Have you seen Disney's ideas from 70 years ago for getting around in the future?

[rachel776]

Some of these they got exactly right, some they were way off. They sort of predicted the internet and smart phones, but not in the form we have them now.

Very interesting.

[abc3643]

The sign which points to which road for which destination does exist - but it's not electronic and didn't need to be... and shouldn't be which brings me to my main point.

A lot of these visions of the future are idealistic and definitely serve as motivation for things. But, from an engineering and economic perspective, their bad - they are often unreliable and/or expensive and/or ill-thought-out for real world cases. In 1958, society was not that cautious to think about things like reliability or safety and, back then, energy was cheap (the Energy Crisis - which never went away - began in October 1973).

For instance, let's take a look at that electronic sign point to which lane for which city... Here's what's wrong:

• How is the sign supposed to function if there is a blackout? To solve that problem, suppose the sign had it's own power source (solar?). Now suppose there's an electrical problem and the sign goes out.
• The sign cycles between indicating lanes. It is conceivable that a driver drives too fast compared to the cycling speed to notice which lane to take. That is especially so in inclement weather.
• The sign requires power and thus costs money to operate.
• The sign requires hundreds of lights, each of which will likely be needed to be replaced at some point. Replacing the lights might adversely affect traffic flow if the sign is constructed (like shown) that repairs would have to be done with a repair truck in the road.
• Sign maintenance workers have to be paid.

Now, compare that to comparable signs from today.

These signs accomplish the same objective: alerting the driver of the appropriate lane to take to go to which city.

• Now, these signs themselves require no power.
• They may require changing of flood lights that shine light upon the signs, but not hundreds of lights.
• There's a trellis for workers to work from.
• The white reflective paint helps readability from oncoming headlights in the event of lighting outages.
• The lane indications are 24/7/365 - no cycling of indications.

The roadway heaters mentioned in the video are another example. I lived in a snowy area and thought of the same thing, but it's not economical because it assumes 100% reliability (meaning nothing fails) and requires a shitload of energy (again, in 1958, no one was concerned about energy sources or economics). So, it's a nice to have, but prohibitively expensive to create and operate. But, can you imagine the millions of road-miles there are in the USA and the amount of money it would take to redo all these roads to have heaters put in them? The people who made this video thought of these neat ideas just like I did, but they didn't think about the realities of costs of implementation, operation, and maintenance.

Some things that are important to note:

In 1962, just before I was born, Bell Labs invented "Fault Tree Analysis" (FTA) which was an important resource toward logically thinking about how things can fail. This was after this video was created. Once Boeing started using FTA in 1966 that went a long way toward establishing "reliability engineering" as a discipline which really began to take off in the 1970s.

GPS was a long way away in 1958. In principle, if all cars were self-driving, there'd be no need for signs and cars could navigate on their own. We are beginning to get there but the way it is being done is a bit dangerous. I am not optimistic.

[abc3643]

Here is the whole video. At almost an hour long, it was apparently an episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney", an anthology series that had that title from 1969 to 1979. (*)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7icGIHPOviQ

(*) Disney has had an anthology series on TV for over 70s years.
It originally began in 1954 on ABC as "Walt Disney's Disneyland". (Disneyland opened in 1955.)
In 1958, it was renamed "Walt Disney Presents" and ran on ABC until 1961.
In 1961, it was moved to NBC which broadcast in color. The show was then given the name "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" which it had until 1969.
In 1969, it was renamed as "The Wonderful World of Disney" and that lasted until 1979.

"The Wonderful World of Disney" is the name that is used in the video above, so this tells me this video is from a broadcast between 1969 and 1979 although I genuinely believe the internal Magic Highways video is from 1958; it looks it.

You can see the whole history of this anthology series name here:
disney.fandom.com/.../The_Wonderful_World_of_Disney

This video is a collection of all the openings of that show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KZFFycWAIY

When I was a kid, I believe "The Wonderful World of Disney" was on NBC on Sunday nights from 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM (ET) just after "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM (ET). That's what I usually watched until I became a teen and switched to "60 Minutes" on CBS. However, in the 1950s, the Disney show was on ABC but moved to NBC around 1961 because NBC would broadcast in color which is what Walt Disney wanted. NBC used to say "In Living Color" to promote that its shows were in color; not common in TV before 1966. This is why NBC uses a peacock as a logo; a peacock is famous for its colorful tail. For example, from 1967:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIxGyrQz_e8

[rachel776]

thank u

your last video doesn't show, it says "Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner" i think YouTube is limiting a lot of things now

[abc3643]

I found it. The episode was originally broadcast on ABC's "Walt Disney's Disneyland" on Wednesday 14 MAY 1958, Season 4, Episode 26.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0908287/?ref_=ttep_ep_26

[abc3643]

The owner wants you to watch on YouTube, so go to this URL which you will need to paste together. However, inside the video itself as it appears here, there should be a "Watch on YouTube" link, so you would click on that..

htt
ps://ww
w. you
tube. com/wa
tch? v=HI
xGyrQz_e8

[rachel776]

yes they're making it very complicated, they want the views and likes and all that...

[abc3643]

@rachel776, how did you become aware of this video from 1958? Old episodes of "The Wonderful World of Disney" (and whatever other names it had in over 70 years) aren't things we come by by accident. Especially when these episodes are long before we are born. (I was born in January 1963 and I know you are young enough to be my granddaughter.)

[abc3643]

(... if 21 is your real age... I suspect you are older.)

[Likes2drive]

That was an interesting video, but I think it would be more like in 1000 years before they could do all that once they figure out how to pay for all that and we do have the technology to make it happen but definitely not the money or the cooperation of the rest of the world. The only thing we really do have is the rear facing camera with video

[rachel776]

well they also showed versions of a lot of things we have now, Facetime, GPS, digital road signs, heated driveways and sidewalks, night vision, Sigalerts, changing speed limits, accident vehicles removed from the road, prefab bridges which they use now after earthquakes, self-driving cars, elevator parking garages, moving walkways like at the airport, computerized trucking and distribution, and the Chunnel

i don't think the light up roads would do much good and i don't think we need to drive up cliffs as much as they thought, and i live around a lot of cliffs

[Likes2drive]

I knew about heated driveways, but you’ll never see heated highways, can imagine the cost? The tunnels that they show were actually transparent underwater tubes. I imagine people would be claustrophobic traveling through that way, and the amount of breakdowns that are very common when things are computer controlled with no back up plan would be an issue and the automatic cars are still not reliable And dangerous actually, most of the stuff wouldn’t be able to be done because of the cost out weighing the price of the cost of doing business

[Paige90]

That was how they thought this generation would be but it isn't practical.

[AgentG111]

Yeah growing up they were fun to watch and read and see history books in school at the world's fair.

[Lliam]

Wow. I've never seen that film before.
The ideas sure depended on unlimited prosperity. The 1950s sure were optimistic. LOL
It reminds me of the kind of future predicted by The Jetsons, or by the magazine Popular Mechanics.

[molonski2]

I reckon. if you view " The Jetsons " they got heeps correct but didn't imagine the. microchip
.
I could not view your example.

[Xawyx-2]

I see, very interesting, thanks for the video.

[Californiagirl5]

I thought we have flying cars.