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Sitting stationary in a traffic jam, gazing wistfully at the horizon, more than once I've daydreamed about pressing a button on the dash causing the car to raise into the air and take off as the crow flies, avoiding the knotted snarl of the full highway below.
It's an entirely understandable wish, and one that has been prominent in science fiction and speculative circles since at least 1926, the year Fritz Lang's Metropolis was released. In the May 2007 Sydney Morning Herald, in an article titled Dude, Where's My Sci Fi Future?, Daniel H. Wilson described the city it predicted:
...a dizzying view of future cities filled with titanic buildings connected by narrow sky bridges and a horizon buzzing with hundreds of autogyros.
That vision set the tone for what was to follow, and Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories picked up the theme, popularized it, and became synonymous with it, to the extent that -- in a frenzy of sci-fi self-referential writing -- William Gibson' wrote 'The Gernsback Contiuum', a short story in which retro-future artifacts pop into existence in the late 20th via mass delusion, or possibly, a fault in the fabric of space-time.
In the Wonders of Science, Terry Jeeves describes the inevitable result of the public's fascination with the wonders offered by the limitless future technology offered, among them the concept of the flying car:
By the thirties, Modern Mechanix and Mechanics Illustrated were more sophisticated versions in the science and technology field. Covers still supplied the stimulus to buying them with such weird ideas as, "Uncle Sam's Flying Tank." We were also told to expect such wonders as... "A Mid-Ocean Aerodrome," "Hydrofoil Liners To Cross Atlantic At 100mph!" and "A Flying Car In Your Garage."
And for a while, it looked like Gernsback's predictions were going to come true. For sure, by the Fifties, no real successful flying car was in evidence, but the cars Detroit was producing certainly looked like they could take wing at any time; great sails of fins poised for takeoff and bullet-shaped chrome bumpers deployed to ward off the slipstream. The Big Three automakers clearly sensed the public's appetite for a streamlined, travel choice of tomorrow, and even if they couldn't offer a reliable airborne automotive solution, they were happy to indulge the dream.
In the magazine November 13, 2007 issue of Autospeed, author Julian Edgar wrote Fifties Concept Cars, a nostalgia-laced homage to these forward looking designs
Call them concept cars, dream cars, prototypes that never went into production, or simply show cars – car companies have been building tantalising prospects for well over half a century. And, paradoxically, it is those very earliest concept cars that are the most interesting.
Edgar's article covers 14 of the decade's more thought provoking designs, including the 1956 Chrysler Ghia Dart, the
Chrysler DeSoto Adventurer Two, which featured Italian styling via Rocket Robin Hood; the dome-topped Cadillac Cyclone; and the GM Firebird rocket cars (they were powered by a gas-turbine engine), one model of which today decorates the top of the Harley J. Earl Daytona 500 Trophy.
As the leader of the Big Three, General Motors was seldom willing to be outdone by its competitors in the race to display advanced technology, and made a practice of producing concept cars characterized by a leap-ahead perspective, both technologically and in terms of styling.
Not to be outdone by its other two competitors, in 1957 Ford introduced the first automatically retractable hardtop roof
on its Skyliner model.
By 1962, the demand for space age wheels had become so pent-up that just one-off concept cars weren't enough to slake the public's appetite, so the next logical step was one-off custom cars. One of the Kings of the Kalifornia Kustom Kar Kulture was Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, a caricaturist and cartoonist who also happened to be a custom car builder. One of Roth's most famous creations was a mixture of mod and futurism called The Mysterion, which became so iconic that Mattel created a Hot Wheels version and Revell created a model kit.
By the late Sixties, though, even as the Supercars reached their peak, the writing was on the wall for over-the-top automotive fantasies, and by 1973, with the OPEC oil crisis, the hangover set in with a vengeance. The space program was scaled back into virtual non-existence, convertibles were outlawed and instead of Kustom Kars, Chrysler's K-cars reflected the national mood. It was the triumph of the Fun Police, and soon an entire nation became too preoccupied with wresting control of its cities back from an epidemic of violence and drugs that threatened to turn Americans into prisoners in their own homes -- unable to get out to enjoy flying cars even if they had them.
But, like all hangovers, even the oil hangover had to come to an end. Along with the computer revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s, came a new surge in belief in personal freedom and self-determination. After Steve Jobs and Apple flung the hammer into the grey face of conformity, and information came to our rescue, a new generation of individualists were free to explore the promise of self-expression. Today, we are at the dawn of mass customization, where everyone is free to express his or her self with custom tailored blogs, choose from a myriad of a la cart factory-ordered car choices selected from an internet menu and intelligent search agents learning our personal information consumption preferences at an ever-increasing pace.
We are at a crossroads, where information mastery, combined with nanotechnology, biotechnology, cutting-edge materials science and high-end energy research are combining to make the impossible possible -- including our century-old dreams of flying cars.
Coming Soon: Stay tuned to the Primary Sources column. In Part Two of this series, Gernsback's Revenge, we'll explore concepts of exponential versus linear progress in technology, advanced navigation solutions, and an entire suite of flying car options that are either available now, or are due to hit the streets in the very near future.
