At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, breathless people walked around wearing commemorative pins that read, “I have seen the future.” And they were right: they witnessed the world as we know it.
Decades before “Back to the Future” captured our imaginations with its time-traveling DeLorean, a man named Norman Bel Geddes showed people what America looks like today.
He also created the case for the IBM Mark I computer, which had different types of lights and different types of halos, that were used in the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.
He was known as a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, but by the time he died in 1958, at age 65, he was unknown.
Few people today remember the name Norman Bel Geddes. He was a visionary all his life. He left school in the ninth grade, but shortly thereafter sketched a mural for his school on the blackboard, a detailed and beautiful drawing.
And for 40 years, he was America’s most famous inventor, working for everyone from Chrysler to Philco to RCA to IBM, creating everything from chrome cocktail sets to soda bottles, office furniture to electric typewriters and futuristic radios.
He improved the fountain pen, the garter and the flyswatter, designed aeroplanes, airliners, ships and trains, invented the streamlined liner “Ocean Greyhound” and tried his hand at architecture.
He loved cars and the roads beneath them. You’ve probably seen his teardrop-shaped automobiles that look like they’ve come straight out of an old comic book. He designed the Chrysler Airflow, which never caught on. In his book, Magic Motorways, Bel Geddes envisioned self-driving cars and vehicles not too different from Elon Musk’s Cybertruck.
In 1927, he put all his skills together when General Motors asked him to build the city of the future, which he called “Futurama.” It was an acre of miniature landscapes and cities, with 500,000 unique buildings, a million tiny trees, over 12 lanes of interstate highway, and a gigantic scene with 50,000 cars and all kinds of flying devices.
It was the most-attended exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, with a staggering 27 million visitors.
Mesmerized spectators, about 600 at a time, rode on conveyor belts for 20 minutes around this little utopia, surrounded by lights and sounds, like birds soaring above an advanced civilization.
Futurama introduced Americans to the superhighway.
A few years after Bel Geddes’ death, his vision became reality with the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a 160-mile highway that connected Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, with a toll of $1.50 and a drive time of about three hours from end to end.
It was a futuristic replacement for the Lincoln Highway, the first road in America designed for automobiles from coast to coast.
Pennsylvania’s highways, by comparison, seemed like alien technology, like Futurama come to life: concrete that seemed to float in the air. The freeway’s on-ramp and off-ramp lanes and spiraling interchanges must have been a shock to anyone seeing them for the first time.
For the first six months there was no speed limit, which turned out to be a bad idea but it was fun while it lasted.
You can run as fast as you can, and for a moment it almost feels like you’re flying — except this isn’t the conveyor belt of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, this is a real-life Futurama superhighway.
Part of what makes Futurama so realistic is Bel Geddes’ love of the stage.
Before beginning his career as America’s Da Vinci, he designed sets and costumes for film and theater, and loved to direct and produce on Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera, and wherever there was a stage.
He also collaborated on the set design for H.G. Wells’ Things to Come.
He was also obsessed with lighting. He designed the entire stage lighting system. He loved light.
He also created the case for the IBM Mark I computer, which had different types of lights and different types of halos, that were used in the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.
It’s no surprise that a visionary like Norman Bel Geddes saw the future as bright and grandiose. All of his inventions seem to be in constant motion. He knew that nothing travels faster than light.
