JF Ptak Science Books Post 2741
"The Spectroscope, the Last Day of Manhattan", was part of a 1905 sci-fi series written by John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) and illustrated by the great Winsor McCay (1869-1934). McCay illustrates what is evidently a vastly over-built, over-populated, over-weighted, and over-Manhattaned Manhattan, so monumentally built up that it (however impossibly) sinks into the satirical Bangs' NYC harbor. This is viewed by the technically magical "Spectrophone", which allows the viewer to see into the future--and the future that the viewer peeps into is in the 57th century, some 3600 or so years from now.
I've seen some other images of Manhattan in the distant future, most of which show this sort of overcrowding though without the sinking part--one of those images shows the opposite of the Bangs/McCay scenario, and has the mega-city floating, tethered to the hole in the bedrock where it used to be, silent and placid like a cement cloud hovering over its old missing self.
Elsewhere on this blog are some posts showing New York City destroyed, a topic that I never pursued though I'd find myself confronted with the images every now and then, so I saved many of them and wrote about them a little. Just enter that phrase in the google box and you'll see them.
- There's another bit on this blog from this series on the Supermegalopolis of 4307, here: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/04/megalopolis_mccay.html
"Being some Consideration of the End of some Things as seen through The Spectrophone. The Last Day of Manhattan". Illustration published in the New York Herald (Sunday February 26, 1905): Magazine Section, p. 6, by the great Winsor McCay (1867-1934)
"The Bangs newspaper piece illustrated by McCay . . . revolves around the creation of a fantastic imaginary piece of scientific equipment, The Spectrophone. This object allowed the viewer to look ahead and see into a specific future time . . . In various newspaper installments on The Spectrophone accompanied by McCay illustrations, Bangs chronicled how advertising had proliferated in the subway by 1907; what the public libraries of Boston and New York looked like in 1914; and the strange changes that happened to the New York Horse Show in 2263 . . . what McCay illustrated was not our contemporary destruction, but a distant future disaster in the 57th century when Manhattan, so over-built both above and below ground, begins to implode"--rockwell-center.org The Rising Tide
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