Cutaways from the 1940s (1940 to 1949).
A cutaway within a cutaway. Drawn by Stewart Rouse, this illustrates a generic WWII fighter plane peeled back to show the pilot within. Then the pilot’s gravity suit itself is peeled back to reveal some of its inner workings.
Bladders within the suit were inflated with air from the craft, to minimize the chance of pilot blackouts during hard turns.
Source: Popular Science January 1945
In 1940, it was asked if we might be driving a car like this in only two years.
The novel cutaway turned the notion of how to design a car on its head: streamlined to look like “a giant aerial bomb on wheels,” with the engine in back, driver in the center, and rear passengers resting on upholstered seats in a spacious area as comfortable “as a small living room.”
Source: Popular Science June 1940
A gorgeous picture of a Quonset hut from 1946, touted by Popular Science as a possible “stop gap” to the immediate post World War II housing shortage.
I’ve called it a Quonset hut/house because it clearly does not resemble its earlier incarnation: Army barracks. In fact, the vets were said to be moving back to their old barracks “and loving it.”
Clusters of these 20 x 48 foot huts was sometimes called Homoja Villages, a compound name for Admirals Horne, Moreell, and Jacobs.
Admiral Ben Moreell (1892-1978) is known as the the Father of the Navy’s Seabees, and himself was known as “Master Bee.”
Source: Popular Science March 1946
Famed Palomar Observatory, just outside of San Diego, CA, had not yet been finished at the time this cutaway drawing was published.
The drawing shows the observatory’s massive 200-inch mirror that, at that moment, was being finished at optical labs at Cal Tech, Pasadena, CA. The disk of glass was 17 feet in diameter, and waste glass produced during the grinding weighed 2 tons.
Source: Popular Mechanics March 1947
I’m not certain when this Rolf Klep cutaway was produced, but the magazine text mentions that V-E Day was upcoming, so I’ll put it at 1945.
This 160 ton aircraft was expected to be able to take 200 passengers from New York to London in 9 hours.
Consolidated ventured that it would build about 15 Vultee Clippers for PanAm immediately following the War.
