Wonderful Future That Never Was, The (Popular Mechanics Magazine) [Hardcover]

One of the editorial mainstays of the leading American monthly hobbyist magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science was the blending of the future with the present. Every issue had pages of DIY things for the craftsman, usually in the back half of the magazines, before that there were pages and pages of new developments in science and products and how they related to Mr and Mrs Average and their families. Anything to do with transport and speed was heavily featured. The pages of the book pick out the scientific predictions over several decades divided into six chapters.

I thought it was interesting that the earlier predictions, in the first two and a half decades of the last century, really were rather fanciful based on fairly simple scientific principles. In the thirties with the huge increase in new products and developments (and during the Depression, too) the predictions became more tempered and practical. By the late forties and during the fifties the future projections were much more based on reality. Actually a reasonably accurate way of predicting the future was developed in the fifties by the Rand Corporation, called the Delphi Technique. Experts in various disciplines answered questions anonymously and the answers were blended together to created a reliable future projection for all sorts broadly scientific activity. The predictions in this book, of course, don't have that kind of credibility.

I thought chapter two 'Home, sweet home of tomorrow' the most interesting with its mixture of ideas, a lot of which certainly came true because we all live with them now. Included are predictions for the picture phone (1956) prefabricated housing (1922) plastic and synthetic materials for house building (1937) clothing made from casein, a milk derivative (1929) air-conditioned homes (1944) frozen dinners (1947). Fortunately dresses from asbestos (1929) and aluminium (1929) never made it.

The text is a fun read and quite though provoking in parts but I wish the look of the book was equally as fascinating. It should have looked good because Popular Mechanics had wonderful cover paintings, right up to the late sixties when photos finally took over. The illustrations and photos used inside the magazine always tried to put across an idea as simply as possible. Unfortunately all this wonderful graphic imagery is more or less ruined throughout the book. Cover paintings have been hopelessly enlarged and then cropped with caption panels superimposed on them. This also applies to images that appeared inside the magazine. Photos are printed in blue, brown, green or red, over-enlarged and again with captions overprinted. It seems to me that the pictures are just used as graphic items to fill up the pages in a rather heavy handed manner with no thought given to displaying them to their best advantage.

If only more thought had been given to the editorial presentation the covers and illustrations could have really made the book sparkle. Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future covered the same idea with words and pictures but looked so much better and even Future Perfect (Icons Series) a small paperback full of colour pictures looks better than 'The wonderful future that never was'. Incidentally the tacky looking cover will give you an idea of poor quality look of the insides.

>>>LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

A sumptuously produced book (though the idea of having a dust cover which turns into a poster does not really work), Gregory Benford's book is a collection of some of the best, worst and strangest predictions for future technology published over the years in the pages of the American magazine Popular Mechanics.

A few wider themes come out from the collection, including the move during the twentieth century from concern over there not being enough food to concern over people eating too much, and the way in which predictions about improvements in flying technology have consistently oversold its potential. Issues of safety, practicality, noise and cost mean we still do not have the sort of personal flying machines that often come up in a myriad of forms from personal helicopters in each garage through to jet packs and anti-gravitational devices.

As the book briefly discusses, a common trend is that even when predictions have been correct at a technical level, they have tended to under-estimate their knock-on social effects. (A good, different example is from the technical predictions over the future of newspapers where predictions of the future newspaper have in many respects turned out right, such as over personalisation and direct delivery to the reader, but they missed the way in which the business would be massively reshaped.)

A few of the predictions have thankfully not come to pass, including the idea of turning discarded underwear into candy, and others show how much the world has changed, as with the prediction of the future of nuclear power which handily included instructions on how to build a lightweight portable radiation detector so readers could head out to the countryside and go prospecting for uranium.

The book shows glimpses of a serious side - we can, after all, learn much from how previous predictions have gone wrong - and only occasionally pokes light-hearted fun at some past predictions. However, this is really neither a book for laughs nor for serious thought. Rather it is for gentle entertainment reminding us what the future used to look like.

Brutal and unecessary over-designing of the layout rendered this book a disappointment for me.
I can't fault the textual content - although I would have liked more of it. However, visually this book is a mess. I bought it as a gift hoping (not unreasonably, I think) for some of the original Popular Mechanics illustrations to be reproduced. Unfortunately they've just been used as a raw material and abstracted beyond recognition. I would have thought they would have been a valued part of the book's content for any reader interested in Popular Mechanics and design/technology/social history. Apparently the publisher decided they weren't.
I do like the way it refrains from mocking the predictions of the past which turned out not to be true, it's still a serious, if lighthearted look at how we thought and what we hoped for the present we're currently living in. Unfortunately, I have to say it's mostly 200 pages of missed potential. Probably interesting to kids but theres simply not enough to it to satisfy me as an adult reader.