File:Everyday Science and Mechanics, November 1934 - 007.jpg

This is a strikingly accurate article, made quaint by its lack of modern terminology.

Through WWI, aircraft were in a more supplementary role, but the future benefit of flying weapons platforms was quite evident. "Navies of the Stratosphere" was the best description they could find -- because back in the day, heavily armed ships could cruise near the coast, fire heavy weapons at a great distance - hopefully beyond the range of any defenses - and lay waste to cities. Aircraft, they theorized, could fulfill the same role, but from the air. The altitudes and speeds may have seemed crazy at the time: 12 miles is almost 70,000 feet -- which is around the same operating altitude as the U2 spyplane. 1,000 mph is twice as fast as the U2, or around mach 1.5 (supersonic flight wasn't possible yet, and some still feared it as too dangerous). It would be another twenty or thirty years before a true supersonic, high-altitude bomber -- the B58 Hustler -- would actually be put into service. If we pull back to the lower end of the article's specs, going just under 12 miles and around 600mph, the style of aircraft becomes more clear: the airplane theorized here is on par with a B52 Stratofortress. They're still short the jet engines, but otherwise this article predicts the future of bomb-carrying aircraft. I'll admit, like most of the futuristic articles here, the writer takes the 'current' state of technology and extends it to (at the time) crazy levels of extremes. This one lucked out: the crazy edges of extreme, by 1930s standards, would be not only attainable, but easily exceeded by technologies that were only a few years off.

At the bottom of the page, we get the meltiest of vehicle designs -- I'd like my school bus over-easy please! For this style, we can blame Norman Bel Geddes, who designed all kinds of smooth, uncomfortably blobby vehicles that wouldn't actually be built until the modern VW Beetle saw the light of day.

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