Futurism came to a peak in the 1930s. The world of 1930 was utterly transformed by technology from the America of a half century, even a quarter century, earlier. The Depression made a major dent in that technological optimism but the forces that worshiped technology and its sibling science fought the pervading gloom by promising that a greater, glitzier, most fantabulous future was but a few years away, accessible to all once the economy returned to boom mode as it surely world.

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Those visions of a capital F Future bombarding the average citizen through every media, in popular science magazines, pages of pictures in Sunday newspapers, newsreels, movies, art and fashion. And, symbiotically, all of these carried the word of the grand Fairs that emblemized the decade.

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Only a single major fair had been held in America since before World War 1 and that, the 1926 American Sesquicentennial in Philadelphia, was a bust. City promoters looked to Fairs to distract minds from the gloom of everyday existence by making them bigger and gaudier and louder, an escapist fantasy of a better way to live, serving the same purpose as Hollywood musicals but on a larger scale. San Diego, Cleveland, Dallas, and San Francisco served up Fairs during the 1930s, each of them overshadowed by the two gigantic Fairs that bookended the era: the 1933-4 Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition and the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, the first to use that name.

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To see the debt the two Fairs owed to technology look no further than their mottos. Chicago's was ""Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts" and New York opened with ""Dawn of a New Day" although "The World of Tomorrow" unofficially encroached on that honor. New York's most famous feature was the Futurama, a ride that soared visitors over the city of tomorrow. They each received a gift as they left, a button that read "I Have Seen the Future." Man adapts, indeed. Few people doubted that the gleaming highways and soaring buildings were anything other than destiny.

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The exhibits at the Fairs were often leadenly educational, serious as their subject matter. The dirty secret of major Fairs is that most of the money comes from the amusement parks that accompanied them, spectacles that borrowed from Coney Island and led ultimately to Disneyland and reality television.

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Rocket cars, speed and power and danger in a thrilling and often deadly mix, burst out of newspapers and newsreels in the late 1920s. German daredevils like Max Valier strapped rockets onto cars, motorcycles, and boats, sometimes breaking land speed records, sometimes breaking their bones. Spaceships and robots and other tropes of modern science fiction were minor aspects of popular culture, confined to Buck Rogers and the handful of science fiction pulp magazines. Rocket cars manifestly existed, tangible and audible in their roaring majesty. Anybody could build a true rocket car if they wanted to risk their life and if the authorities would let them test it, which bureaucrats became increasingly loathe to do. The sensible ones found that calling a streamlined vehicle a "rocket car" thrilled audiences just as much and was a heck of a lot safer. "Rocket cars" proliferated in the 1930s the way "robots" do today.

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Chicago was almost synonymous with World's Fair in America, its 1893 World's Columbian Exposition extravaganza setting records for both attendance and the number of marvels it introduced, back when that was the primary function of a world's fair. The Eiffel Tower, then the tallest man-made construction in history, had overshadowed in every way the 1889 World's Fair it was built for and Chicagoans, bent on knocking New York off its pedestal as America's foremost city, examined a thousand ideas for a topper. George Washington Ferris' giant wheel won out. Over 250 feet tall and capable of sitting more than 2,000 people at a time it made a fortune for the Fair (if not for Ferris, who sued the Fair's management for $750,000 in withheld revenues).

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The Century of Progress in the modern Fair's title supposedly referred to the progress made since the incorporation of the Town of Chicago in 1833 but everybody knew that comparisons to the 1893 Exposition were all that counted. Some gigantic ironworks had to tower over the millions of fairgoers. Heinz proposed a 1,000-foot-high pickle. The committee very politely said no and Heinz settled for a booth in the Agricultural Building, presenting "Kitchens from Many Lands." Taken more seriously was an engineer, William L. Hamilton, whose idea was audacious yet practical. The September 1932 issue of Popular Science leaked the winner to a national audience. "Rocket" cars would run between two 600 foot towers, the tallest structures west of New York.