Sunday 20 December 2009

What Where They Thinking?


It's fun to peruse old copies of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Modern Mechanix, and similar magazines and laugh at the naivety of 1950s science. Everything was all, 'Rockets! Space! Lasers! Together at last, on your toaster!'

It was a recipe for an inevitable letdown when jet-packs failed to show up by 1970. But sometimes Popular Mechanics just had bad ideas. Like, crazy, poorly-thought-out contraptions and scenarios that, even in the '50s, made no sense whatsoever.

1 comment(s):

soubriquet said...

Indeed, you look at this, or pretty much any PM cover illustration, and your first thought is "That wouldn't work"...
Yet somehow, they kept churning out covers of outrageously impractical contraptions, and were singularly ineffective at almost everything they pre-guessed.