Missing the Future
A famed designer’s predictions fail the test of time.
By Henry Petroski
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Magic Motorways, a book that presented America’s superhighways as they were envisioned to be in 1960. The book grew out of the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Both exhibit and book were the work of Norman Bel Geddes, who had achieved renown as a theatrical set designer before becoming one of America’s early industrial designers.
After waiting in long lines to enter the GM building at the fair, visitors were seated in large, comfortable chairs that carried them around the periphery, from which they looked down on an expansive model of a future American landscape. It was like an enormous model-train layout but with a focus on highways.
Among the things Bel Geddes saw 20 years hence were elevated roadways, some carrying traffic across wide lakes or the crests of dams. This was actually not a new concept; construction of New York City’s elevated West Side Highway had begun in 1929. By the 1960s it would be a glaring example of neglected infrastructure. When cars and trucks fell through its rusted roadway onto the street below, it began to be dismantled.
Boston’s elevated Central Artery became such an eyesore and bottleneck that it was replaced by an overbudget, overschedule, and scandal-ridden Big Dig project that put traffic under the city’s streets. Seattle is in the process of replacing a section of its elevated Alaskan Way with a tunnel (See “Engineering Blockbuster” in First Look). Unfortunately, after striking a buried steel pipe, the gigantic tunnel boring machine burned out its main bearings and is awaiting rescue and repair.
In Bel Geddes’s wide-open countryside, automobiles were expected to cruise along at 100 mph. However, the magic motorways known as interstates were geometrically designed for a top speed of about 85. I do remember in the 1960s driving along highways in Texas with an 80-mph speed limit, but our Volkswagen Beetle could only exceed that on the downhill. In the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s, the national speed limit became an energy-conserving 55. Among the predictions in Magic Motorways was that in 1960 it would be possible to drive coast to coast in a couple of days.
Bel Geddes’s buildings of the future were largely variations of the art deco style of the 1930s. He completely missed the rectangular steel-and-glass skyscrapers that began to appear in the late 1950s. As for automobile design, by 1960 the craze was not the streamlining he championed but tail fins evoking rockets that launched satellites and weapons.
As Yogi Berra once famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Steeped in current trends as the industrial designer Bel Geddes must have been, he was not able to see 20 years ahead.
Designers of all kinds can use a pencil to sketch with pictures and words an imaginative portrait of the future that talented model builders can render in dramatic three-dimensional arrangements to be viewed by millions of people at a world’s fair or similar venue. But as convincing as such utopian predictions might be at the moment, they rarely stand the test of time.
Today’s future is tomorrow’s past, and what once looked inspired can over the years reveal itself to have been conceptually flawed, poorly executed, and all too fragile. And engineers are not immune to becoming overly optimistic about projects that promise to be the things of the future. After all, the Titanic was the future of ocean travel, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge the future of suspension bridges.
Engineering is by its very nature about designing the future, but it does so most successfully when it proceeds cautiously, learning along the way from the missteps small and large that inevitably occur.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke. His most recent book is The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship.
Photo by Catherine Petroski