Everyman’s Folding Auto (1939)

The November 26 , 1939 San Antonio Light ( San Antonio , TX ) featured this prediction of the fold - up car of the future .

Even the young man of the scientific future may find trouble , one day on the route , with his sunpower machine . He gets out , tips up the cable car with one manus and looks underneath . Finding what seems to be the trouble , he unscrews a few clamps , takes out the engine , and starts off jauntily to the resort shop , as though he were only carrying an alarm clock clock .

Strong muscles ? Not at all , merely a lightweight engine .

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Next day he add up back for the engineless car , folds it up like a collapsable baby carriage , loads it on the most convenient high stop number coach or aero bus , takes it home and tucks it by in any handy closet until the engine has been repaired .

These are not Professor Harrison ’s predictions , but they are made potential by one of his , that of stronger metals .

What requires so much weight unit in automobile engines or bodies , in giant bridges , in the steel frames of buildings and a thousand other things is that much alloy must he used to make the beams or castings potent . weight unit Itself is useless . Need is only for military capability .

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“ Great strides have been made recently , ” Professor Harrison drop a line , “ in the physics of metals — the study of how atoms cohere together to shape crystal and these crystals hang together in metal retinal rod and wires . All metals are permeate by microscopical cracks and fault which greatly reduce their strength .

“ If only Ihe watch glass of which they are frame would hang to one another with the forces with which the individual corpuscle stick together ! Then a cable of blade an in thick would safely affirm four million pounds , instead of the bare 300,000 pounds which it now will held . ”

Such metals 13 time inviolable than now can mean not only lighter engine and folding , fly - weight auto organic structure , but also taller buildings , longer bridge , fast airplanes , larger ships — or deadlier simple machine guns and further - ranging sub .

Lesdilley