I have seen the future
Printed on a tin badge and handed out at the exit of the General Motors pavilion at the New York World's Fair, Flushing Meadows, 1939. Five million people took one home in one summer.
What follows is the text of the signs you fly past on this page, in the order they appear, together with the history they are drawn from.
The night it opened
New York World's Fair, tonight. Admission fifty cents. Rooms two dollars, hot water. No dumping.
What they promised
General Motors. Highways and horizons. Futurama. The line starts here. All the world is in this line. Glide in, walk out.
The pavilion was called Highways and Horizons and the ride inside it was called Futurama. The queue ran more than a mile and never emptied: thirty thousand people a day, which was everything the machine could carry. You did not walk through the future. It was delivered past you.
The instrument
Sit down, the future comes to you. Your chair is already moving. A voice in every chair. Welcome to 1960. I have seen the future. The driver of tomorrow.
Five hundred and fifty two chairs on one belt, moving at a hundred and twenty feet per minute, which is 1.36 miles per hour: slower than you walk. Every chair had a voice in the headrest, twenty two pieces of thirty nine seconds each, run by a machine called the Polyrhetor. The model you looked down on was dated 1960, twenty years ahead, on purpose. It was designed for General Motors by Norman Bel Geddes.
The length of the ride is the one number this page will not give you. Sources say sixteen minutes and eighteen minutes, and the length of the track against the speed of the belt works out at about fourteen and a half. Three figures that cannot all be true, so none of them goes up.
What actually happened
The Fair closed on 27 October 1940 having returned about a third of what it cost. The structures came down and the material went into the war. In Magic Motorways Bel Geddes planned the roads for about thirty eight million cars in 1960. There turned out to be 74.4 million. He was off by half, in the direction of not enough. The thing he got most wrong was how badly people would want it.
Crossing
You are now leaving 1939. The lights go out here, and this is the only sign still saying anything in the dark.
Before the lights come back, the searchlights put one more year on the mist, in the same letters they used for 1939: the year on the clock of the machine you are reading this on. Under it hangs a single painted board, bare wood, in the same hand as the rest of them. It reads: this sign was not painted in 1939.
The other side
Tomorrow, straight ahead. No ticket needed from here. The future is open all night. The coffee bar. The world of tomorrow. The bath of today.
Arrival
Nineteen sixty. The searchlights put the year on the mist here, the way they put 1939 there at the start. The first one is the year you were standing in. This one is the year you were promised.
The axis ends on a mooring mast: a lattice tower standing on the floor of the chasm with a walkway near the top, a row of lamps along the rail, a mooring cone facing the way you came, and four people waiting on the deck. They are the only figures on this page at human scale, and they are there to tell you how big the rest of it is. The sign on the rail reads mooring mast 4, which means there are three others.
Behind it, off to one side and cut by the edge of the frame, stand the Trylon and the Perisphere: the needle and the sphere that were the emblem of the Fair, lit at night, the only structures on this route that were built to be seen from far away.
You were here
The last thing on the route is a painted board with a map on it. The chasm you flew through is drawn as a ribbon of light, wide at the approach, pinched to a slot in the dive, open again over the square, and the line of the flight runs through it, thick where you climbed above the roofline and thin where you dropped. There is a ring at the far end of it, which is where you are now.
Every map of a place you are standing in says you are here. This one is in the past tense.
Off the route
The Ash Heap, the same ground a few years before anyone drew a future on it
Vizibly, the room behind the sign that says not to go there
The Driver of Tomorrow, a hall where they measured how well you drove
The Coffee Bar, where a cup is waiting and the door says where it goes
The Bath of Today, a washroom by candlelight with one tap from the future
