Resembling a whale out of water, here you see the Dymaxion, a three-wheeled vehicle being manufactured at Bridgeport, Conn., as "the car of the future." The invention of Buckminster Fuller, the super-streamlined model has two front wheels set midway in the ovaloid body and one rear wheel, set in the tail, which does the steering, rudder fashion. It uses little gasoline, but can travel 125 miles an hour.
The May 6, 1934 News and Tribune (Jefferson City, MO) ran the photograph above of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion "Car of the Future." The advertisement below, which ran in the April 23, 1934 New Castle News (New Castle, PA) used an image of the streamlined Dymaxion to help sell motor fuel.
See also:
Gyroscopic Rocket Car (1945)
Buckminster Fuller Screenprints (1981)
Fuller's Traveling Cartridge (circa 1960s)
The Most Well-Documented Lives in History
Sea City 2000 (1979)
GM's Three-Wheeled Runabout (1966)
Automobiles of the Future (1966)
GM Car of the Future (1962)
Sports Car of Tomorrow (1966)
7 comments:
That's odd, raindrops are not shaped like that.
http://weather.about.com/od/cloudsandprecipitation/a/rainburgers.htm
The car in the Sunoco ad doesn't look like the Dymaxion.
The Dymaxion car in the ad is in the upper right.
The car in the ad is similar to, but not exactly, the Dymaxion. The car in the ad has a more streamlined tail. You can better see it in the pale side-view overlay over the old-style car.
I would tip on the Tatra T-87, if it wasn't the case that the T-87 emerged three years after publication of this ad... strange. (For a better view: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/highlights_25.html)
I'll confess I didn't even notice the Dymaxion-like shape within the raindrop; I thought the obviously-different car at the bottom of the ad was being compared to the Dymaxion. The car within the raindrop does look somewhat stylized, however, particularly the tail.
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