1939 Worlds Fair front runner to todays Tech Revolution
https://www.facebook.com/OurGreatestGeneration/posts/574578839385841
https://m.facebook.com/OurGreatestGeneration/posts/574578839385841
Our Greatest Generation added 19 new photos.
In preparation for the 1939 World's Fair in New York City and Fleet Week several Navy ships were seen coming up river.
What New Yorkers know today as Flushing Meadows — the massive park that houses the Mets, the New York Hall of Science, and the Queens Museum of Art — was once a tidal marsh from whose dark waters rose the imposing Mount Corona, a pile of soot and trash and manure immortalized in The Great Gatsby as the “Valley of Ashes.” It was on this unlikely site, in 1930, that Parks Commissioner Robert Moses envisioned an urban oasis. Over the course of three decades, Moses moved mountains and rivers, powerful banks and labor unions, politicians and the press, to remake the park (and the city) in his image. Transforming the Meadows from gray to green involved the reclamation of 1200 acres of marsh and refuse, the eviction of residents and squatters, the diversion of waterways and building of new highways. The 1939 World’s Fair (and another at the same location in 1964) paved the way for a grand public park.
Back in Manhattan, a small staff in a temporary office at 176 Broadway moved the mountains of files and forms that effected the similarly grand plans of the World’s Fair Corporation. Like the dirt and detritus of Corona, that paperwork would be resorted, re-indexed, and relocated several times throughout the planning and execution of the Fair, and in its afterlife. Curiously, the mechanisms and systems that processed those records were prominently displayed at the Fair — a spectacle in their own right. Exhibitions by RCA, Kodak, Westinghouse, AT&T, and Remington Rand celebrated (and aestheticized) the communications devices and machines of information management that powered The World of Tomorrow, a world that promised robots and nylon stockings, “picture radio” and speech synthesizers, Plexiglas and 3D film, fluorescent lights and fax machines. The future was imagined to take place within a neo-Corbusian city: streamlined, rational, orderly, efficient.
It is “amazing to recognize how central ‘the city’ was to the 1939 vision of tomorrow,” observes sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod. Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit gave spectators in moving chairs a preview of a car-centric future, sponsored by General Motors. Henry Dreyfuss built his Democracity inside the Fair’s iconic Perisphere, where model highways linked a dense, non-residential urban core to suburban Pleasantvilles and industrial-residential Millvilles, whose various tradespeople starred in a slideshow projected on the domed ceiling. Consolidated Edison’s panoramic City of Light was a block-long working model of New York City, complete with thunderstorms and moving elevators. Even IBM took up the “global village” theme, with a diorama, perhaps inspired by Renaissance La città ideale paintings, that depicted its offices, factories, and labs from around the world in one fictional cityscape. IBM substantiated that vision with an astonishing technical display: a Tele-type machine, equipped with a cathode-ray tube, which relayed televisual messages between the World’s Fair in New York and the concurrent Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco.
The World of Tomorrow, Leonard Wallock writes, “was the city’s perfected dream of itself.” It manifested desires for “scientific rationality, technological progress, modernist aesthetics, industrial design … consumer prosperity, and … corporate capitalism” in spatial form, via rational urban planning and progressive civil engineering, modernist architecture and sterilized suburbs. Just as important — though much less discussed — was the dream of efficient urban administration.
Who dreams of files? Well, I do, to be honest. And I imagine Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and Le Corbusier did, too. It’s not only the files and cabinets themselves that enchant, but their epistemological and political promise; just think of what you can do with all that data! The dream has survived as a collective aspiration for well over a century — since we had standardized cards and papers to file, and cabinets to put them in — and is now expressed in fetishized data visualization and fantasies about “smart cities” and “urban science.” Record-keeping and filing were central to the World of Tomorrow and its urban imaginary, too.
In the decades leading up to the Fair, particularly between 1880 and 1920, corporations and cities, merchants and militaries, dentists and teachers embraced records-management as integral to their efficient and profitable operation. Turn-of-the-century Americans took their files seriously, and they relied on an expanding industry to design, furnish, and manage their record-keeping systems. That industry — built on typewriters, filing cabinets, carbon copies, and card indices — evolved into what we know today as information technology. To put it plainly: the history of filing systems is the history of computing.
What’s more, the cities and organizations planned and managed through those analog files, and committed to the scientific rationality of records-management, were forerunners of the current obsession with data science. Many scholars focus on the 1964 New York World’s Fair — with Eero Saarinen’s spectacular ovoid building for IBM, embellished with a multimedia show designed by Charles and Ray Eames — as a turning point in media and cultural history. But the proto-computing world of the 1939 Fair, positioned restively between the Depression and the Second World War, was equally pivotal. Its manual and electro-mechanical technologies foreshadowed not only the mainframes, rockets, and atomic reactors of the 1960s, but also today’s “sentient” urban operating systems.
Among the key players in that world — a prominent exhibitor at the 1939 Fair, and a behind-the-scenes consultant on its record production and management — was the Remington Rand corporation. Rand’s role in the World of Tomorrow is only one facet of its extensive influence in American life over a period of 200 years. Although the company rarely shows up in our dominant narratives, it has been a central player in the histories of computing, military technology, and navigation; the push toward standardization in manufacturing and management; the rise of consulting and information services and techno-industrial “R&D”; and the ongoing cultural negotiations between automation and human agency — all concerns that played out in the Fair’s exhibition halls, too.
[/FONT]
