Typewriters, Underwater Hotels And Picture Phones: The Future, As Seen From 1964

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KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: Fifty years ago this summer people from all over came to New York to visit the 1964 World's Fair and to get a glimpse of the future. The fair had stuff like jet packs and new miracles of science like a house made of Formica. You could wipe it clean with just a sponge. David Kestenbaum with our Planet Money team looks back at how we saw the future 50 years ago.

DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: I bought an actual guidebook for the fair on eBay, and it's amazing to flip through it today - 50 years later. There are some things that, looking back, are clear misses. We do not, for instance, have any colonies on the moon today. But there are other things where you're like, really, we had that back then? It turns out there was a picture phone at the fair 50 years ago.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Someday, people may want to see, as well as talk, over the telephone.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Singing) In a place where electronic wonders abound - a marriage of sight to the drama of sound.

KESTENBAUM: We tracked down someone who had used that picture phone at the fair 50 years ago. Vito Turso - today, deputy commissioner for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Back then, he was a boy selling pizza at the fair. The picture phone was one of his favorite exhibits.

VITO TURSO: To walk into this room and have a conversation through - with a, like, small television - it was incredible. The lines to use the picture phone where, you know, unending.

KESTENBAUM: So why didn't the picture phone takeoff? Well, they were really expensive. But there was another reason, as well - a reason that explains why we often get the future wrong. Sometimes, the idea of the thing is cooler than the actual thing. It turns out people don't always want to see the person they're talking to. We've got picture phones now, but, for the most part, people still seem to prefer talking and not seeing. The fair got some things right. Those new color TVs - we really liked those. But it basically missed what was arguably the most futuristic thing that really was going to happen over the next 50 years - the computer and the Internet. IBM had an exhibit at the fair, but a lot of it was focused on the selectric typewriter.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Here's a better way to put words on paper - a remarkable electric typewriter.

KESTENBAUM: Larry Samuel wrote a book about the fair. The IBM fair did cover computers, he says, but they seemed boring - machines for businesses that could add numbers.

LARRY SAMUEL: I wouldn't say it bombed, but, you know, I think it was just - people - you just couldn't get it. And they tried to break it down a do little skits and little, you know, puppets and stuff to make it really easy. But I think it was beyond the reach of most people.

KESTENBAUM: As a kid, which did you think was cooler? - the typewriter or the computer?

SAMUEL: Oh, definitely the typewriter.

KESTENBAUM: So there were things the fair got right. There were things it missed and really one other category - things where you wonder, why didn't that happen? It seems like such a good idea. Take, for instance, the underwater hotel. This is from a ride at the fair called Futurama, which took you past dioramas of what the future might look like.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: A weekend, if you wish, at Hotel Atlantis in the kingdom of the sea - a holiday of thrills and of adventure.

KESTENBAUM: My colleague Robert Smith looked into this one, and he did find an underwater hotel you can stay at today - the Jules Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida. He talked with Neil Monney there.

NEIL MONNEY: It's a very unique experience to dive down and spend the night and to, you know, just live underwater.

KESTENBAUM: The hotel used to be a research facility. It's in the bottom of a lagoon. Inside, there's no stove - just a microwave. But it's got windows.

MONNEY: I'm not sure that it's working at this particular time, but we had a little fish feeder that you could drop some food in inside the habitat. And it would pop up by the window and then the fish would gather around at feeding time.

KESTENBAUM: Neil Monney says he has tried to build a bigger, fancier underwater hotel. The problem has always been finding investors. When the organizers built the World's Fair, they invited the futurists and the diorama makers. They did not invite the bankers. The fair presented this utopian vision of the future where technology and science would solve all manner of problems. But Larry Samuel, the author, says that even back then, people didn't quite believe it. Outside the grounds, things were happening that made the fair seem pretty naive. JFK had been assassinated just five months before the fair opened. There were civil rights protests and the Vietnam War. The economic optimism of the '50s was fading. People went to the fair, he says, because it was a fantasy. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.

MCEVERS: It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

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