In the 1910 novel “The Sleeper Awakes,” H. G. Wells took on a plotline familiar from Mercier’s and Bellamy’s stories. The protagonist wakes up in London 200 years into the future. Unlike his predecessors, however, he finds a dystopian society.
The city had grown vertically. If in Haussmannian buildings the poor often lived in attics above the rich, now the working classes inhabited labyrinthine subterranean dwellings, invisible to the ruling classes living high up above them. The skyline was dotted with “Titanic buildings” connected by suspension bridges. The following year, an article in Buenos Aires on New York as “the city of tomorrow” described the view from atop the Singer building, predicting that class segregation would reserve such sunny spaces to the rich, relegating the poor to the shadows below. This of course also reflects commercial ocean liners with first-class passengers above and migrants in steerage below. In English, the very use of upper class grew steadily beginning in the early 1900s, declining after midcentury.
A vertical imagination often assumed that flight would be ubiquitous in urban settings. In the 19th century, railways and steamers revolutionized transportation between cities. Within them, advances were not quite as dramatic. In the early 20th century, however, automobile and airplane technologies opened new possibilities. This coincided with a broad change: Machines, so often associated with the dangers of factories in the previous century, became increasingly perceived for quality-of-life improvements. After an inflection point, people tended to expect innovations ascending in a steep line, rather than plateauing.
After balloons, Zeppelins and early airplanes, it seemed logical to assume all sorts of other flying vehicles in the immediate horizon. Flying around the city became a constant feature of imagined vertical densification in the 1910s and 1920s. At the same time, it was nearly impossible to conceive of leaps in transportation technologies without mass transit remaining central. Collective vehicles had an edge over automobiles.
Reimagining mobility became integral to most futuristic exercises. Many followed the template on the cover of King’s Dream of New York, named after the guidebook publisher Moses King. These bold images of New York’s future circulated widely in the 1910s, including as postcards. They showed “the city of skyscrapers” connected horizontally though bridges and railways on top floors, as well as airships and small planes. The trains high above partially reflected a reality.
A Greek migrant, who worked as a peddler, would reminisce about his first impressions of the big city: “New York astonished me by its size and magnificence, the buildings shooting up like mountain peaks, the bridge hanging in the sky, the crowds of ships and the elevated railways.” Yet, he added, “I think that the elevated railways astonished me more than anything else.” Why not imagine that mass transit would follow buildings into the sky?
Magazines like The Sphere in the UK covered the “air car,” which looked like a double-decker bus with wings. They also offered “a glimpse of future locomotion” with even larger double-deckers crossing a gorge on an elevated monorail — an image that also circulated across the Atlantic in Argentina. In a later issue, readers learned about an amphibian, Zeppelin-like airship with wings, presented as an “artist’s dream of the future.”
Over time, especially after World War I, high-tech fantasies increasingly originated in the United States. There were a wild range of promising novelties. In 1920, the Electrical Experimenter showcased the “Sea Going Ferris Wheel” running on underwater train tracks. Other even more sensational inventions pervaded popular media: city-skyscrapers half a mile high, cities along railroad tracks, cities on boats for 800,000 people. Several of these stories, originally published in the United States, reverberated throughout the Atlantic.
Scientific magazines brandished transformative inventions as an inevitability. In 1919, for example, a cover image of the Electrical Experimenter showed rail hovering above the city, with a confident headline: “Wheel-less Trains Glide on Water-Film.” The innovation promised to be cheaper and less disruptive to build than subways. And it would be superior to airships, due to higher carrying capacity. Automobiles were not seen as direct competitors. Other articles covered now prosaic solutions, like “shafts of light” to regulate street traffic. In 1920, an issue depicted “Chicago’s New Monorail” running amid the skyscrapers. Inspired by a precedent in Germany, this was presented as a quiet and low-maintenance alternative.
Typically, these futuristic illustrations showed an urban landscape in the background. Skylines were invariably dense and dotted with high-rise buildings. Chicago’s sleek monorail represented what was to come. Behind it, we see buildings of the present. Down below, there are streets choked in traffic. This was part of a pattern. The implication seems to be that private cars do not belong in the future. Even the language of “horsepower” placed them in the lineage of obsolete predecessors. Cars were just too inefficient to meet the demands of modern cities. Unlike the suspended monorail, capable of moving more people while taking up far less space, they could not be reconciled with the dense, vibrant streetscapes of tomorrow.
It really could be easier to imagine flight as a realistic alternative. In the imagined Buenos Aires of 2177 that would blow away Jules Verne, mass transit was widespread while cars had fallen into disuse.
Though some of these ideas might have been far-fetched, most major metropolitan areas had ambitious plans to extend mass transit in the 1910s. Even in smaller towns in the United States, people assumed that in the future transportation would be moved to the skies or underground. An article on New York “a century hence” claimed that each avenue in Manhattan would “undoubtedly” have a subway running beneath. Certainties aside, several projects to build new subway and rail lines were postponed during World War I, shelved after the Great Depression hit, and abandoned once highways took over. Due to the early rise of car ownership, urbanization in the United States had already begun to deviate from other places. The number of passenger vehicles in the country grew at an astonishing rate, from 5 per 1,000 people in 1910 to 187 in 1930. This meant that around half of families owned a car. Most major European countries would only reach comparable numbers in the 1960s and 1970s; Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, in the 2000s; China, India, and South Africa, in the 2010s.
The victory of the car in the United States and later much of the world was by no means inevitable, or even predictable. In the beginning of the century, cities still relied heavily on horse-led streetcars. This ended in New York City by the late 1890s, and in Paris by World War I. Electric streetcars moved about twice as fast, but also needed track systems. In the late 19th century, bicycles represented a rupture: they allied freedom of movement with efficiency.
The New Woman feminists embraced their ability to confer independence. As the scholar Paul Smethurst put it, bicycles at the time embodied “the cult of speed” and a “celebration of the future.” An article in Scientific American predicted that along with electric railroads and cars, they would “relegate the horse-drawn vehicle to the past.” Many remained skeptical that anyone would “prefer the inanimate road machine driven by petroleum to the noble steed whose graceful action is among the most beautiful things in life.” In the motor versus horse debates, few seemed to question that bicycles had a place in the future. One publication dismissed the argument that the “ill-smelling automobile” would supersede the bicycle as “rank nonsense.” As we saw in postcards of urban futures, bikes easily coexisted with flying vehicles.
At first, bikes represented the American future more than cars. A New York Times article on “the horseless carriage” drew a contrast between Europe and the United States. The automobile clubs of London and Paris were as popular among their wealthy classes as the bicycle clubs in the United States were “among all classes.” This would age within a generation. Unintentionally, by advocating for paved roads, well-connected organizations like the League of American Wheelmen laid the groundwork for the roles to reverse. Infrastructure initially meant for bikes ended up allowing for the massive expansion of car ridership. In the United States in 1899, there were 1.2 million bikes sold. In 1908, the number dropped to 860,000. That year, the Ford Model T was released. Electric vehicles were viable contenders, often advertised as “admirably adapted to city needs” due to their relative quietness and lower speeds. Oil-fueled cars, capable of running for longer distances, would prove more suitable for suburbanization. In 1926, the first Uniform Vehicle Code was created. Laws privileged automobiles, driving the bicycle off the roads that connected cities to their surroundings.
Streetcars still prevailed in urban transportation, even in the United States. In Detroit, which headquartered the Ford Motor Company, streetcar lines expanded from 187 miles in 1902 to around 544 in 1920, when it was the fourth largest city in the country. This extensive network connected the city and surrounding towns. Relying on mass transit for workers, Ford initially built cars in the city, progressively moving operations to more spacious suburbs. In nearby Highland Park, the company inaugurated the largest manufacturing plant in the world in 1910. It was the first car factory to use a moving assembly line. Production peaked at one Model T every 10 seconds. The complex ran on a cutting-edge power station. Fueled by coal and gasoline, it generated electricity equivalent to half of what all of Detroit required. Buildings featured elements that would later be associated with avant-garde architectural modernism. Instead of load-bearing walls and divisions, it had open floor plans and horizontal windows, relying on reinforced concrete columns and ample use of glass. It was nicknamed Crystal Palace. We again have rupture and continuity.
Henry Ford declared in 1922 that “we shall solve the problem of the city by leaving the city.” He overlooked the problems that the car solution would cause. But it was a prophetic statement, anticipating suburbanization in later decades.
The innovator also played an active role in making it so. The Ford company relocated operations to the even larger River Rouge Plant in suburban Dearborn in the early 1920s. Its founder had even more ambitious designs for the future. As the historian Jonathan Levy explains, “Ford’s vision was total.” He wanted to rebuild civilization based on the “Ford Man,” with the logic of an assembly line: predictable, efficient, regimented. The company fought labor unions and sought to dictate how employers should behave even at home: no “drinking,” “riotous living,” “indebtedness,” “lack of thrift,” or “domestic trouble. Ford managed to drastically reduce labor turnover with higher pay and shorter hours.
There was more to it. Levy notes that many of the company’s workers had been European peasants, and experienced “the rupture of the industrial revolution.” Now, he speculates, workers could perceive that “economic life was at last settling down into a long-term structure.” The company promised them continuity. As millions of cars rolled off assembly lines, they would eventually rupture urban fabrics and transform our futures.
Ford had ambitions beyond the United States. By the mid-1920s, the company had built assembly plants on every continent except Antarctica. The first one in a non-Anglophone country was in Buenos Aires. Ford meddled in foreign affairs. A leading antisemite, he would support Hitler’s rise in Germany. In 1934, the philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that “American Fordism […] was as totalizing as Italian Fascism, or German Nazism, or Soviet Communism.” Mussolini’s regime had imprisoned him in 1926. We might ask: if Gramsci’s comparison does not seem apt, is it only because cars ultimately won? The other three isms, we might add, all embraced investment in automobility as an “industrial investment multiplier.”
Ford’s plans, at any rate, suffered setbacks. After the transition from steam- to electric-powered manufacturing, he worked with Thomas Edison to go further. They tried to create the “Detroit of the South”: an “Electric City” dispersed across a 75-mile highway, following a river. Energy from hydro-electric dams would spare the sprawling car-centric utopia from smoke pollution. This did not pan out. Ford did build a company town in the middle of the rubber-rich Brazilian Amazon. Started in 1928, it was abandoned in 1934.
Ultimately, jungles and urban life remained too unwieldy to conform to any single man’s fantasies of control. Ford, however, pointed to a new future, mobilizing technologies to escape the city. Car culture turbo-charged the old Jeffersonian ethos of the United States as an antiurban society. As Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson accused cars of “encouraging the spread of socialism” in 1906. As the nation’s president (1913–1921), he championed them. In the 1928 national election, one of Herbert Hoover’s campaign ads touted how “Republican prosperity” had brought not just “the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot’” but “a car in every backyard, to boot.”
Ford supported Hoover. His Democratic rival Al Smith personified an urban America. Raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he made a name in reformist municipal politics and was elected New York governor for four terms. Smith suffered vicious anti-Catholic attacks. He overperformed in cities but lost in a landslide.
Since then, few mayors have moved on to higher office in the United States, unlike in other countries. And gas prices have stayed a hot topic in national elections. By 1929, around 80% of the cars on the planet could be found in the United States, almost one per household.
Excerpted from The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.
Bruno Carvalho is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. He is the author of “Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro.”
