Then there were the individual cars, including vehicles that still induce gasps today. Among them was the so-called “ghost car”, a Pontiac Deluxe Six clad in Plexiglas; a 1939 Plymouth P8 Deluxe with a clear acrylic top; and a Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet. Most importantly, a streamlined transcontinental bus gave visitors a luxurious taste of how they’d get around the country in the future – complete with dining section and panoramic observation lounge.
Some 45 million people attended. The writer EL Doctorow captured some of its dizzying sense of vertigo in his 1985 novel, World’s Fair : “What was small had become big; the scale had enlarged and you were no longer looking down at it, but standing in it, on this corner of the future, right here in the World’s Fair!” At the end of the fair, visitors were given a badge bearing the message: “I have seen the future.” Yet you may have noticed those baleful dates. Within six months of the fair, World War II started. Quite apart from the cataclysmic events, the whole idea of progress was tainted. The Polish statue of King Jagiello and the French staff remained exiled as their countries were occupied. Big Joe, the 79-foot steel statue on the Soviet Union Pavilion, also looked somewhat tarnished. And as the years developed, the ideas of the ideal urban environment changed, too. In 1962, a New York Times writer said, somewhat ruefully, that the fair had “proved its point so well that the whole countryside is a Futurama now”. There’s still a time capsule, prepared by the electrical company Westinghouse, which is due to be opened in the properly impossible year of 6939 (the 5000th anniversary), bearing camera film, a razor, a packet of cigarettes and a dollar in change.
It’s easy, perhaps, to deride outdated symbols of modernity, but every generation conjures up fresh visions of the future – which is why the robotics or space technology at Futurelab has become an integral part of Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Nor does our taste for futures past appear to be abating: in 2011 that Plexiglas-bodied Pontiac sold for $308,000.
This article was taken from the Spring 2019 edition of the Goodwood Magazine.