The Days of Henry Ford and Tom Edison Are Long Gone

Last week, Lehman Brothers CEO, Dick Fuld, was in the news again when an investigative commission released its report on why Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. To nobody’s surprise, the investigators concluded that Lehman Brothers, under Fuld’s stewardship, went down in flames simply because Fuld and his company richly deserved to fail for their fraudulent business practices. Fuld may have been the poster boy for the 2008 meltdown, but the seeds of that fiasco go back more than twenty years.

The real story isn’t about Dick Fuld, but about the fact that America tolerates and nourishes a veritable galaxy of creatures just like him, men like Jeff Skilling and Ken Ley of Enron, and Roger Smith and Rick Wagoner of General Motors, and Hank Mckinnell of Pfizer. The list could go on and on, for there’s no shortage of men like these who took a highly successful company and drove it into the ground just for personal wealth and lazy unimaginative expediency.

Our problem in America is partly that our quaint and naïve love affair with Capitalism is based in no small way on our nostalgic admiration for industrialists like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone and Walter Chrysler— primarily entrepreneurs, and then subsequently tycoons who headed successful business operations that produced and sold products that they, themselves, had invented or developed. That respected American entrepreneurial tradition continues to this day with successful businessmen like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs and Warren Buffet. Admiration for all of these men is justifiable.

But the essence of the greater problem is that most Capitalism-loving Americans can’t tell you the difference between a Bill Gates and a Dick Fuld, and it would be difficult to overstate the significance of that. The difference is that corporate honchos like Fuld and the vast majority of other corporate CEOS are definitely NOT entrepreneurs. On the best day of their lives, these men could never start a legitimate business from scratch and make it successful any more than your average17th Century pirate could design and build his own sailing ship. These modern pirates are top-feeding functionaries who rise to positions of incredible wealth and power with their internal corporate political skill, and usually nothing more.

Why is this suddenly more important than it’s been in the past? Because the true unemployment rate in the richest nation on earth is now closer to 20% than to the reported 10%, and most of the people without jobs will never go back to high-paying work because the jobs— first in manufacturing, and then accounting, and then customer service, and then research and development— all were exported out of the country by the honchos to make the bottom line look good in the shortest possible time without regard to long term consequences. Of course, there are apologists aplenty in places like the U.S. Commerce Department who tell us that the exportation of jobs was just a natural consequence of globalization, but globalization didn’t come with a rule book that mandated the export of jobs just to save labor costs. Those decisions were left up to the honchos running the companies, and their own self-serving interpretation of Capitalistic ethics gave them their roadmap to follow. What we have now, massive unemployment and financial misery at the bottom, and exploitation at the top for multi-million-dollar bonus checks, all of this is simply unrestricted free-market Capitalism at work, functioning just the way it was designed to function. I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again, Capitalism only works in a positive way within an ethical framework. The days of Henry Ford and Tom Edison are long gone.

Eulogy for General Motors

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE proclaimed the small stickpin tin lapel buttons that were given out to patrons when they exited the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Billing itself with the slogan, "The World of Tomorrow," the fair became a two-year celebration dedicated to the blessings of democracy and the wonders of technology, and it was this latter purpose, the apotheosis of technology, that captured the imagination of the fairgoers in a way unlikely to ever be seen again. During those two incredible years, sandwiched between a decade of economic hopelessness and the coming horror of the Second World War, it seemed for a brief moment that anything was possible.

The Futurama of General Motors which had been designed by futurist, Norman Bel Geddes, was meant to show the American landscape as it was predicted to look in the year 1960. Bel Geddes' vision of the future included 1,500-foot-high office buildings, taller than the Empire State Building constructed with lavish use of aluminum and glass, 14-lane superhighways that would allow a driver to travel coast-to-coast without stopping for anything but food and gasoline, and small individual vehicles capable of traveling by both roadway and air. Other components of future technology, envisioned in Futurama, told the people of that time what they could expect to see in the next 25 years. These anticipated marvels, prophesied in 1939, were realistically expected to exist in the early 1960s: the cautious but feasible use of atomic energy for power production, ubiquitous plastics, television sets in every home supported by a broadcast infrastructure, nylon stockings for women, rockets capable of orbiting above earth's atmosphere, radio telephones for occasional use in automobiles, aircraft capable of carrying 200 passengers at 400 mph, antibiotics, warships an eighth of a mile long, prefabricated low-cost houses, and fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time of year.

All of this predicted wonderment was set against the backdrop of an America that had the world’s greatest production capacity, on a planet that held only 2 billion human beings, all living in an atmospheric environment that had changed very little over the previous half million years. In that time of 1939, General Motors was the largest and richest corporation on the face of the earth.

Things can change dramatically in 70 years, in ways that could never have been envisioned back in 1939. The futuristic gizmos and products and developments came into being just as predicted, but along with them came environmental pollution and global population explosion and materialistic cultural changes that, arguably, made the world no better than it was back then. Today, when we talk about “The World of Tomorrow,” we don’t celebrate this vision with optimism and eager anticipation. In a way, the fate of General Motors serves as a kind of metaphor for everything else.

Conference on World Affairs

This year’s international Conference on World Affairs was, by far, the best in the last decade, perhaps because so little time needed to be devoted to Bush and Cheney. Subjects covered ran the gamut— global warming, Charles Darwin, black holes in space, Islamophobia, economic meltdown, the demise of newspapers, Rush Limbaugh, dark energy discoveries in the universe, breast cancer, American education, terrorism, international traffic in sex slavery, Mexican drug wars, and the political danger of misunderestimating the Republicans. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be summarizing many of the best ideas that I picked up from this amazing annual gathering of intellectuals.

One of the highlights was a lecture by Bill Reinert, national head of advanced technology for Toyota. His subject, of course, was the auto industry, and his talk can be summarized in three numbers— 17 million, 14 million, and 8.5 million. Last year the global auto industry produced 17 million cars. After the latest round of cutbacks, the global auto industry now has the capacity to produce 14 million cars per year. This year, the global auto industry is on track to sell 8.5 million cars. Do the math. More than any other single element, it’s overcapacity which most frightens auto industry leaders. There are currently 16 auto companies building cars around the world, and Bill Reinert’s educated prediction was that, when the economic crisis has passed, there will be 6 auto conglomerates left to supply the car industry. Don’t look for GM and Chrysler to be among them.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor

It’s the annual football orgy time with NFL playoffs and a seemingly endless stream of bowl games, and this year it represented a chance for the dying auto makers to advertise their way out of bankruptcy with a Fed fueled cash injection paying for the TV spots. Since I was going to be watching most of the games anyway, I decided to use this opportunity to monitor the advertisements more closely than I’d done in the past. Here’s what I found.

GM and Chrysler were, by far, the most prolific sponsors of televised football this year. Every single game that I watched had the play on the field interrupted by AT LEAST a dozen car commercials. Twelve was a minimum. Some games had two or three times that number. Chrysler’s advertising agency, BBDO Detroit, seems to believe that college football audiences are overwhelmingly made up of testosterone-loaded young macho types who dream of piloting Dodge Ram pickup trucks through fiery explosions as they drive like a bat out of hell without pavement under the tires. Maybe BBDO Detroit has the Chrysler customer demographic dialed in to perfection, but I have to believe that these commercials (which look like they’re being filmed in a war zone) have a lot more to do with the fact that Dodge Ram pickup sales are still languishing in the aftermath of $4.00 gas.

GM’s new advertising agency for Cadillac, Modernista!, is trying something rather daring. They are conspicuously tying the GM brand to the various makes and models from Pontiac and Cadillac in addition to Chevrolet. I wouldn’t have believed that there was anyone left in America who didn’t know that Cadillac was a subsidiary of GM, but since Modernista! believes this, here’s my question— is now the time to set the record straight just as GM CEO, Rick Wagoner is fresh from his Congressional fiasco? Wouldn’t it be better to let a prospective buyer for an Escalade think that, since the vehicle has a European sounding name, it must be made by a foreign car maker? This is especially true since GM is touting a 5 year warranty in the new commercials. Good luck with that GM warranty three years from now.

The tragedy is that none— zilch—zero percent of the commercials from GM and Chrysler were for green vehicles that would give fuel efficiency and lower emissions.

Why Public Relations Matters

There’s a saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” but that seems to be the best description for the task set before the PR teams at Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Less than two weeks ago, the CEOs of the big 3 automakers presented themselves in front of a congressional panel to beg for money, and they came away with nothing but the image of their own incompetence and narcissism burned into the mind of the American public. If one of these men had been unprepared, it would have been remarkable, but the fact that all three were unprepared is simply astonishing. So tomorrow, they get to try all over again.

There should be page in the CEO “how to” manual that tells a titan of industry to meet with his PR director before he appears before congress. Most people think of PR guys as spin-masters and slick mouthpieces, and some are just that, but the very best PR directors working at the most successful companies are paid handsomely for one very important talent— they can see things the way that people outside the company see things. They are inoculated against internal groupthink, and— most importantly— they have the personal fortitude to speak truth to power, and to tell a CEO the things that a CEO doesn’t want to hear. A good PR director would have told any one of the big 3 CEOs to cut his own salary, to sell off the corporate jets, and to carry a pen and paper to take notes so that it would appear to the congressmen that somebody actually gave a shit.

I suspect that all three American automakers have such PR directors on their payroll. The fact that they weren’t consulted explains why their companies are in financial trouble. The inept and arrogant big 3 CEOs have accepted the dysfunction in their styling departments, and their engineering departments, and their strategic planning departments, and their marketing departments— so why would they think about trusting their PR departments? The good news, however, is that Americans have the choice to not buy their products.

What Didn't Happen This Week

There’s an old joke about the customer who asks the salesman, “How can you sell your product at such a low price?” The salesman replies, “We lose a little bit on each sale, but we make it up on volume.” What was never elaborated in that joke was that the salesman eventually went on to become the CEO of an American auto company, so I guess the joke’s on us as American taxpayers.

Stevedores at the shipping docks in Long Beach and Los Angeles report that there is no longer room to store the imported cars coming into the U.S. from Asia because nobody is buying the cars that are already unloaded there. Meanwhile, auto workers are facing layoffs at the GM plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky where the Corvette is manufactured because there are still unsold 2007 model Corvettes sitting on the paved lot down there, but the body style on America’s sports car hasn’t been changed in more than ten years, so I guess that GM could fudge the paperwork on those 2007 models and sell them as new. It would make about as much sense as anything else that GM is doing.

This week, the CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew from Detroit to Washington on their own separate private jets to appear before Congress, and this symbolically spoke volumes about what’s wrong with the auto industry. However, it was the things that DIDN’T happen which spoke even louder. What didn’t happen was that someone from the UAW (the “union”) was sitting there on the hot seat right alongside the CEOs. I’m sure that a top union official could have hitched a ride on any one of the three corporate jets if somebody had thought about the fact that the union is, perhaps, the most important player in all of this pathetic auto meltdown. What didn’t happen was that any of the auto CEOs thought to bring along a pencil and paper to make any notes. What didn’t happen was that any of the CEOs had the faintest clue about what to do besides begging for free taxpayer money. And most importantly, what didn’t happen was that potential car buyers saw or heard anything at all that would make them want to “buy American.”

That’s the fundamental problem, that there’s no logical reason whatsoever to “buy American.” The quality is second rate. The management is imperious and disgusting. Having an American auto service infrastructure years down the line is a highly remote possibility. The car value for the dollar spent is much less than with the foreign models, and when American car prices are actually lowered, the reduction is done with clunky rebates. Even a federal law requiring us to “buy American,” would not work because we’d still be free to drive what we already have until the American companies finally throw in the towel. When you lose a little bit on each sale, you really can’t make it up on volume.

GM Needs More Than Bailout Money

Question from an American taxpayer. “After we cough up our tax dollars to bail out GM, will we subsequently be required by Federal law to buy GM cars?” because that’s the only way to save this pitiable and dysfunctional company. The problems like poor economy, unpredictable gas prices, and diminished disposable income are only secondary reasons for the lagging auto sales at GM. The fundamental problem is the perceived second-rate nature of the vehicles coming off the GM assembly line, and the failure of the GM marketing people to lock in clear customer targets. Here are some examples.

The GM flagship offering, the Corvette— so identifiable that it requires no television or media advertising— has a body style that’s basically unchanged since the middle years of the Clinton administration. Each year, the new Corvette comes to market with ever more powerful engines packaged in the same old body. I, personally, have six close friends with modern Corvettes who tell me they would trade up to a brand new model to get a snazzy new body style, but who are unwilling to trade their 180 MPH vehicle for one that goes 210 MPH in a land where the speed limit is 75. My six friends are, admittedly, a very small customer sample, but the marketing people with the larger customer samples are the ones who are about to go out of business, so their proven insights are not exactly stellar.

There was a time when the Cadillac brand was the darling of the country club set, and was driven by affluent people with retirement-swollen bankrolls. The modern Cadillac customer still has a fat bankroll, but he also has saggy ass pants, and after buying his Escalade with cash, he routinely has the windows replaced with smoked glass. As a high-end customer demographic, this doesn’t exactly attract a lot of new buyers wanting to emulate the image.

Then there’s the Volt, the car that will save the company— or so they say. Anyway, that’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. Readers of this blog have read a lot from me about the Volt, so I won’t drive over the same old road on this topic. Suffice it to say that the hype has gone on so long that there’s no way the Volt, if and when it comes to market, can ever live up to the expectations. Moreover, prospective Volt customers are keenly aware that there is unlikely to be an infrastructure of GM service departments in five or ten years when the Volt starts to need some mechanical attention. People still remember the lessons from the 1930s, learned the hard way by Hupmobile and Whippet owners— you don’t want to buy the last car from a dead company.

We hear a lot about the idea of firing most of the incompetent and overpaid GM top brass as a prerequisite for giving bailout money to the dying car giant. If we’re placing blame for GM’s failure by looking for revenge, I personally believe that everyone would be better served by firing the strategic marketing team, as well as the styling department people who did their bidding. More than money, GM needs imagination and new ideas.

Also see: “Why The Merger With Chrysler Can’t Save GM” (11/3/2008) and “It’s The Infrastructure, Stupid” (7/31/2008)

Why The Merger With Chrysler Can't Save GM

It looks like the proposed GM—Chrysler merger will have to wait for the next administration now that Bush has decided to kick that can down the road. Sadly, however, it probably won’t make much difference. Of course there will be new economies of scale and synergies to be leveraged from the merger, and thousands of United Auto Workers will lose their jobs, but the fundamental problem (especially from the GM side) lies in the products which consist of inferior cars and unmarketable trucks. Take the case of the much-publicized Chevrolet Volt, the car that is supposed to be GM’s salvation.

The Volt started out about eight years ago as a snazzy concept car to be shown at the Detroit Auto Show. The body was a subtle blend of the futuristic and the elegant, with just the right touches of both familiarity and creativity. In a master stroke of innovation, GM engineers had designed this body to sit atop a rolling low-platform chassis which would have the flexibility to run on fuel-cell-generated electricity, or conventional gasoline, or a hybrid of both. But then, the fuel cell idea was trashed when someone realized that it would take 100 years to build out an infrastructure of cryogenic filling stations that could supply liquid hydrogen across the country (see my blog of 7/31). After that, bit-by-bit, the Volt morphed in the way that often happens when something is designed and redesigned by very large committees with divergent points of view. The Volt that has emerged from this committee process now features a battery pack to be recharged at the plug-in socket on the garage wall at home, and a reconfigured body which now closely resembles the Prius and has none of the original futuristic charm. Evidently, GM honchos figured that if it looked like the Prius, it might sell like the Prius.

Recently, one of the national networks sent a TV crew to the GM proving ground to do a video piece on the development of the Volt. With the camera rolling, the little Volt finished prototype began to climb a very slight hill on the test course. And then it slowed, unexpectedly. And then it stopped dead in its tracks and refused to move any farther. To make matters worse, the GM spokesperson started to spin the episode by saying that the car was still very experimental, completely ignoring the fact that the Volt has been floating around the drawing boards at GM for all of the 21st Century. Nothing could better underscore the fact that GM is no Toyota, and while a GM—Chrysler merger would create a company bigger than Toyota, the quality gap would probably still persist.

Also see: “It’s The Infrastructure, Stupid” 7/31/2008

And Now a Message From Our Sponsors

At a time when GM is struggling just to remain viable as an American corporation, the car maker has now bet the farm on advertising during the Olympics. Along with Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Exxon Mobil, GM is one of the major sponsors for NBC’s marathon Olympic coverage, but their ads are a mystery to me. Most of them feature various GM models parked unattended next to a gas pump at the filling station, and while the car owner is off camera (presumably inside paying his obscene fuel bill), the gas nozzle comes to life through the process of computer animation, and begins playing various pranks on the helpless, inanimate, vehicle.

The intended message is that gas pumps dislike Chevy vehicles because of their miserly fuel consumption. There are two other interpretations, both equally valid. One, that GM products spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in gas stations. And two, that GM car owners aren’t smart enough to pay at the pump.

The GM Volt is also featured in a few of the ads (see my article 7/31). The target date for the start-sale of the Volt is now pushed back to 2010, and from the sounds of the ad, the Volt will use hybrid rather than fuel cell technology. The once-futuristic body is not looking any newer than it was eight or nine years ago. GM might as well put it all on the line with this 2008 Olympic telecast, because it’s not a sure bet that GM will be around for the 2012 games in London, and the company has already announced their decision to not advertise during that event.

As for the other big players in the NBC ad pool, the Coke and McDonalds spots are fresh and entertaining. Coke and McDonalds do advertising far better than they do human nourishment, but that’s another story. Exxon Mobil gets the award for having the most chutzpah . With their oil profits at obscene levels, their ads focus on their work curing malaria in Africa. For each million dollars in oil profits, Exxon Mobil evidently contributes one mosquitoe net valued at roughly one dollar. The spokesman in the ads for the malaria project is some guy with an M.D. after his name. I don’t know if he’s a real doctor, but he plays one on television, and in the past that was always good enough for TV commercials hyping medical messages.

The real tragedy of this year’s TV advertising is that the Olympics occur in election years. That’s always the case, and there’s nothing worse in the electronic world than political ads. It’s a wistful thing to imagine what it would be like to see the Olympics presented without televised messages tearing down political candidates.

Also see: It’s The Infrastructure-- Stupid

It's The Infrastructure, Stupid

170,000! There are 170,000 gas stations in the United States. Hold that thought for a minute and I’ll get back to it, and I’ll tell you why it may be the most important statistic in the entire discussion about high gasoline prices.

In 1973, before the Arab oil embargo, the average gas mileage for American cars was 12.4 MPG. Then our government took action, mandated better fuel economy from the auto makers, and by 1984 the average was 22.7 MPG—almost double what it had been only ten years previous. That was the last meaningful action from our government on this matter. The average now is 22.4 MPG, actually less than what it was a quarter century ago. Left to their own devices without government interference (the Reagan years), the automakers pushed horsepower rather than fuel economy, knowing that the consumer would always buy the most horsepower that they could afford. And the auto buyers, the consumers, took the bait and swallowed what the TV ads were pushing. Now everyone is shocked at the price of gas because they can’t afford to feed the horsepower beast in their garage. As my son would say, “Who didn’t see that coming?”

The government is blaming foreign oil, or those pesky Arab evildoers (they get blamed for everything), or environmental limits on domestic drilling, or surreptitious manipulation by unscrupulous commodity traders, or any other possible thing they can trump up to focus attention away from the automakers and the consumers. Here’s why that is. The American automakers are so anemic and pathetic that they will probably go into bankruptcy soon, and the government doesn’t want to be accused of “piling on.” And the auto buyers, the consumers, can vote, so nobody wants to offend them by telling them their buying habits are financially suicidal. Nothing gets done and everybody kicks the can down the road.

So what about alternative fuels? Have you heard of the General Motors model called the Volt? It surfaced about seven or eight years ago with a futuristic body and no propulsion system. It was promised at the time that it would run on fuel cells. Fuel cell technology was perfected in the 1960s by NASA for the Apollo trips to the moon. That whole process— perfecting the fuel cells and going to the moon— took eight years. Flash forward to now. In an identical eight years time, GM has done nothing with the Volt but show it off. NOTHING. The project has languished on the shelf at GM for so long that the once-futuristic body is now starting to look retro. It gives new meaning to the words, “empty shell.” GM spokespeople say that they are waiting for someone to develop workable fuel cells. No wonder that Toyota pushed GM out of the lead in the car market.

Remember that earlier number of 170,000 gas stations? I told you it was important, and here’s why. Those vendors only sell gas. None of them sell pure hydrogen, and fuel cells require pure hydrogen to operate. When GM says that they are waiting for someone to develop workable fuel cells, the operative word is, “workable.” GM is telling the truth. GM is waiting for someone to establish the infrastructure that will supply the hydrogen. It took most of the last 100 years to build out that petroleum-supply infrastructure of 170,000 stations. Even with a crash program like the 1960s Apollo initiative, it would take at least 20 years to have the hydrogen-supply infrastructure that GM is waiting for. And GM is content to wait. GM has no money to do anything else. Meanwhile, the next wave of American entrepreneurs who might start making their fortunes selling hydrogen— they won’t make a move until there are fuel cells cars available in quantity. It’s the classic Mexican stand-off (can I say that?).

So what should you do? Here’s my advice. Live like a European. Buy only small, light, fuel-efficient cars, preferably from Asian or European car makers, so that you’ll have a car dealer still in business ten years from now to service your vehicle. Ride a bike, if possible, for shorter trips. Make fewer trips. Walk whenever feasible. Take public transportation. And finally— this is the most important tip of all— arrange your personal finances so that you will be able to pay $7.00 per gallon for gasoline in four years. The Europeans pay more than that now, and they live quite nicely with that reality.

If this sounds un-American, then be a good American. Trust your government to solve an unsolvable problem. Wait 20 years for off-shore drilling of domestic reserves to drop the oil price 5%. Vote for whoever tells you the lies you want to hear. Reminisce about the Reagan years. Bitch about the oil companies and the commodity traders, and when you do this, try to make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. That may be hard to do. Live like a macho country-music-star-wannabe behind the wheel of your giant pickup truck, even if it drives you to the poorhouse. Who knows? General Motors might put you in their next television commercial.

Get Your Free Gas While It Lasts

In 1952, GM honcho, Charlie Wilson, told congress, “What’s good for General Motors is what’s good for the country.” At the time when he said this, his company was already working to eliminate passenger-carrying competition from metropolitan transit systems by buying up the urban trolley companies and transferring the rolling assets to the scrap metal yards across America. Nobody at the time ever tried to explain how this was good for the country, and Wilson’s words were widely quoted and pretty much accepted at face value. Nobody today would buy it.

Yesterday, we saw further evidence of GM’s deterioration, as if any further evidence was needed. The once-proud company eliminated dividends for shareholders, and with GM stock value at an all-time low, this was the last nail in the coffin for the unfortunate people still holding equity investment in the company. Also announced yesterday was the discontinuation of healthcare coverage for GM retirees over 65. I guess Medicare is expected to take up the slack. And, of course, the current honchos will eliminate some white-collar jobs (other than their own) to make it look like management is sharing the pain. I’ll bet GM wishes it now had all that money they spent to dismantle the trolley systems half a century ago.

Less than a year ago, TV advertisements for humongous Chevy pickup trucks were featuring macho cowboy-types at the wheel as the Chevy was pitted against Ford F-Series machines and Dodge Hemis to compare pulling power. You don’t need to be an internal combustion scientist to know that something which can tow a locomotive eats up a lot of gas. So now, with fuel prices higher than ever, General Motors has excess numbers of pickup trucks sitting around with no buyers. Their solution to this is to offer free gas for a short period of time to new buyers—the automotive equivalent of a sub-prime ARM home mortgage. And sure enough, that same kind of cost-camouflaging flim-flam that blindsided financially naïve Americans into home foreclosure now has Chevrolet-owner-wannabes taking the bait. They still want to be that macho cowboy-type at the wheel, at least until the free gas runs out. This is what passes for wise consumerism and automotive industry sales management in the 21st century. It might be good for General Motors, but not for America.

Still Waiting for that Flying Car (part 1)

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE proclaimed the small stickpin tin lapel buttons that were given out to patrons when they exited the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Billing itself with the slogan, "The World of Tomorrow," the fair became a two-year celebration dedicated to the blessings of democracy and the wonders of technology, and it was this latter purpose, the apotheosis of technology, that captured the imagination of the fairgoers in a way unlikely to ever be seen again. During those two incredible years, sandwiched between a decade of economic hopelessness and the coming horror of the Second World War, it seemed for a brief moment that anything was possible. The automotive titans, Ford and General Motors competed for the attention, and even the affection, of fair attendees with two innovative exhibits that conveyed the idea of progress in two very different ways. Ford sought to highlight the paradigm shift that had already taken place by giving visitors a look back in time in the form of a floor show entitled "A Thousand Times Neigh," a horse's-eye view of the automobile. This offering from the Ford Motor Company, while entertaining and original, was completely upstaged by the Futurama of General Motors which had been designed by futurist, Norman Bel Geddes, to show the American landscape as it was predicted to look in the year 1960. Bel Geddes' vision of the future included 1,500-foot-high office buildings, 14-lane superhighways, and small individual vehicles capable of traveling by both roadway and air.

These components of future technology envisioned in Futurama by Norman Bel Geddes made their way onto a list of predictions that grew out of the 1939 World's Fair to tell the people of that time what they could expect to see in the next 25 years. The following is a collection of anticipated marvels prophesied in 1939 that were realistically expected to exist in the year 1964: buildings taller than the Empire State Building constructed with lavish use of aluminum and glass, a multi-lane highway system that would allow a driver to travel coast-to-coast without stopping for anything but food and gasoline, a personal vehicle capable of both air and ground travel, the cautious but feasible use of atomic energy for power production, ubiquitous plastics, television sets in every home supported by a broadcast infrastructure, nylon stockings for women, rockets capable of orbiting above earth's atmosphere, radio telephones for occasional use in automobiles, aircraft capable of carrying 200 passengers at 400 mph, antibiotics, warships an eighth of a mile long, prefabricated low-cost houses, and fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time of year.

All but one of these promised technological achievements were either fully realized by 1964 or were in development with their final actuality clearly in sight. Only the dual-use aircar remained elusive, and if one considers the technological problems associated with atomic energy and orbital rockets, it's hard to argue that the technology of air-ground functionality was simply too insurmountable. It's equally hard to make the case that the aircar concept didn't fully capture the imagination of the public sufficiently to spur development and production. The list was, after all, composed in 1939, and given the attention that the aircar concept had received in the years leading up to 1939, one might have anticipated that its development would have been among the first of the expectations to come true.