view additional pages

The Next Frontier?

Shape of things to come? Even as Apollo and orbiting Skylab recede into history, American scientists consider a more awesome enterprise—a permanent colony in space.

By ISAAC ASIMOV Paintings by PIERRE MION

I DID NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND what L-5 was like, on this July day in A.D. 2026, until I no longer saw it from my vantage point in space.

On the shuttle flight I had observed by telescope the torus that we all recognize, much like a bicycle wheel, gleaming in the direct light of the sun and in the light reflected from the large mirror floating free above. The six spokes and the central hub were visible too, of course.
Read the rest of this entry »

That is a gorgeous toolkit on the third page.

view additional pages

YOUR LIFE TEN YEARS FROM TODAY

During the next 10 years the world will see changes dramatic as those introduced by the industrial revolution. Technicological progress will be equal in this period to that of any previous five decades, and in its wake will come new problems. If man can foresee and meet these challenges, our way of life in 10 years could be amazingly different.

by Leo Cherne

The progress of these next 10 years will be as dramatic, as filled with change, as jampacked with impact for American business in the total American community as any 50 years in the entire development of civilized man.
Read the rest of this entry »

The fastest speed a human being has ever traveled is roughly 25,000 mph (Apollo astronauts). Speed of light in a vacuum is 670,616,629 mph so they were only off by a factor of 27,000 or so.

view additional pages

SCIENCE LOOKS AHEAD TO 2000 A.D.

When a development engineer like myself looks into the future and tries to explain what he sees, he begins to sound more like a science-fiction writer than a development engineer.

By the year 2000, for instance, it is entirely possible that we may have spaceships which can travel at a speed approaching the speed of light. This would put us in a position to examine some of the fantastic implications of Einstein’s theories. Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Most Scientific Fiction Can’t Come True

by WILLIAM J. HARRIS

You’ve probably read scores of so-called scientific fiction stories, but the chances are you don’t know why most of these tales can’t possibly come true. Mr. Harris sets forth here the scientific objections to fantastic projects such as transporting a human being by radio and rocketing to Mars.
Read the rest of this entry »

Windows? Bah, who needs windows when I’ve got sunlamps?

view additional pages

More Leisure for Man in the Automatic Age

by L. Warrington Chubb

Director of Research, Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co.
As told to J. EARLE MILLER

Mr. Chubb describes in this remarkable article a number of the amazing inventions recently developed which promise to free man from toil at machines, to better health, and to add greatly to the comforts of home life.

IN A ROOM down the hall an electric eye is busy at a task that human eyes and hands have always performed. Nearby an electric organ fills the building with the deep, soft notes of a cathedral instrument. Across the way a facsimile machine receives and dispatches exact copies of written or printed pages, a cathode tube flickers with the moving picture of electricity in transit, and a beam of polarized light passing through a piece of celluloid is telling its master that railroad rails are being made with too much steel near their base and not enough just beneath the flange on which the car wheels glide. Read the rest of this entry »

HECK? Really? HECK? That’s the best they could come up with? What exactly does kid mean in this context? Baby goat?

view additional pages

HOW RCA IS PLANNING…. YOUR WORLD OF TOMORROW

By James C. G. Conniff

RADIOS as small as sugar cubes. Typewriters that print letters as fast as you can dictate them.

A memory storage plate smaller and thinner than a postage stamp—a shoe-box full of them will store and produce any one of a million facts in seconds.

An automated house with electronic devices that awaken you in the morning, make your bed, prepare your breakfast, clean house and make it burglar-proof while you are out.

All of these electronic miracles are in existence. They are products of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N. J., and scientists of the Radio Corporation of America are working today to make them available to you tomorrow.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Radio Power will Revolutionize the World

by NIKOLA TESLA As told to ALFRED ALBELLI

Tesla’s World of Tomorrow

“We are on the threshold of a gigantic revolution, based on the commercialization of the wireless transmission of power.

“Motion pictures will be flashed across limitless spaces . . .

“The same energy (wireless transmission of power) will drive airplanes and dirigibles from one central base.

“… In rocket-propelled machines . . . it will be practicable to attain speeds of nearly a mile a second (3600 m.p.h.) through the rarefied medium above the stratosphere.

“. . . We will be enabled to illuminate the whole sky at night . . . Eventually we will flash power in virtually unlimited amounts to planets.”

—Nikola Tesla.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

MI Readers Suggest: Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow

Here are the 50 Golden Hammer-winning inventions for the world of 2055, selected from the thousands submitted by MI readers.

Illustrated by Gurney Miller IF YOU future-minded MI readers can bear to cast a backward glance (just to the March 1955 issue) you’ll recall a rosy forecast of the year 2055 A.D. entitled Amazing Marvels Of Tomorrow by that joyous prophet O. O. Binder. In connection with that article we announced that 50 Golden Hammers would be given for the 50 best ideas for inventions that would make the world of 2055 even jollier. From the thousands of suggestions that poured in from enthusiastic futurists we have selected the 50 below. Some of these ideas were sent in by as many as 20 different readers. In such cases, when the idea was a winner, we gave the award to the writer of the letter with the earliest postmark. Read the rest of this entry »

This article is an exploration of the changes that will be brought on by the rise of solid-state electronics. The author does a very good job extrapolating what will be possible, with very few of the flights of fancy such as flying cars and domed cities that are common to articles of this genre. Almost every product he discusses is available now.

People do have video crib monitors, solar panels are available, but are not quite efficient enough to power a house, as he predicted. Video phones are only now really practical because of the bandwidth limitations spelled out in the article. We don’t have ultrasonic washing machines in our houses, but ultrasonics are used in a number of areas for cleaning. We do (did) rent movies for our color VCRs, and there are megahertz range computers managing very complicated factory production with very little human intervention. Not to mention touch tone phones and microwave ovens. Plus, if you showed that picture of a flat screen tv on the first page to someone without any context they’d probably guess that someone had hacked an LCD monitor to look all “retro”. By the way, if you’re interested in flat screen TVs, you should check out this one from 1958.

I’ve actually been wanting to post this article for a few years. When I was posting this piece about a pocket transistor radio, I noticed that the author used the word “stereatronics”, which I’d never heard. I googled it and found the complete text of this article, with no pictures, here. After reading it I learned that stereatronics was a word created for this article, which they hoped would catch on. It didn’t. I thought it would be perfect to post to the site, so I tracked down a copy. Then when I got it I realized that Colliers magazine was 11×14″ and I couldn’t fit it on my scanner. However, I recently bought an 11×17″ scanner for the site, and so here it is.

view additional pages

Stereatronics – A New Science that Will Change Your Way of Life

Tiny solids are turning the electronics industry upside down. Some vibrate, others change light to energy or energy to light, or direct current to alternating. Together, they spell revolution

A NEW science, stereatronics, has been creeping up on us in the last few years and has started to make major changes in the way we live. Few of us have noticed any difference; the changes have come so quietly that even many of the people who are closest to the new science are surprised at what it has been doing. Yet the evidences have been all about us.

—Television sets are a great deal less expensive now than they were a relatively few months ago.

—More and more tape recorders are being sold. Five years back, they were too costly for most people. Ten years ago, they weren’t to be had at any price.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we do have flat-screen computers you can write on that fit in a briefcase, but I’m still waiting to take my 250 MPH car to a business meeting in another domed city. Perhaps by the end of the year.

view additional pages

40 Years in the Future

By James R. Berry

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a pretty fun article that does a pretty mediocre job of predicting the future. Must have been those damn labor-unions that held everything back. My favorite prediction is that used underwear will be recycled into candy.

view additional pages

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years

By Waldemar Kaempffert

Science Editor, The New York Times

WHAT WILL the world be like in A.D. 2000? You can read the answer in your home, in the streets, in the trains and cars that carry you to your work, in the bargain basement of every department store. You don’t realize what is happening because it is a piecemeal process. The jet-propelled plane is one piece, the latest insect killer is another. Thousands of such pieces are automatically dropping into their places to form the pattern of tomorrow’s world.

The only obstacles to accurate prophecy are the vested interests, which may retard progress for economic reasons, tradition, conservatism, labor-union policies and legislation. If we confine ourselves to processes and inventions that are now being hatched in the laboratory, we shall not wander too far from reality.
Read the rest of this entry »

Usually old articles of the form “Your x of tomorrow” be it house, car, phone, city, plane, etc are full of ideas that are wildly off the mark or just plain ridiculous. This article about the future of phones is remarkable because virtually everything in it has come true. Worldwide Direct Touchtone Dialing, Transistorized Switching, Audio/Video data compression, Voice Recognition and rampant miniaturization. All true. Not to mention that a tiny, touchtone, color videophone you can watch TV on is a pretty accurate description of my Motorola RAZR.

I also love the idea that everyone will get a phone number at birth and keep it for the rest of their life. If you call someone and they don’t pick up, you’ll know they’re dead. Or perhaps just sleeping.

view additional pages

Your Telephone Of Tomorrow

Future may bring push-button dialing, videophones, direct calls anywhere on earth and pocket-size sets.

By Robert G. Beason

ON SOME night in the future a young man walking along Market Street in San Francisco may suddenly think of a friend in Rome. Reaching into his pocket, he will pull out a watch-size disc with a set of buttons on one side. He will punch ten times. Turning the device over, he will hear his friend’s voice and see his face on a tiny screen, in color and 3-D. At the same moment his friend in Rome will see and hear him.

The disc will be a telephone, a miniature model equipped for both audio and video service. Back in 1952, Harold S. Osborne, retiring chief engineer of American Telephone & Telegraph, envisioned this tiny instrument as the ultimate shape of the phone. In the future, said Mr. Osborne, a telephone number will be given at birth to every baby in the world. It will be his for life. When he wants to call anyone, no matter where, he will merely push the buttons on his Lilliputian phone.
Read the rest of this entry »