Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future Review

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(More customer reviews)I'll admit to not having high expectations for this book; after all, it is only 128 pages long. Unfortunately, it was really disappointing. There just simply is not enough insightful information here to make it really interesting.
The goal of the book is to look at some of the more ridiculous predictions of the future made throughout history, from giant "land submarines" to jetpacks. But there are two big problems with how the authors treat this subject. The first is that their approach is very superficial--they touch on each subject quickly and then abandon it, rather than grouping them together in weightier themes. It's like eating finger foods, each bite is unsatisfying. Some of these subjects, like mega-cities or massive vehicles, also deserve a deeper discussion. Instead, the authors assert that (paraphrasing) "things are gigantic when times are good" and mention the dinosaurs and large prehistoric insects. That's a rather odd and imprecise statement to make, and although it might apply to biological entities, it doesn't necessarily apply to manmade objects. What about computers? Why are they getting smaller? And are big things naturally "good"?
The other major problem is a startling lack of dates. Photographs, magazine illustrations and diagrams are frequently presented without _any_ indication of when they were made. Is this illustration from the 1950s or the Depression-era 1930s? Isn't that relevant to why it might have been produced? Many of the pulp magazine covers are cropped in such a way that the dates are cut off, which is incredibly annoying. Thus, the book reads like a haphazzardly arranged scrapbook, without any keen insights about how or why people might make erroneous predictions about the future.

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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 Stardüsters.

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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The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys Review

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(More customer reviews)Since Chaos burst upon the intellectual consciousness of the twentieth century, examples of the butterfly effect have inundated our lives. Chaotic systems exhibit a type of behavior where vanishingly-small perturbations in initial conditions result in wild and unpredictable alterations in a system's final state. The butterfly in China, flapping its wings, results in a hurricane off the coast of Florida 100 years later.
James Burke takes us on an intersected voyage through the web of history, and in the process shows the intricately connected nature of our lives in a chaotic mishmash of intersecting events. The mental imagery I concocted while reading his book was one of a small worm making its way through a biscuit of shredded wheat. With thousands of intersecting strands, and billions of route possibilities open at each juncture, my biscuit gives a feel for the intricate connection that every event in history shares with everything else. In fact, Burke has written his book from the worm's perspective, with branch points identified in the margins so you can follow a thread (instead of the book) as it weaves its way through history. You do not need to read this book sequentially, and quite possibly might choose to read it worm style rather than cover to cover.
When I first began Burke's book I looked for the obvious connections, but soon learned that was not his objective. Though he illustrates obvious connections, much of the interelatedness in Burke's book deals with subtle effects that changed people's lives and resulted in dramatic changes in history.Sometimes the stories become so intricate I found myself taking notes so I could mentally trace back through the web of events.
Most of the historical events he covers relate in some way to scientific or technical achievements and discoveries. In some of these, I found myself confused about the terminology used. Burke is not always clear when he comments about a particular discovery, whether he is making a statement about the way things are viewed today, or how they were viewed by the original discoverers. Because of this, I found myself sometimes irritated by technically incorrect descriptions. For example, on page 198 Burke says:
"There was only one thing that would reflect radio waves besides metal reflectors like the ones Hertz had used: ionized atoms, which had lost one or more of their electrons. These atoms became positively charged and would reflect electronic signals (which were negative)."
While it is true that ions are positively charged, radio waves are not negative. In another place, he describes voltage as charge (see page 186). He also mentions, off handedly, that collimated laser beams spread by only "a few feet" over the distance between the earth and moon (see page 75). [A collimated beam, with a wavelength of 600 nm, will have a half-beam divergence of about 48 feet over the distance between the earth and moon when collimated with a telescope having a 10-meter-diameter primary mirror. See, for example, Saleh, Teich, "Fundamentals of Photonics," Wiley Series in Pure and applied optics, equation 3.1-20.]
These examples left me with a sometimes uneasy feeling about the book's technical accuracy, yet I cannot discount the possibility that Burke was simply explaining these phenomena in the context of the way they were understood when first discovered.
The book has an excellent index. The figures, however, are of generally poor quality and hard to see. Another irritant was the frequent and often-detailed descriptions Burke gives of ingenious and complex machinery and gadgets. These descriptions are often very hard to follow, and would benefit greatly from drawings that support the textual descriptions.
Aside from these few criticisms, however, I found Burke's book most enjoyable. It will broaden your horizons and make you appreciate history from a new perspective. An ideal book for just before bedtime, I highly recommend it.
Duwayne Anderson

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