From the engineers at Honeywell in 1957 comes this prediction that, by A.D. 2000, we will have machines under our dining room floors that suck away dirty dishes, clean them, and then stack them on the shelves.
If you have any sense of what is possible in the physical world, this cutaway may offend you. An eight-inch thick concrete floor with an automatic dishwasher levitating below it? How do the dishes exactly get washed in there, then pushed up and away? Mostly, how does the machine sort and stack the dishes?
Remember the great age of home intercoms? I don’t either!
That’s because in the 1960s and 1970s, home intercoms were not found in your typical suburban house. Unless your family were “people of means,” as your Mom or Dad might have referred to your rich neighbors, you didn’t have one–sadly enough. Those neighbors with the sprawling, picture-perfect mid-century modern house with a pool and shag-covered conversation pit did have an intercom.
At the heart of it, an intercom is a house phone. It differs from a phone in that it has no handset. In many cases, the connection can be opened up without having to activate any controls. What this means is that Mom, in the kitchen, can can use the intercom to squawk “Time for dinner” to the kids in back of the house, without the kids having to pick up any bothersome handset (because they would ignore it, anyway).
Military and Industrial Roots
The term “intercom” first began appearing around World War II, but usually in a military or industrial setting–not the residential intercoms we tend to think of. Bombers had intercoms so that crew members could communicate across the length of the plane.
Teletalk billed itself as an “intercommunication system” for offices:
Intercoms in Homes, 1960s Onward
Wired and wireless intercoms began appearing in U.S. homes in the mid 1950s.
By the 1960s, real estate ads began listing intercoms as a house feature, along with pool and shag and other luxuries. This NuTone intercom from 1963 is fairly typical of a permanent, hard-wired system in that it came fully loaded multi-station functions and an AM/FM radio.
Built in Disneyland in 1957 as a joint project between Disneyland, Monsanto, and MIT, the House of the Future was constructed of 16 identical plastic shells that were fabricated off-site and then shipped to the building site for assembly. The home was meant to display technological marvels, such as the microwave oven and speaker phone, but mainly showed the many ways that plastics could be incorporated into home-building of the future. Materials included: Acrylon, melamine, rayon, vinyl (flooring), and even plywood. Each of the four wings was capable of supporting 13 tons. Besides showing off the wonders of plastic, this was an attempt to build a home of fewer but large parts rather than the current (and still current) method of building homes of many small parts.
Floor Plans
Cross Section
Dimensions: Each wing was 16 feet long and the utility core was itself a 16 foot square. Thus, total length was 48 feet.
Disneyland Monsanto House of the Future – Cross Section with Dimensions
Under Construction
Exterior: PR Materials and Tourist Images
Interior – Living Room
The living room was the swankiest area of the house, with a futuristic (and presumably non-functional TV) and both built-in and free-standing custom-made furniture that was curved to follow the curves of the house.
Interior – Family Room
The family room, like many mid-century modern homes of the time, had a family room, intended as a more casual place for family (meaning: kids) to hang out in. Since the house did not have a separate dining room area, this doubled as dining facilities.
Kitchen – Utility Core Area
The kitchen occupied the central section called the utility core and was by far the most technologically advanced room of the house with a microwave, ultrasonic dishwasher, cabinets that electrically descended from the ceiling, and not a refrigerator but a “cold zone” divided into three functional areas: cool refrigeration, frozen, and cool irradiated food.
Interior – Second, or Children’s, (Divided) Bedroom
The second bedroom could be divided into two areas with a light-weight accordion door.
Interior – Master Bedroom and Vanity Area
The master bedroom occupied an entire quarter, or wing, of the House of the Future. It had its own bathroom which, as a promotional film stated, was constructed out of just two pieces. The bathroom had its own intercom and closed circuit TV system for communicating with callers at the front door.
Bruce McCall is the patron saint of secret infrastructure. His book, Zany Afternoons, is one of my most highly valued books. For some odd reason, most of my favorite books were on sale in the bargain bin at bookstores. This one was a mere ten bucks at Barnes & Noble.
While there are too many great Bruce McCall drawings/comics to list, one of my favorite series of drawings is called “New York, Once Upon a Time”. He talks about a parallel universe of New York architecture that never was and never could have been.
There is the Ironing Board Building, instead of the very-real Flatiron Building. There is the Fifth Avenue Line Subway, 1901, which I believe has some vague connection to reality. And then of course there was the time that a portion of Central Park was turned into Jimmy Walker Metropolitan Airfield, back in 1931. Or how about Canal Street, 1934, which had a real canal in front, complete with ferry-trolleys plying the waterways. Of course, Canal Street did have to be drained in 1939 as a precaution against Nazi subs.
The Moto Ritz Towers in 1937 is one of my favorite. As McCall puts it:
Theater people had most of the top floors. They partied continuously. Coming up late at night was hell, you knew some of them were up there somewhere, on the way down. Woe betide the tenant whose driver was yellow. We had nothing but bad luck with ours. One of them–an ex-aviator, if you can imagine–would get halfway up, stop and vomit. Even when it wasn’t foggy. You often just left your car down on the street and took a taxi; those people would do anything for money. The ghoulish publicity after that first bad ice storm virtually forced the city to tear the roadway out. As a compromise there was talk at the time about guard rails. We didn’t want guard rails. The absence of guard rails, wasn’t that the whole and entire point?
