In the future, says car designer Chris Bangle, self-driving cars will be invisible and have bus-like seating. In another future – the one that engineer William Bertelsen predicted in 1961 – self-driving cars will slide around on cushions of air and cross the U.S. in just two hours. Cities will be linked by grassy, eight-lane "airways" instead of interstates, and the 8-foot-wide "ground-effect machines" will change lanes at hundreds of miles per hour as their riders leisurely read magazines and smoke pipes, PopSci reported in August 1961.
The pumping stations that keep air flowing through the nationwide system of Aeromobile tubes would be nuclear-powered. Passengers would only need to input direction at junction points. And, with the mobility of a helicopter, Aeromobiles could perform pivot turns in driveways and parellel park by moving sideways.
According to Bertelsen, every bit of technology needed to implement his system was already available in 1961. So what happened to his dream? In June 2008, Bertelsen contacted PopSci to catch up. Basically, he said, Americans lost interest in hovercraft as the space race took off. (But don't call his Aeromobiles "hovercraft": "It's not meant to hover, it's meant to get places!" he told our reporter.) Bertelsen, who was also a practicing physician in Illinois for more than 50 years, died July 16, 2009.
Read the full story in our August 1961 issue: 1,500-m.p.h Family Cars?.
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.