Another look at 20th century retro-future.

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Product Description

Promises for the future were made; some sadly broken and some unfortunately honored. While we didn't get household jetpacks and personal serving-drinks-by-the-pool robots, or even our orgasmatrons, we did get things like the super-fantastic building materials of the future-asbestos, lead, and foam.

So just what was the utopian master plan for future households during the early twentieth century? Follies of Science is the keeper of such knowledge, offering glimpses into sparkling, smooth lead paint covering our living room walls, dazzling DDT foggers killing mosquitoes dead, alchemists transforming atoms into gold and diamonds, homeowners living in "The Foam House of the Future," and, of course, commuters blasting away on their jet packs to work. Utopian indeed.

Aptly illustrated with full-color and black-and-white classic imagery, the visions of the future spread across page after page, pulling the reader in to what could have been and what shouldn't have been.

Eric Dregni has written nine books, including Midwest Marvels, The Scooter Bible, Ads that Put America on Wheels, and Grazie a Dio non sono bolognese. As a 2004 Fulbright Fellow to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Dregni researched Scandinavian culture and roots for a forthcoming book. His time is divided between Italy, Norway, and Minneapolis where he is the curator for El Dorado Conquistador Museum and guitarist for the mock-rock trio Vinnie & the Stardsters.

Jonathan Dregni is a futurist and sci-fi enthusiast, raising a family midway between the soon-to-be domed cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322882 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

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Customer Reviews

Nice pictures...
If you have seen some of the other reviews you may know by now that the authors may have wished to do a little more research about the subject matter inside the book. But the pictures are nice. Yet many don't have any information and some of them are mislabeled. Some text that says it is for the photo above is, in fact, for the photo on the left or on the right. And some of the ideas, what the authors look at as follies, are, in some ways, being used right now. For example, the chapter on future homes has a picture of a metal dome. The idea is you can have as many or as few as you needed or could pay for. Yet cheap houses are still a major issue even in the 21st Century. Tiny, cheap houses, like WeeHouses, are on the market and can still give you a nice home with a green lawn without paying hundreds of thousands for the normal dream house. I bet the authors have three story houses or something. Also, I like the idea of a plane being mated with a bus. As long as the blades can be tilted up while the bus is being changed. I don't want the passengers to be sliced up. In other words, the ideas COULD be possible, they just never came about. That is not a folly it just means there was no need for it.

The folly of buying Follies of Science
Filled with errors of fact (e.g.,a navy "general", an autogyro described as a combination helicopter and car, etc.)as well as multiple egregious typos. Illustrations (many from old science fiction pulp magazines) lack dates and citations for the most part.

Skepticism
Lots of nice pictures. Okay for the loo. I'm only on page twenty of the text but have perused the pictures and captions. At this point, though, upon reading text about which I know some things, I will have to be skeptical about the things I don't know much about.

For instance, I don't know what a "cooling rod" is doing in an atomic submarine, but I do know that Admiral Rickover's proposed design for the first nuclear powered sub USS Nautilus had an isolated cooling loop of pH treated nearly pure pressurized water. We've all seen the footage of him pointing out the components in a tabletop mockup with a pretty petty officer at his side.

Also, the washdown systems of US Navy ships (not just aircraft carriers) will indeed be useful in case of nuclear fallout, chemical attack, or biological attack. Why is that a "headscratcher" to the Dregni Brothers?

I, like the Navy "general," would happily keep a nameplate of uranium on my desk. What problem do the authors have with that?

Please, an expedient way to purify water is to dig two dry wells a foot or so apart. Fill one well with contaminated water. The water that seeps into the other well will be significantly decontaminated. (This can also be done at the beach of a contaminated pond.)

Perusing pictures else in the book I find many mistakes about things nuclear/radioactive. Is this advocacy or ignorance? Are the authors Luddites about the other topics in the book? I'll have to keep that in mind as I read the rest (if I can).