to propel paper documents instead of the internet.
the aircraft at 2.22 is actually a real one, the 1929 Dornier DoX, the biggest aeroplane in the world upto that time though an underpowered failure, despite its 12 engines
I am most fascinated with forecasts of now made in the 1960s. In that decade of optimism and space tech, we were fixated on the magical term, "21st Century."
Elon Musk is trying to make that happen with his Starship program, his self-driving electric vehicles, his robots. I think he read a lot of these Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines.
@@Bfdidc It was possible, but we took a left turn and went "Duh", and started using drugs as a bunch of hippies trying to explore inner space instead of outer space! I was born in 1967, and coincidentally our drive to explore space in person slowed to a crawl. I learned much about the Apollo missions after the program had ended, there was much hope that the Shuttle would bring space travel to the masses in the 1970s, I read Gerard O'Neill's books of Space Colonization, and I couldn't wait for the much delayed Shuttle to finally launch, but it appears SpaceX Starship will be the real Shuttle to orbit now, after most of my life has past, and it appears I will be lucky to see the beginning of Space Colonization on television from my bedside in a nursing home sometime in the 2050s if I am lucky enough to live so long!
Glass roofed cars have come about and popular more recently. Exoskeletons have gotten traction recently. There are glass domed cabins. We plan on staying at one in Finland next year. There are small underwater propulsion systems and commercial submarines.
A common theme I notice about retrofuturism is that it tends to be very much a reflection of what existed at the time, or what was desired to exist at the time. A projection into the future through the limited viewpoint of what currently was and with little to no consideration for how desires might change or new inventions might invalidate or at least lessen the need for innovations in other older inventions. In this regard, we are exactly the same with our depictions of the future today. As fun as it can be to look back on old future predictions and laugh, we are all too likely to be in the same position in decades to come as our depictions of the future get equally criticized and laughed at. Foresight is always 20 20, but looking ahead tends to be hazy, blurry, and filled with uncertainty.
Propeller trains: the Russian Aerowagon built 1917, & the German Schienenzeppelin built 1930. Sadly, propeller trains worked better in comics than in reality.
I don't think that fishing trainer looks too far off from being some sort of electro-mechanical arcade game from the mid-seventies. I'd almost expect to see one next to a 1974 Nintendo Wild Gunman machine.
As a kid growing up in the 60's & 70's Mom and Dad had a couple stacks of old Popular Science from the 50's. I spent a lot of time reading through them. It was such an optimistic time. And yes, a lot of the artwork was pretty sensational, but it sold magazines. I'm sure engineers across the country groaned and rolled their eyes every time a new issue came out.
1:39 *I had that issue of PS!. It's a Hybrid Electric car! Short range battery for ordinary driving, external 3rd rail for hands free freeway driving.* *Changable barcodes on the door are scanned before each exit to leave the freeway and resume manual driving.*
Why is the 4 rotor drone on your thumbnail absurd? we have those right now with passengers on board, its not absurd, on the contrary the image on your thumbnail was extremely forward thinking and accurate.
The mechanical infantry body suit that gives the soldier super-human strength also has existed for a long time. I guess he just likes the art, but isn't really up on the current state of science.
Good work, tbh i see a lot of realism in some of those designs, they kind of drew the ekranoplan; however that 0:30 was hilarious and it is more strange with modern special effects, since it actually was showcased by space x in the "earth to earth" project as a serious presentation, believe it or not.
It was quite funny to see that interview where the interviewer asked "surely this is not going to happen, right?" and the SpaceX spokeswoman repeating "oh yes it will, it's absolutely going to happen, oh yes!" with a big smile on her face while the audience giggled.
The soldiers shields at 4:39 were not far off. Recently I saw video of WWI Italian troops being sent out of the trenches in "modern" style armor like knights of old. Crossing "no-mans land"... they didn’t have a chance against the enemy machine guns.
The system depicted on the Popular Science cover at 4:08 is the Bennie Railplane, which was actually built and worked: ua-cam.com/video/N7ZvfO-99dc/v-deo.htmlsi=FCrbX69jXPAYyrAG .
My view of retro-futures is that while some of it may be truly silly, there’s a whole heck of a lot of it that really isn’t. It comes from an era, extending even into my own early lifetime, when people still had imaginations-and not all of it based in fantasy. Some of these fantastic retro-futures had the potential of coming true. The problem is, somewhere along the course of my lifetime, the imagineers faded away and we stopped advancing (with computer/digital technology perhaps being a key exception). We stopped going to the moon or anywhere else for that matter. Mechanical and architectural technologies have stagnated and in some areas, even reverted. People have become generally more ignorant, less informed, and less educated despite having more college degrees and more access to information at their fingertips than any point in human history. And little to no imagination, period. With a new space race finally beginning to re-percolate after fifty years, perhaps there’s a chance that could change-and inspire a new imagination renaissance.
@@somedumbozzie1539 - More like (as often happens) the original creators/showrunners leave or retire and are replaced by newer ones who are completely unfamiliar and uninterested in the previous source material. We’ve had younger generation NASA people admit that they’re essentially having to relearn from scratch how to put men onto the moon because they don’t know how the older guys did it. It’s like a lost art for which they have no clue.
@@MoonjumperReviews There is a saying in tele that 7 seasons is the life span of a show before the novelty wears off with the public. I saw a doco on the NASA problem they don't know how to make the bell for the Saturn 5 or many of the other major components and the military have lost the formula for the polystyrene foam that is needed to make an H bomb work so its not all bad. Having said that we also seem to have forgotten the horrors of a world war and quite frankly when you look at all the folly and foolery that is going on around in the world today it is like the 20th century never happened.
5:56 Those illustrations from around 1900 showing people flying around with the greatest of ease basically had no idea of the power requirements for lifting such craft off the ground. I also have another picture showing underwater vessels shaped like ordinary surface boats, but with simple transparent greenhouse-like enclosures for the passengers, with no allowance for engines or ventilation, or how much strength those enclosures would need-there’s no way they could be made of glass, for example.
I still remember the Taylor Aerocar featured on the New Bill Cummings show. And exoskeletons are in use already. The weird thing is that growing up in the 50s and 60s we thought we would have flying cars by the 90s or 2000s and now it is 2024 and people are struggling to buy gasoline for regular terrestrial cars.
What I like about this is there's so many people out there saying, "Science Fiction is so good at predicting the future!" But what this shows is that their predictions have just been hit or miss at best. But that's the fun of the genre.
Same as with any predictive endeavor: We remember only the strands of thrown spaghetti that actually stuck to the wall. And in more than a few instances, the speculation didn't so much predict as inspire.
@@Donleecartoons even more so with cold-reading scams like Astrology, Tarot, Psychics, Mediums, Clairvoyants, etc where they say something generic and play off the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief and eagerness for it to be correct.
I was a kid in the 1960s. I am still waiting for my Jetsons flying car and other cool stuff they predicted. The year 2000 was nothing like the artists' conceptions. What a let-down!
There are some propeller driven cars in the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville TN. Mostly focused on post WW2 European cars. The exo skeleton is being explored by DARPA or the military.
3:17 What do you think about it ? Up to now, every move from A to B was bound to the surface of the earth. It was a vast of time for a whole century. 'Flying cars' to rent for a daily need could bring us one step closer to the 'future'... 🎼😎✔️
seeing some of the predictions that we thought were fanciful musings of 'wouldn't it be nice' come true makes me feel my age but the sci-fi geek in me just plain LOVES retro scifi and the classics that predicted a lot of what we take for granted. true we don't have the anti-gravity belts like they envisioned, but we're getting there with wearable jetpacks. ' some of the retrofuturism in those classic novels and short stories might make for some good episodes if you can find the visuals to go along with them.
3:35 Not as crazy as you think. Dubai has had exhibition of flying cars last year and eVTOL vehicles are in development all over the world. 5:04 Exoskeletons are a real thing as well, the US military has been working on them for decades, battery power is the biggest obstacle.
@ExtraEcclesiamNullaSalus With the rise of AI, it becomes a much more likely scenario that it will become available to the masses. Driverless cars were a pipe dream once as well, they have driverless taxi's in San Francisco now thanks to AI.
"Absurdity"? We went from first flight, to going to the moon in less than seventy years. Maybe cut people some slack for buying into the idea of a futuristic, science non-fiction filled future.
What do I think? Some futurists in the past had visionary dreams limited to snippets from UA-cam. Many of these resemble things today that were beyond their comprehension and had to be explained with their then current technology.
When I talk about the future I don't concern myself with forms of travel or other technologies. I refer to the medical advances. Especially the ones involving 'improving' the human body such as creating cyborgs and transplanting uteruses in males and brain implants that create virtual realities. And there is AI which will try to replace human thoughts and ideas with artificial ones. All these things will contribute to the dehumanization of mankind.
A lot of these contraptions and ways to travel don't seem physically impossible to me, but rather uneconomical, dangerous and just outcompeted by better solutions.
Great (absurd) drawings here without which you wouldn't have much of a video to talk about.Look at the medium we're using. But respectfully I think simply highlighting their absurdity is missing the point. Many images from this period provide the essence of the seeds of ideas that have sprung up from the imagination being played with here and contributed meaningfully to the imagining of many new designs/ technologies we enjoy today. This artwork is mostly speculative and freely imagined technologies which has helped inspire and promote design and thinking beyond the limitations of the era. Where would modern society be without the range of technologies directly or indirectly inspired by gadgets and vehicles from movies and shows such as StarTrek, 2001 etc, the endless flamboyant sci-fi propositions and also the World Fair, advertising, architectural design. It might look silly and easy from this comfortable vantage point to criticize its naked ambition, but far too easy to never try to reach out beyond the reality that's presented to us and attempt to create something perhaps absurd on the face of it, but laden with future possibilities developing from them. I don't know . Where do people think emerging technologies emerge from? - if not 'drawn' from once absurd leaps of faith.
You actually point out two things here, the absurdity of both Retrofuturism and Presentism. But who knows? Maybe humans just haven't lived long enough to see those visions become real, so it only seems to us like they were wrong. In reality, they were much farther ahead of their time. Nah.
I'd love to send a shot out to picandportraits, not only for the hard work but for the thought put into these old films. It's easy to throw them out, but it's quite another thing to have a passion and retrospective about all these beautiful relics of our past. To give my own twist, I'm a big fan of absurdism as a concept. It really taps into the child in all of us, and that's the point of futurism. It works so cohesively. One issue is that these idealists didn't brace for an onslaught of unchecked capitalism. The obsessive profiteering of oil barons really sunk us into deep addiction by which the cure of electric-powered cars and other power sources was just not entertained. The lobbying backpedaled any progress we may have enjoyed until the debate on climate change forced us to make objective decisions. These ideas were accurate, though not designed for practicality, space, nor were they experts in engineering fields in every illustration they produced. Nonetheless, they thought the future would have so much potential whether or not we took real advantage of it. But this is a massive planet, and many brilliant people are working hard day and not to give people alternatives even if it takes extra effort to gain access.
Science Fiction eventually becomes science fact. Take the flat screen tvs in Back to the future II, at the time they were science fiction. Submarines, rockets, landing on the moon, lasers, self balancing humanoid robots, Artificial intelligence, talking computers (just to name a few things) were all once science fiction.
Retro-futurism looks so stupid because people don't understand that new inventions create new applications. They can only look at them through the prism of existing applications they know about (that virtual fishing scene is telling, I wonder if future folks were supposed to eat the virtual fish as well). This is true for 99.999% of the people. I'm sure that the way we imagine the future today will look just as ridiculous for those in the future, like 2-3 generations away.
Seems like futurists so often promoted the best ideas for society, while the reality of Capitalism means it's the most profitable ideas that actually get implemented. Not necessarily the same.
C'est rigolo devoir l'imagination sans limite de l'humain y a quelques réalisations qui se sont quand même faites et d'autres qui pourraient être fait à l'heure actuelle ....mais bon il devrait utiliser son imagination pour essayer de trouver des solutions pour sauver la planète.... après il aura le temps de s'amuser It's funny to owe the limitless imagination of the human there are some achievements that have been made anyway and others that could be done at the moment .... But hey he should use his imagination to try to find solutions to save the planet.... After he will have time to have fun
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I grew up reading my grandfather's collection of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. The heady postwar exuberance for technology as the solution to all our problems intrigued me greatly. I inherited his magazine collection, and over the years I've collected hundreds more. I still love them, but I now see that much of what was proposed was actually horrible in practice, environmentally and socially. I'd love to see a return to the lovely aesthetic of that era, combined with our hard-earned knowledge of the consequences of unbridled faith in technology.
I did the same, although he had Popular Mechanics only. Every month’s issue for decades. I spent hours, days, and weeks leafing through them. Unfortunately they weren’t preserved. That naive optimism that the advancement of technology could resolve all of our problems and improve humanity was really thrilling. So sad that we now know differently :(
Don't forget Mechanics Illustrated
If you ever watched "Star Trek: Voyager," you probably saw Tom Paris engaging in retrofuturism in the holodeck with his Buck-Rogers-style adventures (one time Captain Janeway joined in).
Same! Im all for this man! What happened to the World Expo!
I recently popped on the TV and an episode of the Jetson's was on. Elroy was faking he was sick (to stay home from school). Jane brought a monitor of some type (iPad/tablet?) and Elroy had a telemedicine visit with the doctor. Some things do come true!
The wildest part about these covers- about a quarter of them are based on prototypes at the time, and a lot of them are artistic representations of radical new engineering principles of the time.
The giant flying boat on the cover of the March 1930 issue of Popular Science at 2:22 is not a speculative design but an already-existing aircraft, the Dornier Do X, which first flew in July 1929. In 1930, it was announced that the Do X would soon be making a transatlantic crossing to New York, hence the article titled “America Gets World’s Biggest Planes” in the list of contents. The cover illustration shows the aircraft with its original Bristol Jupiter engines (12 engines mounted in tandem push-pull pairs), but these were replaced with more powerful Curtiss Conqueror engines for the transatlantic flight. The Do X set off from Friedrichshafen, Germany, in November 1930, but as a result of various accidents and delays en route, it did not reach New York until August 1931.
Powered exoskeletons have become a thing. Currently the largest markets appear to be medical, such as giving mobility to paraplegics but industrial applications are beginning to evolve.
The most popular is military application. I've even seen film of soldiers experimenting with prototypes.
These are such grandiose and hopeful images, unlike the grim reality!
My reality is not that grim. If you’re here, yours isn’t either.
You're right. Thanks!@@richsackett3423
Do you want a little cheese with that
Trobot
Reality is great, if you choose that reality. Needs to go faster.
There was so much lead in the environment back in those days that its presence helps to explain a lot.
Thank you for this video and for all of your retrofuturism work.
Truly this was us as a human race at our most gloriously impractical lol
This channel embodies the dream of what late night TV could be
And we are still at it! A hundred yesrs from now, there will be other people looking at todays 'quaint and weird' ideas and concepts. Thank you for the fun reminders.
I don't watch these to laugh. I enjoy the spirit of optimism people had of the future at the time. Sad to think we've lost that now.
Not me.
Thanks again for another great breakdown~ I'm only in my 30s, but my dad is a boomer and I definitely had stacks of the old PopSci mags around to read growing up without internet so this video is a fantastic bit of nostalgia. Always adored the cover art. Hell, even kept a subscription to the magazine myself until the early 2000s~
Would love a lens into an alternate universe where those old predictions had come true~
Thanks for this! I appreciate all of your retrofuturism videos. They're a big inspiration to my art and also quite comforting
I liked the retrofuturism, it seemed amazing ^^
2:45 That’s definitely based on a Leonardo Da Vinci sketch. And no, he was not one known for the practicality of his designs.
A common error of prognosticators is that they can't anticipate paradigm shifts in technology, so they can only extrapolate quantitative advancements in the tech they know.
Thus atom-powered dirigibles instead of jet planes, and city-wide pneumatic tube systems to propel paper documents instead of the internet.
Who had the atomic dirigible? I want to read that article!
Where can I get one? I promise to fly responsibly unless I’m in a hurry and had a few atomic cocktails.
the aircraft at 2.22 is actually a real one, the 1929 Dornier DoX, the biggest aeroplane in the world upto that time though an underpowered failure, despite its 12 engines
There's a lot of impractical stuff here, but it definitely inspired a lot of the engineers and designers that would come after it.
I am most fascinated with forecasts of now made in the 1960s. In that decade of optimism and space tech, we were fixated on the magical term, "21st Century."
I was a kid in the 60s and we were told in school that our generation would go to work on the moon. It all seemed so possible at the time.
Elon Musk is trying to make that happen with his Starship program, his self-driving electric vehicles, his robots. I think he read a lot of these Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines.
@@Bfdidc It was possible, but we took a left turn and went "Duh", and started using drugs as a bunch of hippies trying to explore inner space instead of outer space! I was born in 1967, and coincidentally our drive to explore space in person slowed to a crawl. I learned much about the Apollo missions after the program had ended, there was much hope that the Shuttle would bring space travel to the masses in the 1970s, I read Gerard O'Neill's books of Space Colonization, and I couldn't wait for the much delayed Shuttle to finally launch, but it appears SpaceX Starship will be the real Shuttle to orbit now, after most of my life has past, and it appears I will be lucky to see the beginning of Space Colonization on television from my bedside in a nursing home sometime in the 2050s if I am lucky enough to live so long!
I’m not impressed with the overrated Elon Musk.
Glass roofed cars have come about and popular more recently. Exoskeletons have gotten traction recently. There are glass domed cabins. We plan on staying at one in Finland next year. There are small underwater propulsion systems and commercial submarines.
A common theme I notice about retrofuturism is that it tends to be very much a reflection of what existed at the time, or what was desired to exist at the time. A projection into the future through the limited viewpoint of what currently was and with little to no consideration for how desires might change or new inventions might invalidate or at least lessen the need for innovations in other older inventions.
In this regard, we are exactly the same with our depictions of the future today. As fun as it can be to look back on old future predictions and laugh, we are all too likely to be in the same position in decades to come as our depictions of the future get equally criticized and laughed at. Foresight is always 20 20, but looking ahead tends to be hazy, blurry, and filled with uncertainty.
Always will be, you can only imagine the future based on your present knowledge.
Propeller trains: the Russian Aerowagon built 1917, & the German Schienenzeppelin built 1930. Sadly, propeller trains worked better in comics than in reality.
The sky is full of flying propeller trains! Unfortunately they weren’t made to fly.
That gold "robot" at 13 seconds into the video ended up in a local junk shop near my boyhood home. It was make out of plywood and stovepipe.
This is the future I grew up with. Enjoyed it.
I don't think that fishing trainer looks too far off from being some sort of electro-mechanical arcade game from the mid-seventies. I'd almost expect to see one next to a 1974 Nintendo Wild Gunman machine.
I remember that robot skeleton power suit from 1965...I was 12 years old! Exiting stuff in tthose days!!
As a kid growing up in the 60's & 70's Mom and Dad had a couple stacks of old Popular Science from the 50's. I spent a lot of time reading through them. It was such an optimistic time. And yes, a lot of the artwork was pretty sensational, but it sold magazines. I'm sure engineers across the country groaned and rolled their eyes every time a new issue came out.
1:39 *I had that issue of PS!. It's a Hybrid Electric car! Short range battery for ordinary driving, external 3rd rail for hands free freeway driving.*
*Changable barcodes on the door are scanned before each exit to leave the freeway and resume manual driving.*
Some of these "absurd" predictions are actually true today and were depicted accurately.
Why is the 4 rotor drone on your thumbnail absurd? we have those right now with passengers on board, its not absurd, on the contrary the image on your thumbnail was extremely forward thinking and accurate.
I agree with you and it looks very much alike to the Doroni H1- X that is a reality right now
The mechanical infantry body suit that gives the soldier super-human strength also has existed for a long time. I guess he just likes the art, but isn't really up on the current state of science.
Good work, tbh i see a lot of realism in some of those designs, they kind of drew the ekranoplan; however that 0:30 was hilarious and it is more strange with modern special effects, since it actually was showcased by space x in the "earth to earth" project as a serious presentation, believe it or not.
It was quite funny to see that interview where the interviewer asked "surely this is not going to happen, right?" and the SpaceX spokeswoman repeating "oh yes it will, it's absolutely going to happen, oh yes!" with a big smile on her face while the audience giggled.
@@vinny142 And the way she said it, i still can't come to terms with it.
I want one of those motorized hoop things. Apparently, they actually DID exist back then. The past is still way ahead of us on some things. 😂
The soldiers shields at 4:39 were not far off.
Recently I saw video of WWI Italian troops being sent out of the trenches in "modern" style armor like knights of old. Crossing "no-mans land"... they didn’t have a chance against the enemy machine guns.
I love looking at those old PopSci magazine covers! They often looked the same as the covers for Weird Tales and other SciFi pulps of the day.
The system depicted on the Popular Science cover at 4:08 is the Bennie Railplane, which was actually built and worked: ua-cam.com/video/N7ZvfO-99dc/v-deo.htmlsi=FCrbX69jXPAYyrAG .
What is the video at 0:46? Putting a label in the corner of all the video clips would have been useful.
Bring back The World Expo!
My view of retro-futures is that while some of it may be truly silly, there’s a whole heck of a lot of it that really isn’t. It comes from an era, extending even into my own early lifetime, when people still had imaginations-and not all of it based in fantasy. Some of these fantastic retro-futures had the potential of coming true. The problem is, somewhere along the course of my lifetime, the imagineers faded away and we stopped advancing (with computer/digital technology perhaps being a key exception). We stopped going to the moon or anywhere else for that matter. Mechanical and architectural technologies have stagnated and in some areas, even reverted. People have become generally more ignorant, less informed, and less educated despite having more college degrees and more access to information at their fingertips than any point in human history. And little to no imagination, period. With a new space race finally beginning to re-percolate after fifty years, perhaps there’s a chance that could change-and inspire a new imagination renaissance.
Like a TV show that has run a few seasons longer than it the world just ran out if ideas well good one's that is.
@@somedumbozzie1539 - More like (as often happens) the original creators/showrunners leave or retire and are replaced by newer ones who are completely unfamiliar and uninterested in the previous source material. We’ve had younger generation NASA people admit that they’re essentially having to relearn from scratch how to put men onto the moon because they don’t know how the older guys did it. It’s like a lost art for which they have no clue.
@@MoonjumperReviews There is a saying in tele that 7 seasons is the life span of a show before the novelty wears off with the public. I saw a doco on the NASA problem they don't know how to make the bell for the Saturn 5 or many of the other major components and the military have lost the formula for the polystyrene foam that is needed to make an H bomb work so its not all bad.
Having said that we also seem to have forgotten the horrors of a world war
and quite frankly when you look at all the folly and foolery that is going on around in the world today it is like the 20th century never happened.
5:07 Look at one of the article contributors: a certain Kennedy, no less.
5:56 Those illustrations from around 1900 showing people flying around with the greatest of ease basically had no idea of the power requirements for lifting such craft off the ground. I also have another picture showing underwater vessels shaped like ordinary surface boats, but with simple transparent greenhouse-like enclosures for the passengers, with no allowance for engines or ventilation, or how much strength those enclosures would need-there’s no way they could be made of glass, for example.
At 3:36 that's a quadcopter - perfectly feasible design and single seaters have been built and flown.
Popular mechanics was one of my favorite magazines during childhood.
I would love to see a sci fi movie with a pulp/retrofuturism look.
I've had my fill of dark Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk personally!
Have you seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?
Flash Gordon?
Captain Zoom?
I still remember the Taylor Aerocar featured on the New Bill Cummings show. And exoskeletons are in use already. The weird thing is that growing up in the 50s and 60s we thought we would have flying cars by the 90s or 2000s and now it is 2024 and people are struggling to buy gasoline for regular terrestrial cars.
What I like about this is there's so many people out there saying, "Science Fiction is so good at predicting the future!" But what this shows is that their predictions have just been hit or miss at best. But that's the fun of the genre.
Same as with any predictive endeavor: We remember only the strands of thrown spaghetti that actually stuck to the wall. And in more than a few instances, the speculation didn't so much predict as inspire.
@@Donleecartoons even more so with cold-reading scams like Astrology, Tarot, Psychics, Mediums, Clairvoyants, etc where they say something generic and play off the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief and eagerness for it to be correct.
Great video. Be aware that Google archive has every Pop Science and Pop Mechanix as well as all Life Magazines and more.
Retrofuturist art reminds me of Davinci's sketches of helicopters and parachutes and whatnot
Tell me the thumbnail isn't a quadcopter, how is that ridiculous?
I was a kid in the 1960s. I am still waiting for my Jetsons flying car and other cool stuff they predicted. The year 2000 was nothing like the artists' conceptions. What a let-down!
I'm like Red Forman from "That 70's Show": "Where's my jetpack?"
3:35 - July 1957 Popular Mechanics... dead on prediction!
0:42 I want that art-deco beast! 👍🏻😁
There are some propeller driven cars in the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville TN. Mostly focused on post WW2 European cars. The exo skeleton is being explored by DARPA or the military.
Thank you so much for doing these videos so few people appreciate retro future stuff and i cant get enough
3:17
What do you think about it ?
Up to now, every move from A to B was bound to
the surface of the earth.
It was a vast of time for a whole century.
'Flying cars' to rent for a
daily need could bring us
one step closer to the 'future'...
🎼😎✔️
I keep ice cream in my glove box, so there!
I believe the hoop motorcycle is a great idea!😅
seeing some of the predictions that we thought were fanciful musings of 'wouldn't it be nice' come true makes me feel my age but the sci-fi geek in me just plain LOVES retro scifi and the classics that predicted a lot of what we take for granted. true we don't have the anti-gravity belts like they envisioned, but we're getting there with wearable jetpacks. '
some of the retrofuturism in those classic novels and short stories might make for some good episodes if you can find the visuals to go along with them.
People think the present comes from the past, but it comes from the future.
Anything anyone has ever done has first been envisioned by someone.
Great video
3:35 Not as crazy as you think. Dubai has had exhibition of flying cars last year and eVTOL vehicles are in development all over the world. 5:04 Exoskeletons are a real thing as well, the US military has been working on them for decades, battery power is the biggest obstacle.
@ExtraEcclesiamNullaSalus With the rise of AI, it becomes a much more likely scenario that it will become available to the masses. Driverless cars were a pipe dream once as well, they have driverless taxi's in San Francisco now thanks to AI.
2:36 was recently showcased
Gonna be a wing ding...summer smoker on da gro..und.
I hear you’re mad about Brubeck.
1:25 - That reminds me of an Ornithopter. I wonder if Frank Herbert was inspired by this. lol
"Absurdity"? We went from first flight, to going to the moon in less than seventy years. Maybe cut people some slack for buying into the idea of a futuristic, science non-fiction filled future.
I like the shorter format....
Leaves me wanting
Considering the horrific times when many of these were published, people certainly had a huge amount of optimism. Where did it go??😢
If you need to make something for a sci fi setting.
Old retrofuturism, it's an endless well
@3:37 That's remarkably close to some prototype aircraft built for the US military. Look up Aerogeep.
The funny thing about these "futuristic" designs from the 50s is that they obviously still look like something from the 50s.
What do I think? Some futurists in the past had visionary dreams limited to snippets from UA-cam. Many of these resemble things today that were beyond their comprehension and had to be explained with their then current technology.
I already see stuff from today that's going to look even sillier than some of this does, especially in a hundred years from now.
Awesome!
Hello, from the future!
Enjoyed Much...
... very cool _ cheers
cool designs
When I talk about the future I don't concern myself with forms of travel or other technologies. I refer to the medical advances. Especially the ones involving 'improving' the human body such as creating cyborgs and transplanting uteruses in males and brain implants that create virtual realities. And there is AI which will try to replace human thoughts and ideas with artificial ones. All these things will contribute to the dehumanization of mankind.
A lot of these contraptions and ways to travel don't seem physically impossible to me, but rather uneconomical, dangerous and just outcompeted by better solutions.
I want one of those hoops!
Hiller's aerial sedan, looks like a modern drone taxi. did he patent his idea ?
The Hiller reminded me a great deal of the Piasecki Airgeep -- envisioned as a one- or two-person vehicle with a shrouded lift fan fore and aft.
Kinda like SteamPunk ! I love it
Cool!
Great (absurd) drawings here without which you wouldn't have much of a video to talk about.Look at the medium we're using. But respectfully I think simply highlighting their absurdity is missing the point. Many images from this period provide the essence of the seeds of ideas that have sprung up from the imagination being played with here and contributed meaningfully to the imagining of many new designs/ technologies we enjoy today. This artwork is mostly speculative and freely imagined technologies which has helped inspire and promote design and thinking beyond the limitations of the era.
Where would modern society be without the range of technologies directly or indirectly inspired by gadgets and vehicles from movies and shows such as StarTrek, 2001 etc, the endless flamboyant sci-fi propositions and also the World Fair, advertising, architectural design. It might look silly and easy from this comfortable vantage point to criticize its naked ambition, but far too easy to never try to reach out beyond the reality that's presented to us and attempt to create something perhaps absurd on the face of it, but laden with future possibilities developing from them.
I don't know . Where do people think emerging technologies emerge from? - if not 'drawn' from once absurd leaps of faith.
Mute an stop start to enjoy the old covers
You actually point out two things here, the absurdity of both Retrofuturism and Presentism. But who knows? Maybe humans just haven't lived long enough to see those visions become real, so it only seems to us like they were wrong. In reality, they were much farther ahead of their time.
Nah.
I'd love to send a shot out to picandportraits, not only for the hard work but for the thought put into these old films. It's easy to throw them out, but it's quite another thing to have a passion and retrospective about all these beautiful relics of our past. To give my own twist, I'm a big fan of absurdism as a concept. It really taps into the child in all of us, and that's the point of futurism. It works so cohesively. One issue is that these idealists didn't brace for an onslaught of unchecked capitalism. The obsessive profiteering of oil barons really sunk us into deep addiction by which the cure of electric-powered cars and other power sources was just not entertained. The lobbying backpedaled any progress we may have enjoyed until the debate on climate change forced us to make objective decisions. These ideas were accurate, though not designed for practicality, space, nor were they experts in engineering fields in every illustration they produced. Nonetheless, they thought the future would have so much potential whether or not we took real advantage of it. But this is a massive planet, and many brilliant people are working hard day and not to give people alternatives even if it takes extra effort to gain access.
Science Fiction eventually becomes science fact. Take the flat screen tvs in Back to the future II, at the time they were science fiction. Submarines, rockets, landing on the moon, lasers, self balancing humanoid robots, Artificial intelligence, talking computers (just to name a few things) were all once science fiction.
What is true, with 100% certainty, is the FUTURE they promised us is DEAD
Propellers on ships will still have a future. Just put them under water and call them screws, and you have solved many inefficiencys of the propeller.
Note to haters,
The reason we got this far is because they were not afraid to use their imagination. So suck it up and get creative!
A number of these were indeed technically possible, but there was not enough investment or market for them. Don't blame the inventors blame us.
That's right. The narrator is not scientific, just opinionated.
Retro-futurism looks so stupid because people don't understand that new inventions create new applications. They can only look at them through the prism of existing applications they know about (that virtual fishing scene is telling, I wonder if future folks were supposed to eat the virtual fish as well). This is true for 99.999% of the people. I'm sure that the way we imagine the future today will look just as ridiculous for those in the future, like 2-3 generations away.
That sandcastle one isn't a bad idea. Then you carve into the mortar.
It's like less than a minute. You can harden that fast if quick. 3d print is slow.
If you had enough people, I still thing you can hand build an entire town in less than 10 minutes. At flash building and repair.
You just kind of fix things behind them.
You get a ton amount of people. And just go through a town and put it back together. And just leave out the other side.
The same concept if you took apart first.
more on the mags
Seems that the era of new inventions is over. Nowadays, it's just making improvements to current inventions.
Seems like futurists so often promoted the best ideas for society, while the reality of Capitalism means it's the most profitable ideas that actually get implemented. Not necessarily the same.
The thumbnail is not that far removed from today
C'est rigolo devoir l'imagination sans limite de l'humain y a quelques réalisations qui se sont quand même faites et d'autres qui pourraient être fait à l'heure actuelle ....mais bon il devrait utiliser son imagination pour essayer de trouver des solutions pour sauver la planète.... après il aura le temps de s'amuser
It's funny to owe the limitless imagination of the human there are some achievements that have been made anyway and others that could be done at the moment .... But hey he should use his imagination to try to find solutions to save the planet.... After he will have time to have fun
Imagine if these actually happened