Figure 3 The Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London: The transept looking north. Steel engraving by W. Lacey after J. E. Mayall, 1851.
World’s Fairs provide some fascinating historical examples of how the future has been envisioned and how future visions have been shared with the public. The main lesson I see in them, in contrast with utopian writing and other types of future imagination, is that the perspective on the future that is offered—not just what in particular is imagined—is particularly important.
A remarkable aspect of the last century is that, amid world wars and standoffs between the superpowers, a powerful, elaborate means of sharing visions of the future was developed in an international context. These future visions might suffer from their often doggedly corporate direction and from their basis in excitement about new technologies, but they have offered surprisingly rich models of the future with which one could argue or agree. They presented ideas of the future more fully than disconnected slogans could have, and they showed a way to engage the future that a range of thinkers have since employed. And, interestingly enough, one of the standout exhibits from the world’s fairs was quite concerned with the automobile—as were the Futurists, as were the denizens of alt.pave.the.earth—in a less violent and extreme way, certainly, but, still, with this automotive technology as central to the vision of the future.
My specific focus here will be the famous Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair, one that returned in a different form to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It was an extremely popular exhibit, and while it focused on a near-term vision of the future, it epitomized the future-oriented world’s fair exhibits of the twentieth century. I’ll describe the historical context, and legacy, of Futurama and describe what lessons this exhibit, and those similar to it, have to offer for future-building.
Before Futurama, before even the officially designated world’s fairs, there were national exhibitions, initially taking place in France and then extending throughout Europe, meant to encourage and showcase technological improvements.1 The tenth such exhibit in France, the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, was particularly influential and prompted similar expositions in six other cities, from nearby Bordeaux to Saint Petersburg. It was most significant, however, for influencing the first truly international event of this sort, one open to exhibitors from anywhere in the world. This was London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in 1851.2 The Great Exhibition is now considered the first world’s fair. It took place in one of the most famous temporary buildings of all time—perhaps outdone only by the Eiffel Tower, which was built for another world’s fair—resonantly named the Crystal Palace, an impressive technological showcase formed from a glass roof and facade, as if it were an early version of an Apple Store (see figure 3).
Figure 3 The Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London: The transept looking north. Steel engraving by W. Lacey after J. E. Mayall, 1851.
This was accomplished with a skeleton of cast iron and a new method of casting plate glass. Just shy of a million square feet in size, the Crystal Palace enclosed not only what approximately fourteen thousand exhibitors were displaying on eight miles of tables but also, with a ceiling surpassing a hundred feet, numerous fountains and trees. The building was both a pristine technological showcase and a sort of greenhouse that could be placed without damage to the site in Hyde Park. (It was designed by Joseph Paxton, a horticulturalist.) A visitor might imagine that the industrial development represented by this sheltering building could coexist with nature—or that it could frame and control nature. The four main categories of exhibits—raw materials, machinery, manufacturers, and fine arts—allowed for cultural exchange that went beyond the advancement of technology. Six million people attended the Great Exhibition, including Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, and Charles Dickens, just to mention a few who had the same first name.
The Great Exhibition was a great financial success and had significant intellectual and political effects, promoting internationalism, trade of raw materials between countries, and further industrial development. The famous building, although it no longer stands, endured for a while, too. It was dismantled after the exhibition and erected on a different site, in South London, where it stood for more than eighty years until a fire destroyed it.
The Great Exhibition was an auspicious start to decades of events that would further international contact and exchange and allow industrial enterprise to communicate with the public. These fairs showcased amazing advances. In 1876, at the first world’s fair to be held in the United States—in Philadelphia—Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was shown to the public for the first time. At another U.S. world’s fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, George Ferris tried to outdo the Eiffel Tower (built for the 1889 World’s Fair) with a structure that moved, the Ferris Wheel. Back in Paris in 1900, Rudolf Diesel showed his prototype engine to the public for the first time. In 1901, in Buffalo, a working X-ray machine was first demonstrated to the public at the world’s fair. And, back in Paris once again in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo showed what was a partial but no doubt extremely impressive chess computer—a system that, while not capable of general-purpose computation or of playing a chess game from start to finish, could play an endgame perfectly. Inventions and technological progress were very important to these events, certainly, but it wasn’t until 1939 that a world’s fair explicitly focused on the future.
At the end of April 1939, in Flushing Meadows, Queens, just a short drive or train trip from the nerve center of Manhattan, a world’s fair opened with a new sort of theme, based not only on the future but also, quite specifically, on future-making. The slogans for the fair were “Dawn of a New Day” and “Building the World of Tomorrow.” There were pavilions representing sixty countries, including particularly impressive contributions by Russia, France, Poland, and Britain (housing the Magna Carta, which had left the United Kingdom for the first time). The Jewish Palestine Pavilion introduced the concept of a Jewish state, which would later become Israel.
Even if one could somehow miss out on the international perspective, there was much of interest for those from the host country and for other, international, visitors at this world’s fair. The Westinghouse “Moto-Man,” Elektro, provided robotic performances for audiences. Immense modernist structures were erected. In a convergence of different sorts of future-making, the First World Science Fiction Convention was held at the fair. This world’s fair had been planned, in part, to help lift New York City out of the Great Depression, although it did not post a profit and there were plenty of complaints, beginning before the fair opened, about how costly all the preparations were. The fair, which ran two seasons, did garner a great deal of mindshare, attracting forty-four million people.
The cultural legacy of this internationalist event is even more remarkable given that it ran for just over four months before a new, much more grim day dawned on the world—in the form of World War II. On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, the only major country that did not participate in the 1939–1940 World’s Fair. Two weeks later, Germany invaded Poland.
Nevertheless, in that moment, those few months, before the war, advances in technology and in imagination continued, and in ways that are still instructive to us today. Representative of this was the General Motors exhibit Futurama, the most popular at the fair. It depicted a vision of only twenty years into the future, one largely enabled by new types of highways. This was certainly a utopia that included lots of product placement—the automobile played an essential role in it—but it was also a rich and systematic imagination of the future that was sensitive to human needs and social life. The designer behind the exhibit, and the follow-up book, Magic Motorways, was Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who had also extensively designed for theater and the movies.
Futurama was seen by five million people. Ironically, given that the exhibit was largely about eliminating congestion, the line for Futurama sometimes extended more than a mile. Bel Geddes attributed the popularity of the exhibit to the topic: nearly all of the visitors drove cars or rode in them and were concerned about the future of transportation. Futurama, an immense diorama, depicted highways running efficiently along modeled sections of terrain that were based on aerial surveys and broadly representative of the United States. This exhibit offered a detailed, practical proposal for much better automotive travel. It introduced the concept of limited-access, divided expressways to the public, celebrating the work of civil engineers as well as car companies.
The automobile was, of course, the central technology in Futurama, but cars didn’t clog population centers; the centers of towns and cities were shown as open to pedestrians, with vehicle access restricted. The diorama also depicted new agricultural methods, new forms of power generation, and even some new flying vehicles. An impressive new technology—one that was actually prototyped by 1960, although not deployed—was a fully automated highway system that would allow drivers to relax as it brought moving vehicles closely together to efficiently travel long distances.
Practical concerns, related to their own everyday use of cars, may have motivated visitors to wait in line, but it was no doubt the spectacle of the diorama and the novelty of the presentation that made the long wait worthwhile. Seated in upholstered chairs that were moved along rapidly by a conveyor system, visitors viewed the diorama below through glass. There were sound and light effects along the course, which ran for a third of a mile.
The perspective of Futurama was like that of a third-person, top-down “God game” such as SimCity, quite different from the first-person perspective presented in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Both were compelling visions of the future, quite influential in United States history, but they couldn’t have been more different in how they were presented—not because one was an exhibit and the other was a novel, and not even because one was twenty years in the future and the other more than a century, but because one offered a nearly omniscient view while the other featured a protagonist being introduced, personally and at street level, to a new type of society. In terms of the utopias imagined, there were some connections. Just as Bellamy envisioned a single “umbrella,” an array of awnings, that would cover everyone, Bel Geddes envisioned a single roadway strip of light that would replace individual headlights and keep glare out of motorists’ eyes. Of course, there were differences between these visions too, but the differences in how they were presented were the most striking.
Between the very different, and yet successful, perspectives of Bellamy’s novel and Bel Geddes’s exhibit, it can’t be that one of these is always the best approach for presenting one’s future future-making. Adnan Morshed made the argument that the critical transportation technology in Futurama is not the car (with its enhanced highways), but the airplane.3 While airplanes were used to survey terrain and help construct a diorama representative of different parts of the United States, even more important was the spectator’s unusual perspective for viewing this exhibit, from above, moving steadily—as if seated on board a plane. From this vantage point, it seemed as if the country and its transportation systems could be fully grasped and that a designer could set things right by developing needed infrastructure and bringing flows of people into harmony.
Bellamy’s ground-level and personal vision was of a different sort, and suitable for someone whose focus was on daily human life and on improving social welfare. He showed the interpersonal and emotional plausibility of his system, something that was not as important when considering a national system of smoothly running expressways. Bellamy argued that what we value about our way of life and our day-to-day experiences could be sustained, and could prosper, in the new system he envisioned. He used a kind and knowledgeable guide to offer the background necessary for understanding what his narrator saw and experienced, in his fictional, utopian world of a future Boston.
Bel Geddes, on the other hand, sought to show that his transportation advances could work in any region of the country. His focus was on one specific problem with social dimensions, that of congestion, which limited people’s mobility due to slowing, inefficient traffic. Showing traffic flowing smoothly and rapidly everywhere was more important, in this context, than giving a personal perspective on the society of twenty years hence. The bird’s eye view may have overlooked some street-level benefits that could also have been developed in Futurama’s plan, but it was very suitable for looking to the main issue treated in this utopia. As Bel Geddes mentioned, almost everyone visiting Futurama would already drive or at least ride in cars, so people arrived with a personal stake in the problem. What they need to be shown is how the system can change.
One of the things to learn from General Motors, Bel Geddes, and the spectacular diorama of 1939:
The 1939–1940 World’s Fair in New York was not the last of the world’s fairs, but it did conclude one era of these international events. There was another world’s fair that also was open in 1939 and 1940 in the United States—this one, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, celebrating the completing of that city’s bridges. Oriented toward the Pacific, it was also shadowed by the war. Treasure Island, the artificial island on which the Golden Gate International Exposition took place, was converted into a naval base soon after the fair ended.
World’s fairs in the twentieth century continued to focus explicitly on the future. In 1958, the Brussels World’s Fair featured the Philips Pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier, which offered a multimedia presentation composed by Edgard Varèse, one of the first fully electronic compositions. Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition in 1962 was the occasion for construction of the Space Needle and a monorail; this fair celebrated scientific achievement and the space race. The World of Tomorrow exhibit, for example, was seen by about a hundred visitors at a time, who rose through it in a hydraulic device called the Bubbleator.
The 1964 New York World’s Fair soon followed, on the same site as the 1939–1940 fair and sporting the 120-foot-tall Unisphere. This was a globe formed from a stainless-steel grid, encircled by space-age traces of orbits and surrounded by fountains. While many governments within the United States and many U.S. companies participated, the fair was not approved as official by the Bureau of International Expositions and did not feature as much international involvement. Pepsi presented a pavilion that introduced Disney’s famous “It’s a Small World” ride.
This time around, General Motors once again had an immense exhibit hall. The company presented an updated version of Futurama in which people were portrayed moving about on the moon, visiting the ocean floor, conquering terrain in new ways, and traveling through changed cities using novel transport—such as moving sidewalks. People exited from the new Futurama to the Avenue of Progress, where they learned how engineering was done at GM. This fair prominently featured computer technologies and the space age, but also had a war looming over it. Before the first season closed, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, approving the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.
Another success story for cultural exchange and impact was Expo 67 in Montreal, with the theme “Man and His World.” The fair celebrated the 100th anniversary of Canada’s founding. More than sixty countries participated, and more than fifty million people attended. The fair far exceeded expectations for attendance, and also did much better than expected financially. However, that meant a loss of only a bit more than $210 million Canadian. World’s fairs draw tourists to the host city, but they are usually money-losing events even when things go better than planned. Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition was a rare exception, and was actually profitable.
The difficulty of funding world’s fairs is one of the reasons that large, general world’s fairs, typical for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, haven’t been held nearly as often in recent decades. Public interest and the ability to attract tourists, and companies’ ability to showcase new developments outside of such events without the same expense, are cited as other reasons for the decline. Fairs are still put on, but now tend to be based on specific themes, such as energy. The next “universal” exposition is planned for Dubai in 2020.
Futurama made its last official appearance, in revised form, at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, but General Motors has continued to sponsor attractions dealing with transportation. The company sponsored one of the original exhibits at Disney’s EPCOT Center, a park conceived of as “a permanent world’s fair.” EPCOT opened in 1982, and World of Motion, the GM exhibit, presented the history of transportation. It also had a post-ride area of displays, similar to the Avenue of Progress, which educated people about how GM designs and engineers cars today.
GM’s exhibit at EPCOT was open through 1996; since the end of the 1990s, General Motors has had the Test Track at EPCOT, allowing visitors to design cars and experience a simulation of riding in them. The orientation of General Motors exhibits turned to history and then narrowed on the present day, while the perspective taken became more individual and first-person. Instead of surveying a systematic design for a national highway system or a city’s transportation network, the visitor is given a personal view of one simulated, customized car and what it is like to drive it. While this may serve the interests of the sponsor, from the purpose of future-making, this shift in perspective does not seem auspicious.