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Futuristics Walking through the main hall of the University of California at Berkeley’s mammoth Doe Library in the summer of 2004, you encounter real world science fiction on display among the aging photos of water polo squads. Transportation Futuristics: Visionary Designs in Transportation Engineering exhibits dozens of failed innovations, from personal flying saucers to monorails, helicopter buses to pilotless cars guided from below by a radio signal in the roadway. Designed by utopian engineers, these creations are alternately crackpot and visionary, as brilliant in conception as they are startlingly impractical. And like science fiction, they reflect their times as much as any projected future.
What sort of responses have you been
receiving? People generally love the site. This month I’ve been contacted by Exhibit Builder magazine, PIG Magazine (People In Groove — an Italian fashion and lifestyle magazine), Disney Imagineering, and a few engineers who were actually involved in the projects represented in this exhibit. The only negative feedback I’ve had has been from a couple of people who have current projects mentioned on the site who don’t like their proposals being associated with so many failed proposals. Leonardo Da Vinci sketches plans
for a helicopter 500 years ago, and he’s considered a visionary.
Why do we revere him
as a prescient
genius who laid the groundwork for future breakthroughs while
we dismiss the engineer who patented a personal flying saucer
transport
as a crank? Where, exactly, does the line between crackpot
and genius lie? So what differentiates a genius from a crank? A genius succeeds and a crank does not. Although Leonardo’s helicopter never got off the ground and some of Moller’s craft have, by the standards of his day, Leonardo’s helicopter was a success. He didn’t have to build a working prototype – in his day, men of letters did not sully their hands doing practical tests. If the design seemed logical, then that’s all that mattered. Today, however, a design that seems logical on paper isn’t enough. Now we have to demonstrate that a design is practicable and so we’re inherently limited by available technology. When the Wright brothers were building their first motorized airplane there didn’t exist an engine light and powerful enough, so they had to get someone to design a totally new engine for their craft. In 1968, Moller’s disc-shaped flying machine the XM-3 was unable to get more than about a foot off the ground. He needed engines with a much greater power to weight ratio than was available at the time. With lighter, more powerful engines it probably would have worked as planned. What
was your attitude towards this work? How did you fight the
temptation to turn this material into science fiction kitsch
— to make fun
of failed experiments and experimenters? Do you see a future for any of these proposals?
I know you’re the curator of an exhibit, not a transportation
theorist or engineer, but I’m curious if anything you found
struck you as something that might come to look less like a failure
and more like the underpinnings for a future technology? Ground effect machines are horribly impractical replacements for conventional automobiles, but they serve quite nicely as ferries. Operating costs are comparable to conventionally hulled ships, they don’t require a pier at which to dock, and they produce virtually no wake and so they don’t pose the same danger to smaller boats which can be capsized by the wake of a conventional fast ferry. Super capacity airliners are a pretty safe bet for our future. The Airbus A3XX is already in production and will be able to handle up to 960 passengers. Bigger designs look promising as well. But improbability is what makes something futuristic. The vast majority of new designs make only incremental advances over established technology. The real departures from existing designs are inherently riskier and so less likely to make it to “mature technology” status. Radical concepts require changes in infrastructure. One simple example is hydrogen fuel cell cars. You can build a car with a hydrogen fuel cell power plant, but you’d be hard pressed to drive it across the country with the expectation that you’d be able to fill it up whenever you’d need to. That requires a great investment in infrastructure. Not just hydrogen tanks and dispensers at existing gas stations, but a lot of people will need to be trained in handling and transporting hydrogen, people will need to be trained in producing hydrogen, and several large facilities will need to be built to produce it. I guess the more unlikely something is to succeed, the more futuristic it is. |
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Paul Hernandez, a library assistant at the Institute
of Transportation Studies, curated the exhibit and its 