JF Ptak Science Books: Cars of the Future (1942)

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The History of Ideas Blog by John Ptak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Cars of the Future (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This article comes from a volume of Popular Mechanics that I have been enjoying for a few days now. "Your Victory Car", written by Brooks Stevens for the December 1942 issue, discusses a vision for the future, a nod to "normalcy" at a supremely difficult time in the world history of the 20th century. Car design went off in another direction, of course--a lot of what we see in these pages looks like offshoots of the Fuller Dymaxion car from a decade or so earlier--though some of the ideas present here (more streamlining, lighter design, smaller engines) wound up in cars in the future...it is just that the cars didn't quite look like these cars.