NEW YORK (UPI) - It is true that more melodic pop music was produced in the 1930s than in any other decade in this century, yet no era or generation can claim a monopoly on good sound.
And it may be that the pop musicologists of the 1990s may report to their generations that some elegant tunes were composed in the 1960s.
"Spanish Eyes," "Love Is Blue," and perhaps a show tune such as "Cabaret" have a good chance of being in some group's catalogue of popular standards at the turn of the next century.
Both "Spanish Eyes" and "Love is Blue" are among the 11 selections in an outstanding LP entitled "Softly" by The Sandpipers (A&M SP4147). These melodic and nostalgic numbers are handled magnificently by The Sandpipers, who have appeal to all ages.
But the feature song is "Quando M'Innamoro," which also has a foot in the musical door of the future. And the opening number, "Softly," is restful musical medicine.
Birmingham, Eng., Nov. 9. - The world will be a place of mechanical men in 1950, according to the Institute of Industrial Welfare. Skill will have vanished from industry then, it was predicted, and men will be slaves of machines, working ceaselessly in the cause of mass production. The institute is trying to develop "leisure skill" in place of mechanical skill.
Today we have many different gadgets in our homes. They make housework and gardening easier. In [the] future we may have robot servants to do all the jobs in the home.
In charge of tomorrow's servants will be a robot brain. It will run the house. It will control other machines electronically. The brain will work vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, washing machines, food mixers, automatic cookers and other gadgets.
We will be able to give the brain its orders, telling it what jobs to do and when to do them. If we forget to mow the lawn, the robot brain will remind us. Then we can tell the robot to get on with the job.
There may be walking robots to do the dusting, and to lay and clear the table. The robots in the picture are real. One is called Quasar. Quasar can vacuum carpets, mow lawns, carry trays of food, and even take the dog for a walk! At the door is another robot, called the Maid Without Tears.
One day people may not go out to work at all. They will work from home, using television and robots. The robot brain will suggest meals for the day. It will order our shopping, finding out from other robots in the local shops where the best buys are. The goods will be packed and delivered to our home by robots.
"The Look of Today, Tomorrow!" was Matterhorn Motors' promotional theme for 1956, and semanticists, at least those with both the time and inclination, still bicker over its precise meaning: a promise, or an IOU?
Opening night of Matterhorn Motors' Futurific Tomorrowrama Cavalcade of Chrome, Detroit, October 1954. Public hysteria topped Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds before Matterhorn announced that none of the dream cars on display would be produced for sale.
Bulgemobile Corp. decided to give the busy Fifties executive the break he needed with its premier dream car for the '58 season. Enter the fabulous Bossmobile, where the high-salaried corporate big shot could sit back, digest his three-martini lunch, and dictate memos or gab to his golf pro on the portable Electrofone or just uncap the Johnny Walker in the lower right-hand desk drawer for a bracing nip or three before the Bossmobile deposited him at his split-level suburban home in time for cocktail hour.
How fast will man run the mile in the year 2000?
The answer, according to Oxford University physiologist B.B. Lloyd, is three minutes, 41 seconds - more than 12 seconds faster than French athlete Michel Jazy's current world mark of 03.53.6.
Lloyd, addressing the annual convention of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, said the trends in record breaking of the past 50 years were likely to continue for the next 50.
Records keep getting broken, he said, because athletes keep getting "greater hearted" - their muscles get more oxygen from the blood pumped to them by the heart.
Thus, he thought the reason for improvement lay not so much in individual skill as in more intensive selection and training, particularly during the final stages of growth.
These were his forecasts for other world marks at the end of the century.
100 yards: 8.6 seconds, now 9.1.
440 yards: 42.4 seconds, now 44.9.
10,000 meters: 26:08.4, now 27:39.4
Marathon: two hours, two minutes, now two hours, 12 minutes. [paleo-future editor's note: Khalid Khannouchi of Morocco held the record in the year 2000 with two hours, five minutes and forty-two seconds.]
Lloyd said the ability of a runner to use oxygen had increased about eight per cent since 1930.
He added:
'There seems no reason why a similar rate of increase should not be seen for the next 50 years, particularly as the maximum capacity to use oxygen in cross country skiers has already been shown as six per cent larger than that of record breaking miler John Landy.
And he forecast that women may overtake men in sprint events. Women, he said, can use their original stores of energy faster than men.
To provide safety in case of a malfunction of the reusable upper stage - von Braun's 1950s shuttle concept - crew and passengers press buttons on their chair arms. Contour seats straighten automatically and enclosures snap shut forming sealed escape capsules. To abandon ship, the crew and passengers push another button and the capsules, guided by rails, are ejected by explosive powder charges. The arrangement is seen in cross-section.
After ejection, the capsules' descent is controlled by four-foot steel mesh parachutes. At about 150 above the ground or water, a proximity fuse sets off a small rocket that further slows the rate of fall.
Today's forests simply grow. Tomorrow, this process may be speeded and regulated - as to size, quality and even color, thanks to intensive research work now under way.
The U.S. Forest Service has already developed pine trees that mature twice as fast as today's ponderosa. Rayonier, Inc., is injecting radioactive carbon 14 into trunks to affect cellulose growth. Weyerhaeuser Co. has created new ways to avoid insect damage. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports a treatment that will pre-color lumber while the trees are still growing; thus painting of wood may one day become a thing of the past.
The Honorable Edmund G. Brown
Governor, State of California
I have been asked by those responsible for placing this "space" capsule to write down my guesses about the state of man's space efforts one hundred years from this date when, hopefully, this capsule will be opened.
Most of my life has been spent as a politician. Politicians generally know very little about rockets, satellites and the other trappings of outer space.
It is their task to be concerned about inner space, the still undiscovered space of the mind and the spirit, and about whether the institutions of men on this planet create for the men they are supposed to serve the atmosphere, the psychological spaciousness, in which they can grow to fulfill their human potential.
This is the "space" about which I am concerned in 1963 as I write this statement. Even here, on ground that is much more familiar to me than is outer space, I have few predictions, but many hopes, about life on earth one hundred years from now.
My chief hope is that by the time men will have truly grasped the overriding necessity of freedom as a condition of man's continued existence: freedom from the necessity to hate as well as freedom from oppression of the mind, the spirit and the body.
I hope too that, having grasped this imperative, man, one hundred years from 1963, will have transformed his institutions into guarantors of that freedom.
I doubt the creators of "The Jetsons" ever imagined how they'd influence kids growing up in the 1970s. The last episode of the original "Jetsons" aired in the spring of 1963, but its real heyday came in syndication, with the show playing on what seemed like continuous loop in the late 1970s. Amazingly, there were only 24 "Jetsons" episodes --- it's a bit frightening to imagine how many times I must have seen each one.
And I'm not alone. Rolling Stone just released another anniversary issue, this one interviewing 25 big names about the future of the music industry, global warming, politics and the like. Turns out a fair number of Rolling Stone's famous interviewees spent their childhoods the same way I did: watching George and Jane and Judy and Elroy.
Kanye West and Bruce Springsteen would like their flying cars already. The future was "The Jetsons," George Clooney recalls -- it "meant getting into a silver costume with a ring around your neck and riding around in floating cars. It was antiseptic and perfect." Chris Rock also grew up expecting airborne cars and moving sidewalks. Mr. Clooney finds it "funny that none of it really came around," but Mr. Rock notes that flying cars aside, "The Jetsons pretty much came true. My kid even has a mechanical dog that does flips." (Who's right? I'll get to that.)
Astronauts will need protection from dangerous radiation, temperature extremes, lack of oxygen, unusual conditions of gravity and other space barriers. Special suits to do that job are now being developed.
Air conditioning is a must. Westinghouse is now creating an individual "package" which maintains steady temperature and has a blower to circulate air. Other companies are devising roomy space coveralls with built-in ray protection and oxygen systems. One protective measure that might be included: Metallic pads on the suits - so that disabled "drifters," separated from their mother ship, can be brought back to safety with a large magnet.
My opinion is that we're going to have to readjust our old, Puritan perhaps, concepts of what a person should do with his life. We used to believe that work was ennobling, that a man who devoted himself to hard work was in some way virtuous. Now, it seems to me, that what is required is a different attitude toward what a man should do with his life. Because there's not going to be all the jobs that used to be around.
Community center planners are getting ready to meet tomorrow's challenges. For proof, look at "Boytopia," the concept of the Boys' Clubs of America for the age of automation and space travel.
Such centers would teach youngsters the mechanics of space travel, solar energy and other new phases of science - just as today they are taught about auto engines, television and radio, electricity and wood-working. There would be special facilities for the handicapped, too, so that all the upcoming generation might be better fitted for the strenuous age of interstellar travel.
Zero-gravity football is a great sport, but it can only be played in a space colony or a space station, where there are zones in which everything is weightless. The players zoom through the air, powered by small motors in their backpacks. Laser lines mark out the field.
Lee Klingensmith (left), son of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Klingensmith of New Salem Road, and Joseph Lucas (right), son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lucas of New Salem, look at the new videophone on display at the Fayette County Fair.
The exhibit is sponsored by Bell Telephone and is entitled "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow". It shows the progress made in communications since the phone was first discovered.
The machine age is about to take command of the world's largest industry - the $23,000,000,000-a-year restaurant business. Hungry patrons will push various buttons representing items on the menu, their orders will be transmitted electrically to kitchen robots which will prepare their food, deliver it, collect the bills, and carry off the dishes.
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