From an engineer and futurist, an impassioned account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future The science fiction of the 1960s promised us a future remade by technological innovation: we’d vacation in geodesic domes on Mars, have meaningful conversations with computers, and drop our children off at school in flying cars. Fast-forward 60 years, and we’re still stuck in traffic in gas-guzzling sedans and boarding the same types of planes we flew in over half a century ago. What happened to the future we were promised? In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer this deceptively simple question. What starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder. Drawing on years of original research and personal engineering experience, Where Is My Flying Car?, originally published in 2018, is an urgent, timely analysis of technological progress over the last 50 years and a bold vision for a better future.

Humans have always wanted to fly. As soon as there were planes and cars, many people saw a combination as the next step for personal transportation, and visionary engineers and inventors did their best to make the flying car (or the roadable plane) a reality. This book is a breezy account of hybrid vehicles and their creators, and of the intense drive that kept bringing inventors back to the drawing board despite repeated failures and the dictates of common sense. Illustrated with archival photos, this entertaining survey takes readers back as far as Icarus and forward into the present day, with a look toward the future. Includes author's note, source notes, bibliography, index.

This book may sound like a work of science fiction, but it's all true. Cars designed to be flown and aircraft designed to be driven have been created surprisingly often, particularly in the United States, where the unfettered optimism of the 1930s and 1950s allowed such fanciful ideas to flourish from time to time. This handsome book covers the subject in depth for the first time, revealing the stories of many doomed ventures, supported by a wealth of intriguing photographs together with wonderful artwork from comics, popular science magazines and science-fiction novels.

Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or trade expo. In fact, each new technology and every novel product that rocked America and rolled the world, from the Colt revolver and the Corvette to fax machines and flush toilets, started at trade fairs, a $100 billion industry that includes world expos, trade shows, and state fairs. More than just promoting material things, however, trade fairs popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, Nazism, Fascism, eugenics, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy. While there have been notable works on world’s fairs by Robert Rydell, Erik Larsen, Erik Mattie, and others, they only capture a fragment of the whole mosaic of these shows—a mosaic that makes the glitziest Las Vegas spectacle look like an Amish barn-raising. This amusing book covers, for example, the World’s Fair that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); a model of the Liberty Bell made of Oranges (1893); one of Thomas Edison’s lesser-known inventions, the prefabricated concrete home (1907); and the Bayer Company’s experiment with selling heroin. More memorable and culturally iconic debuts discussed here include electricity, radios, the Volkswagen and the Corvette, television, the X-ray machine, air conditioning, and even nylon stockings. Dozens of short, illustrated chapters take the reader through over 150 years of world and trade fairs, from the vibrators displayed by sexual health advocates at the 1900 World’s Fair to the first true IMAX film at Expo ’70 in Japan.

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma-formerly of VICE and The New York Times-shows us the future in haiku. What awaits us is not the future we had hoped for or what we were promised, but the terrible consequences of we've done to ourselves. Managing to be both a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, New York-based author Kareem Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. Elegant but caustically humorous, even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past. Paired with Jean-Marc Côté's 19th-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.

It wasn't very long after the first commercially viable automobiles came on the scene that ambitious engineers began to dream of vehicles that could travel not only on land but also in the air, or by water. For a century, talented designers have created unique dual purpose vehicles for land, water and air (in various pairings) for both civil and military applications. Sometimes converted from standard vehicles, sometimes beginning as clean-sheet designs, these machines have met the engineering and economic challenges of dual-mode travel with varying degrees of success. This book describes a fascinating array of these vehicles from the United States and abroad, including flying automobiles, roadable aircraft, amphibious vehicles, hovercraft, road-rail trains, and triphibious inventions.

Flying cars—as a new type of vehicle for urban air mobility (UAM)—have become an important development trend for the transborder integration of automotive and aeronautical technologies and industries. This article introduces the 100-year history of flying cars, examines the current research status for UAM air buses and air taxis, and discusses the future development trend of intelligent transportation and air-to-land amphibious vehicles. Unsettled Topics Concerning Flying Cars for Urban Air Mobility identifies the major bottlenecks and impediments confronting the development of flying cars, such as high power density electric propulsion, high lift-to-drag ratio and lightweight body structures, and low-altitude intelligent flight. Furthermore, it proposes three phased goals and visions for the development of flying cars in China, suggesting the development of a flying vehicle technology innovation system that integrates automotive and aeronautic industries. Click here to access the full SAE EDGETM Research Report portfolio. https://doi.org/10.4271/EPR2021011

There is something incredible coming to this generation! Drivers, welcome to the next generation of cars - Flying Cars! Flying Cars? Seriously? You’ve got to be joking, right? We only see that in the movies. Well not so people. There is an actual real life flying car – and it is for sale. What, Where, When, How? These are some questions you might want to ask. This guide will give you a comprehensive overview of the new Flying Car. Perhaps you might decide to give it a try after you have read the guide. THE FLYING CAR The new flying car is a modern, sophisticated real flying (as in like an aero plane) design of the cars that we are used to. One fundamental difference is that it has wings, plus – a ton of other cool features that we will later talk about in this guide. Early developments To get you better acquainted with the origins and early developments of flying cars, let us take a cursory consider the past.

"As human population continues to increase here on earth, congested streets and highways will abound at a rate well beyond our current plans for solution. Something is drastically needed to relax traffic congestion. An Aircar that con be housed in your garage; can takeoff "quietly" from in front of your house without a runway; and take you to work and back every day is conceptualized herein. A design specification for an Aircar is developed herein by first identifying the impracticalities of everyone having an Aircar for everyday use and then sets forth the technological means for overcoming each of the identified impracticalities. An Aircar design concept is presented based on a design specification. The one great importance of this book is that it identifies large number of applications currently under development, many of which have not been oriented toward any specific application.. Such technologies include nanotube materials, electrogravity propulsion, Lithium Air batteries, "free energy" electrical generators, plasma actuators for boundary layer flow control and noise reduction and electronic guidance and safety control. Thus, the development of the Aircar will bring to the entire aeronautical industry the full development of such relatively "far out" technologies."

Gives readers a close-up look at flying cars. With colorful spreads featuring fun facts, sidebars, labeled diagrams, and a "How It Works" feature, the book provides an engaging overview of this amazing aircraft.