If science, like art, is to perform its mission totally and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning: into the consciousness of people.”
— Albert Einstein, in his welcome speech to the 1939 World’s Fair

A row of statues leads to the Perisphere and Trylon (The Atlantic)

In the first chapter of Where is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall makes a counterintuitive observation: “The vision of a bright future world enabled by technology … had been growing in collective imaginations since the turn of the century. It accelerated, rather than slowing, during the Great Depression.”

While the American economy suffered through the worst decade in its history, optimistic storytellers painted visions of a better future grounded in an understanding of the technological capabilities of the era. Hall cites H.G. Wells’ 1935 film Things to Come and the 1939 World’s Fair – with its “Dawn of a New Day” slogan – as two tangible examples of the promised future.

Things to Come

In Things to Come, Wells predicts the impending Great War with spooky prescience. As The New York Times wrote in a 2013 review, “The film begins in 1940, with an unnervingly accurate anticipation of the London Blitz: on Christmas Eve, the citizens of the Art Deco metropolis of Everytown find themselves under attack by waves of bombers from the Continent.”

Between the Depression and the World War, things were undeniably bad for the average person alive at the time, but despite that, the outlook was bright. The 44 million attendees of The World’s Fair entered “The World of Tomorrow” and experienced wonders like air conditioning, personal robots, super-highways, FM radios, fax machines, and the television. The present is bleak – the Fair said – but the future looks bright.

The optimists were right. World War II spurred a wave of technological innovation that worked its way from military applications into peoples’ homes. In Optimism, we wrote about the underappreciated progress humanity has made over the two centuries, but if you zoom in more closely, much of that progress kicked into high gear after World War II.

Our World in Data

Unfortunately, Wells was also correct in his prediction of a future in which technological progress is unwelcome, or as Hall describes it, “it is the Doers attacked by the Do-Nots.” Today, we li...

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