In 1956, GM showed us what the future of traveling would be -in the far off year of 1976! Jet-powered cars would follow a magnetic strip to their destination on single-lane superhighways, all going about 30 miles an hour, guided by men in control towers, while the family sang songs. For some reason, they thought that a superhighway could have a "scenic route." The guy in the tower would even find them a motel room where you could get pre-digested food cooked by infrared! Yum!
Instead, by 1976, we had interstate highways in most places, but the speed limit was 55 mph, way below what the highways were designed for. After the oil embargo, gas was up to 60 cents a gallon! Then in 1981, President Reagan fired all the guys in the control towers. Now 67 years after this film was produced, we are starting to get self-driving cars, but they are controlled by computers and have yet to learn not to hit things. Route mapping by GPS is routine, but an ice cream freezer in the glove box was never something we were willing to pay for. (via reddit)
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
Key to the Future
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3 comments:
Re: the ice cream freezer glovebox. I remember reading an article in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science (or maybe even Boys' Life) in the 1960s about cooking food on your exhaust manifold while you drove the car somewhere. A baked potato in aluminum foil, or a meat pie, or roast beef. I just tried to find that particular article and can't, but-- look up simply /cooking food on the engine/ and there's a lot of material available.
In my Prius, not even a newish one, the motor is shoved in there with a shoehorn and you can't even see the exhaust manifold. But I'm sure there are some cars or trucks where you could still do that.
Wait-- no. After thieves stole my catalytic converter I had the shop install a shield to make it take ten minutes for them to steal it again instead of one minute, so they probably won't. That shield is a long shelf under the exhaust line. If you're small enough to get under there without jacking the car up, you could bake a line down the center of a sheet cake or make toast.
I wrote a feature article on that about 20 years ago, but it's been lost to time (and probably link rot). But there are two well-known cookbooks on the subject: Manifold Destiny and Carbeque.
I was in the Army at Fort Hood in the 70's- Used to drive from Texas back to Iowa for long weekends. We used to put C-Rations (cans) on the engine manifold- drive for 20-30 minutes, stop and grab the can, open and eat on the fly!
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