We once trusted our kids with radioactive kits - for science!

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory was a toy kit sold for one brief year in 1950, by Alfred Carlton Gilbert, who also invented the Erector Set. It consisted of a Geiger-Muller counter, a cloud chamber, electroscope, spinthariscope, and actual uranium ore, along with a book about how to prospect for uranium.

According to an interview with Gilbert, the set was not only the real thing, but perfectly safe. It was discontinued, not because of safety concerns nor because of parental outcry, but because the unit was very expensive ($50 in 1950 dollars) and even at that they lost money on every unit sold. It was also just a little more advanced than the average science-fair project set.

The A.C. Gilbert company also sold other radioactive-themed toys, including this stand-alone impressive Geiger counter:

View other discontinued toys at the Banned Toys Museum.

A Different America With Different Entertainment: Disney's Adventure Through Inner Space

Speaking as a former Southern California mall rat, one of my favorite experiences from childhood was riding the "Adventure Through Inner Space" ride at Disneyland. They shut it down in the mid-80s to replace it with Star Tours - albeit, also a great attraction. But not the same. And it marked the point of cultural sea change in the United States between its peak and its decline. Here is the Yesterland page mourning its passing.

ATIS was a science fiction ride. In it, we use the excitement of cutting-edge (for the time) science to instill a sense of wonder, through the fantasy element of entering a magic microscope which makes you smaller. The cheery 1950s' song "Miracles From Molecules" greets you as you exit the ride - literally, the message is that the road to future Utopia was paved with scientific progress.

Star Tours is just about the Star Wars franchise and - there will be no way to avoid angering fans so I'll just say it - Star Wars is NOT science fiction. Star Wars is space opera, a Western cowboys-and-indians shoot-em-up set in space. Gone is the enthusiasm for science and the inspiration to look to a better tomorrow; instead the story, set "a long long time ago" is a Gothic post-modern fairy tale. What a poignant indicator to mark the shift in US culture! We gave up on getting into space ourselves - here, here's a fairy tale about how space politics would be just as messed up as US politics anyway. Enjoy your sour grapes.

ATIS sounds incredibly lame to modern kids, sounding more like a hyperthyroid science fair project than a ride, and that just goes to show how our modern culture has broken the present and new generations. To a six-year-old, years before the era of CGI effects, ATIS was scary. As you waited in line, they make it look like shrunken passengers were proceeding to the end of the microscope phasing into nothing. It was a stunningly realistic effect. The cars look like they go right up there. Near the end, a huge human eye peers down on you. The ride is mostly in darkness, with bright flashing lights all around you simulating thrilling interactions on the atomic level.

But all of this would be pretty pedestrian without the hypnotic voice of Paul Frees. As the narrating scientist, he commands your attention and shapes your thoughts with lines like "I am the first person to make this fabulous journey!" and "What compelling force draws me into this mysterious darkness--can this be the threshold of inner space?" and "No, I dare not go on. I must return to the realm of the molecule, before I go on shrinking...forever!" Frees could sit down to the breakfast table and describe his bowl of cereal and make it sound too epic for mere mortal minds to face.

Sadly, no actual video footage of this iconic and original ride exists, since it was shut down before the age of cheap video recorder cameras. But one fan, name of Steve Wesson, has devoted eight years to recreating it in 3D computer-modeling animation, and it is very close to my memories of the ride:

The architecture around the ride itself was a feast of googie nostalgia. Read that carefully, that's "googie" not "Google". "Googie" is the style of retro-futurist pop-art style, common around the general Disneyland area of Southern California. Check the definitive page on the Googie style here.

Can there be any more compelling argument that the United States gave up its dreams than that rides like ATIS and styles like googie now seem quaintly outdated? We used to look forward to the future - it was filled with exciting things and it made all the kids want to be scientists so we could get there as soon as possible and have out flying cars and robot maids. But our attitude towards the future changed from optimism to pessimism right about in the mid-80s. Cyberpunk came along, and with it came the cynical attitude that now said, "It wouldn't matter how much technology we invent; humans would be the same degenerate garbage anyway."

Right here in Iowa, we had yet another march in protest of a proposed bill that would allow exploration of building nuclear power facilities. Protesters dressed as zombies and marched on the state capitol.

I cried when I saw that story. Those zombies are no joke to me. The zombies want us to be governed by books that are thousands of years old. The zombies hate science and learning and love backwardness and repression. The zombies can't deal with sex or education or a president of a different race. The zombies will be here soon to snatch this computer out of my hands and take away my car, forcing us all back to the iron age to trod barefoot through the mud building pyramids while zombies crack a whip over our backs. The zombies are in power. The zombies own America, and the few remaining humans are scrambling to throw off their oppression or escape to a free land.

The United States has become a nation of zombies, dead things shambling forth to steal away the space-age, atomic-powered future promised to me in my childhood by Paul Frees and his Adventure Through Inner Space.

Fall In Love With Marika Rokk's Interpretation Of Space Cabaret

Marika Rokk was a dancer and singer of German film. Unfortunately, she was at the height of her popularity right during the Nazi era, so she became indelibly linked with it. Nevertheless, as seen by the campy, original style of this production, she's worth a second look.

This film from 1958, titled "Mir Ist So Langweilig" (It means "I am so bored") shows a moon-woman spying an African tribe on Earth and blasting down to be frolic with them for the sheer novelty of it. Despite the racist overtone (she even draws her finger across the chest of one dark man to see if it would rub off, but is promptly laughed at for this), it's full of charming touches like the swaying astronauts and a cute rocket with a gyroscopic cockpit.

This was done after her pardon from her post-WWII professional ban. For a while there, they didn't let her perform because she was so associated with the Nazis, which, let's face it, is hardly her fault since she couldn't help who buys a ticket to her shows.

The Real-Life Mountains of Madness: The Dyatlov Pass Incident

After more than half a century, the Dyatlov Pass Incident looks to be the world's most uncrackable unsolved cold case. Nine mountain climbers died, leaving a strange and unsettling scene which has puzzled investigators. An unknown force pummeled three of them to death, while the other six died of hypothermia. While the speculation run from native uprisings to secret Soviet radiation experiments to UFO attack, the events probably have a more mundane explanation - we just don't know what the hell it is.

Robert A. Heinlein's 1952 Predictions For 2000 - A Report Card

I saw this list at io9, and figured, just for the exercise, to go through Heinlein's predictions one by one and see what The Dean got right and wrong...

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it. Wrong! I'm just as disappointed as you, Rob.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure. Correct! The Sexual Revolution was practically on America's doorstep in 1952, so it wasn't hard to get this one right.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space. Mostly wrong! Attacks from outer space, no. But satellite surveillance to gather intelligence is an important military factor, and we do have our robot drone planes. But I'm pretty sure that Heinlein had in mind rocket ships with missiles raining down from the void. He's wrong, thank Cthulhu.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend. Wrong! Ha ha ha ha ha, Rob, how naive you were about politics in the 1950s!

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies. Wrong! But it's hard to imagine what he had in mind. Housing technology has continued to improve, but the "housing shortage" was always a matter of economics - we have plenty of homes, but they're all sitting empty and rotting while banks own them all.

6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by. Wrong! Malthusian predictions about running out of food are always wrong. If anything, we have a problem with obesity. And don't tell me about third-world orphans starving - that, again, is politics - there's plenty of food, but also plenty of dictator idiots causing famines.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists. Wrong! Sorry you were so grumpy about art, old guy, but "modern art" wasn't even close to its peak yet at the time you wrote this.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction. Wrong! Also, huh? Psychoanalysis has changed some since the 1950s, but what has largely replaced such treatments is pills, pills, pills, pills, pills.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb. Wrong! We're so, so sad to say so. But stem cell research is looking into that whole "regeneration" thing.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building. Wrong! No human has yet set foot on anything but Earth and the moon.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision. Mostly Correct! In fact, this one almost sounds too specific to have been in this list - did somebody add this one? Substitute "computer" for "telephone" for those last two.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars. Wrong! In fact, it's growing doubtful that we'll find anything alive on Mars, even fuzzy little microbes.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed. Wrong! Not even sure how he thought this would happen - had he never heard of G-forces? But so far the fastest land-speed record is 760 MPH with a turbofan at Black Rock Desert in 1997, and that's far from "commonplace" or cheap.

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity. Wrong! No, no, no.

15. We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet. Wrong! Communism is alive and well, thank you. And as for "world state", the United States is just about as close to a world empire as we've gotten. McCarthy much?

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance. Wrong! What a Libertarian. While we'd grant that transportation advances have killed off many industries, dozens of new industries have sprung up to take their place.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain." Correct? We could consider computerized air-traffic control systems to be this. The Internet is certainly continent-wide. We even came up with much better tracking methods in the form of telemetry.

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear. Wrong! Our plates are still full of every kind of meat we can imagine. Australians are the only ones who even took to that yeast thing.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed. Correct! Well, I guess if this weren't true, we wouldn't be here to say so.

Here are things we won't get soon, if ever: Travel through time, Travel faster than the speed of light, "Radio" transmission of matter, Manlike robots with manlike reactions, Laboratory creation of life, Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter, Scientific proof of personal survival after death, Nor a permanent end to war.

Time travel, check, FTL, check, Life-after-death, check, No-end-to-war, check. Understanding-of-thought is too debatable to even decide on, but check. But we do have 3D printers which transmit the <em>data</em> to another machine which builds matter into whatever part was ordered, so half-point? We do indeed have "manlike" robots with the Honda ASIMO, but it has nowhere close to human reactions. Laboratories are at least doing fantastic things with DNA and stem cells - they haven't turned inorganic matter into living matter yet, but they're getting damned close.

In all, Heinlein seemed to suffer from the kind of short-sighted vision of continued scientific enthusiasm that affected every American in the 1950s; this was the age of zeerust, after all.

Russian Retro-Future Babes in Space

From Retro-Futurism.