A pavilion built to promote the natural-gas industry — it was called “The Festival of Gas,” delighting every wiseass kid at the Fair — incorporated a kitchen whose “dramatically new Gas appliances automatically emerge from bare walls, floors, ceilings as they are needed by the housewife, and disappear when no longer in use.”
Although Skype and FaceTime are recent inventions, the idea of video calling dates back to the '60s. In 1964, Bell Labs introduced the Picturephone, which allowed callers to see the person they were speaking to on the phone via video screens. Fairgoers had the chance to step into individual booths and video chat with people across the country at Disneyland.
Also at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, General Motors showcased an underwater hotel as part of the company's Futurama ride, which took fairgoers through a model of the possible future.
GM envisioned the sea as an alternative for land-crowded people. The display, according to the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair guide, also included "aqua-scooters" for travel.
"In an underwater scene, drills tap the ocean floor for oil, minerals are hauled away by submarine train, and vacationers relax in a suboceanic resort and, equipped with oxygen, ride about outside on 'aqua-scooters,'" the guide said.
"No one made more predictions for the future than General Motors, and no one got so many of them wrong," writes Bill Cotter and Bill Young in their book, "The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair: Creation and Legacy."
One of those predictions was the computerized highway, a roadway that could automatically space cars at safe distances to reduce traffic jams and vehicle accidents. The idea debuted at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair.
Elektro was one of the world’s first celebrity robots. With electrical controls that were remarkably advanced for the time, he drew huge crowds at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
This exhibit and ride at the 1964 World's Fair featured an underwater resort and an underground Antarctic weather station.
Bell Telephone’s Picturephone went on display at the 1964 World’s Fair in special booths in Grand Central Station.
Another GE offering: a city with no gas or steam lines, where everything ran on electric power, even the heat. A few places were actually built like this, and starting in the 1970s, when electricity costs went up, winter suddenly got very expensive.
General Motors showed a machine that would plow through the South American jungle, “sawing off the age-old trees at their base,” grading and leveling the ground, and laying down a ribbon of asphalt behind itself, creating a multi-lane superhighway. Terrifyingly.
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