JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
In the midst of a short article on bits of transportation advances of the future are these two wonderful futuro-peeps, selected here because of their appearance more so than anything else, as there isn't really anything else to go on. The article has 13 illustrations over four pages and perhaps is 750 words long, so the narrative is heavily dependent upon the images and imagination. That said, the two I'm interested in here have almost no text accompanying them. So be it.
The first is a mammoth transatlantic seaplane, "proposed by a German inventor"--and that's it. I can't tell how "giant" it is supposed to be, nor how many engines, or if there's anything going on inside the wings, and so on. But it does look streamlined and tubular and blocky, which is a hard thing to do at the same time, in a loud-stealthy way.
[Source, Popular Mechanics, August, 1928.]
The other image is that of one tower in a series of untold numbers of such towers popping up throughout France, much like Rommel's asparagus in Normandy, I guess, except more numerous, and far taller. Iterating the height of the structure by the cars at its base, I take this one to be about 150-175' high, from which there are many suspended tubular cages within which travels a 10' long torpedo-like tube that would speed mail from station to station across France at 200 mph. The engineers were Hirschauer and Talon, and from another source1 I see the invention described as "la torpille postale", which is what the mail carriers looked like, except sitting on four wheels, and going really fast on a skinny track suspended a hundred feet off the ground.
I can't but help to think about this arrangement of wire and cable and flowing mail as a kind of non-computer email--it has seemed odd to me for a long time that the one of the backbones of our communication existence is strung up above the ground on wires that are for the most part hung on dead recycled trees. Granted the mail would travel a lot faster in France in 1928 at 200 mph, but completely unforeseen and not-knowable is that email would be a little faster, cruising along at a big chunk of the speed of light. Seems as though there would have to be thousands of these lighthouse-like structures built to accommodate the French mail demand--no doubt they would have been pesky reminders of a past's attempt at the future, though perhaps being France and all the mail carriers might have blown them up.
[Source, Popular Mechanics, August, 1928.]
Notes:
1. http://www.luxemburgensia.bnl.lu/cgi/getPdf1_2.pl?mode=page&id=1386&option=
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