Inspiring a New Tomorrow:

During the summers of 1939 and 1940, in a brand new park built in Queens, NYC, the largest World’s Fair to that point came to life. With over 44 million visitors and about a square mile of amusements and exhibits, it celebrated corporate industry’s new solutions for a better future—exciting words to an America that had been living through a hard-scrabble great depression for almost 10 years.

“The World of Tomorrow” is the fair’s tag line and theme.
An offi cial pamphlet reads: “Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the
tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made.”

Decidedly utopian, the fair was to demonstrate the technology and imaginative engineering that would become our new society. Corporate industry presented the latest new-fangled, gleaming solutions to modern living. Among the attractions: television is introduced, models of highway transportation with a decentralized city, and new home appliances like streamlined dish washers were all demonstrated before a truly amazed audience.

One example of the enduring legacy of the World’s Fair is GM’s “Futurama” exhibit—by far the most popular attraction. The sprawling scale model was a vision of America in distant 1960. Designed by famed industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes, astonished visitors rode in moving seats that took them from the countryside to the
“city of tomorrow.”

Futurama’s vision for the future was an automobile utopia. Wide, multi-lane expressways and in the city, raised sidewalks to allow auto traffi c to move fast and safe. The model demonstrated how green space could be on the urban roofs of the sprawling block-size buildings.

Times were never quite the same after the World’s Fair and World War II. In the decades that followed,
the decisive war victory gave America a license to build all that it had imagined at the Fair. And with a churning industrial base, build they did. The Fair drew a picture for Americans of what their world could be, and arguably set the standard for progress.

In 1964, at the same park in Queens, another World's Fair took place. This time many of the futuristic ideas of 1939 had become a reality, like the national highway system, plastics were everywhere, and the space race was on. It seemed there was no end to the possibilities, and the public imagination couldn't get enough.

Today, many Americans are realizing how old the tools and vision of the World’s Fairs have become. In many cases, they no longer apply to modern problems, in some cases they are the cause of those problems. New tools and a renewed look at our vision of Tomorrow is now required—the public’s imagination must be stimulated, and the seeds for a new Tomorrow planted.

Links for Further Reading:
World's Fair 1939 - Wikipedia
Welcome to Tomorrow
GM's Futurama exhibit - Wikipedia
1964 World's Fair - YouTube