Flushing Meadows, 40 years later
It was 1900 when Henry Adams, historian and scion of a family that produced two American presidents, walked the Gallery of Machines at Paris’ Great Exposition and stopped to brood before a working exhibit of a dynamo. In his landmark Education, Adams told of his face-to-face meeting with technology. Here, within the dynamo, he wrote, was the power of "infinite costless energy." In an age when gas powered lights frequently caused injury and death, Adams and the other visitors to the exposition believed they were witlessness to the promise of a safer, cleaner future.
Forty years ago this spring, this scion of a more modest (but no less proud) immigrant family strode wideeyed through the exhibits of the newly opened 196465 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. There, the promises of the future were laid out before he and his fellow babyboomers in Plexiglas and stainless steel. Pavilion after pavilion promised a future of moving sidewalks,orbiting cities, manned bases on the moon, computers guiding our cars down electric highways, and picture telephonesin every home.
As it turned out, the futurists of 1964 got it wrong both ways, managing to both underestimate and overestimatethe pace of technology at the same time. In the most glaring instance they underestimated advances in computer and computer-related technologies. The notion that within a generation individuals would be carrying powerful portable computers in their briefcases that would be thousands of times more powerful than any then in existencewas too fantastic to be imagined, even at a World’s Fair where flights of fancy arede rigueur.
Where the futurists overestimated is exemplified by what passed for the next World’s Fair hosted by an American city. In1982,Knoxville presented an expositiongeared towards energy conservation and the search for non-polluting sources of power. It was immediately clear, just from the theme, that something had gone horribly wrong since Flushing Meadows. It turned out that those moving sidewalks and electric highways this eight yearold boy gawked at needed energy, but the near-meltdown of a nuclear power plant, coming in the midst of two oil embargoes and subsequent gasoline shortages in the 1970s had forced Americansto ask serious questions about energy production, consumption and conservation. And while such self-examination makes for good seminars and conferences, they make for lousy World’s Fairs, and Knoxville was a financial and critical failure. Subsequent expositions in New Orleans (in 1984) and Vancouver (in 1986) were equally un-inspirational.
Forty years ago, when space flight, computers, nuclear power, and other technologies were in their infancy it was easy to dream, and the 1964-5 World’s Fair in New York may have been one of the last to be carried away with unbridled enthusiasm for the future. As we baby-boomers grew up and watched space shuttles and Concordes fall from the sky we learned with horrifying clarity thelimits of technology and the human cost of those limits, concludingin those cases that some chances are just not worth taking anymore.
The World’s Fair that New York hosted a generation ago this spring may very well have been the last one of its kind for another reason. A majority of Americans today own either a computer, a satellite dish or access to cable, a DVD player, or a VCR. More and more are purchasing high definition televisions so thin they can be hung on the wall. An automatic washing machine, dishwasher or clothes dryer no longer evoke wistful looks from burdened housewives, because many of them own or have easy access to thoseappliances. Here in the affluent U.S. of A. we seem to be pretty well stocked with all the technology we can handle, thank you very much.
The great Crystal Palaces of the 1900 exposition and the moving sidewalks and electric highways of 1964 World’s Fair dazzled fairgoers with visions of brighter futures. What is there to inspire a modern day Henry Adams to wax poetic of the potential of science and technology, when calculators are sold in supermarkets for 5 bucks? The future is here, and that may be the toughest concept to grasp.
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David Kruh is an author and playwright who grew up in New York