I have Seen the Future
It was on this day in 1939 that the New York World’s Fair opened to the public. The theme of the fair was The World of Tomorrow. Planners built the fairground on Flushing Meadows, which had been a garbage dump.
It was at that fair that many Americans first saw the products they would enjoy after World War II, including television, long-distance phone service, air conditioners, refrigerators, FM radio, fluorescent lighting, and washing machines. There were prototypes of the early helicopter, called an autogiro, which was basically a plane with a propeller on top. There were dioramas showing model utopian cities of the future, where everyone would soon have fax machines and videophones. The most popular exhibit was General Motors’ Futurama, which was a scale model of an American city in 1960, with futuristic homes, cars shaped like flying saucers, and an advanced superhighway system with a speed limit of a hundred miles per hour. The Futurama exhibit popularized the term “aerodynamic.” Visitors to the exhibit were given a small blue-and-white pin that said, “I Have Seen the Future.”
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