Looking back at looking ahead

[xoxoxoBruce]

Mechanix Illustrated has always had articles that would take cutting edge technology and weave it into confident predictions..... I'm still waiting for my flying car.
In February of 1943, with WWII still going full tilt, they published an article called, "How Your Daily Life Will Be Changed After the War". I'll break it up in three parts with the medical stuff in "Health", the food stuff in "Food and Drink" and the clothing stuff here.

LET’S dress you from skin to topcoat, to dramatize the coming clothing revolution. You break out your socks, underwear and shirt from factory-fresh packages. When you undress tonight you’ll toss them aside like disposable tissues. The laundry man is practically out of business, for it’s cheaper to have a standing order of new garments delivered every week or two than to have the old ones washed and ironed.

As you slip into your underwear and shirt you marvel at their form-fitting comfort. They ought to be comfortable, for they are moulded to the contours of the body and there is not a single seam, ridge, button or buttonhole. No wonder your Shirts are throwaway-cheap: there’s no hand labor of cutting to patterns, assembling, sewing, buttonholing. Rolls of fabric are fed into one end of a machine like a newspaper press, to emerge on a delivery belt at the other end at the rate of several hundred an hour.

Your shoes are muddy, but a damp rag removes every bit of dirt and leaves a perfect polish. The material isn’t leather but a flexible, semi-porous plastic. You open the closet door and wonder which of the half-dozen suits hanging there you will wear today. These suits aren’t as cheap as your shirts; so you don’t throw them away, but you can have four or five of them for what you used to pay for one worsted suit. The seams are fused, or “soldered” together, eliminating costly sewing. You choose a “wool” suit that isn’t wool and notice an egg spot on the vest. Never mind dry cleaning—soap and water will remove dirt and grease spots, for the fabric is waterproofed by an invisible plastic that leaves it soft and cushiony. Not even a violent rainstorm can remove the crease from your trousers.

It is cold outdoors—snowing, in fact—so as you slip into your topcoat you place a gadget that looks like a fountain pen in an inconspicuous pocket. It is a tiny battery that connects with flexible wires woven into the coat, heating it electrically. Even if you don’t care to turn on the juice your lightweight topcoat is still extremely warm, for it is insulated like the wall of a house filled with rock wool. Strings of cellophane, swollen with tiny beads no larger than a pinhead, are woven under the lining. Each bead is inflated with a bubble of air that prevents your body heat from escaping.

Fantastic? Every one of these advances is on the way! Hundreds of Flying Fortress pilots are wearing electrically heated flying suits right now. The du Pont Company has perfected a process for stamping one-piece seamless gloves out of nylon. The air bubbles in cellophane are being manufactured by the same company for use in military jackets and life rafts. The Germans are producing clothing with fused seams. Several new plastics can be incorporated into textiles for waterproofing, and at least one of them— Goodrich’s Koroseal—can be woven into women’s sheer hose to make stockings which will never run.

Next to food and shelter, clothing is the most elemental need of man, yet until very recently we were still in the caveman era of tailoring. Primitive man took tiger or sheepskins and sewed them together with rawhide to keep him warm. We have improved the caveman’s technique, but basically we have remained dependent upon the same natural materials used for ages: leather, wool, silk, cotton.

These “natural” fibers now are fighting for their lives, and for many of them it is a losing battle. The silkworm has been all but sentenced to extinction, along with its Japanese masters. Never again will the Nipponese silk trade resume its former importance, for du Pont and Celanese have produced synthetic silks all but indistinguishable from the natural product.

Nylon is a fiber which does not exist in nature, except as atoms in coal, air and water or substitute materials. Beautiful textiles are being manufactured from such unlikely sources as sour milk, tree bark, beans and glass.

Rayon, in a sense, is a natural rather than a manufactured fiber since its basic raw material, is cellulose, obtained from such plant products as cotton. As everyone knows, it makes beautiful hose for women, as well as garments of greater intimacy, but new processing methods promise even wider usage. This spring, for instance, you will be able to buy a man’s suit that looks exactly like fine quality worsted but which is actually a new spun rayon manufactured by the Celanese Corporation.

Hundreds of stores are selling women’s coats made out of “wool” that never saw a sheep. The fiber, warm as fur and soft as silk, carries the trade name Aralac. It is made from casein, the protein of milk, by the National Dairy Products Company of Taftville, Connecticut.

These proteins are worth looking into. You are personally full of them. Your hair, skin, nails, soft tissues and many vital secretions are largely protein. Wool is a protein too, produced by the sheep. All proteins are made up of smaller building blocks known as amino acids, of which 23 are known, but the kinds and proportions of amino acids vary with each protein. If you get your amino acids from the protein of milk, casein, and assemble them as they exist in wool, then you have produced wool from milk and that, in essence, is what the makers of Aralac have done—at half the cost of wool.
Soy beans, egg white, meats and fish and many plants contain proteins of varying composition and quantity. Any of these, theoretically, can yield the building blocks to make wool or similar fibers. Henry Ford has been making upholstery fabrics from soy beans and has a suit made of the same material.

Your wife’s fur coat may some day originate not in seals, muskrats, skunks and rabbits, but in a hopper containing purified amino acids mixed in just the right proportions to simulate those furs. When that day comes, mink and ermine and silver fox will be cheaper than rabbit and trappers will be technologically unemployed.

Probably you will never wear glass underwear, if only because it tends to be inelastic, but curtains, draperies, aprons and the like are another matter. Soft and flexible new glass fibers can be twisted into yarn and woven into beautiful fabrics that are mothproof and fireproof. They can be cleaned by sprinkling with a hose. Grease, stains and fingerprints can be washed off easily with soap and water, a great advantage -for furniture upholstery and slip covers, especially, as glass textiles are nearly wearproof and colors penetrating through the fibers never fade.

As you can see, there's a grain of salt and rational reasons they made some predictions. But except for synthetics, they were pretty much off the mark.
It does give an insight into the times and the hope for a better future.

[milkfish]

They also missed edible underwear. Seems so obvious now.

[Larry]

"Next to food and shelter, clothing is the most elemental need of man"

Swiftly sidestepping any mention of sex.

[Sundae]

C'mon Bruce - where's the next section?
I'm looking forward to reading how in the year 2000 no-one will be hungry, malnourished or overweight because we'll all live on perfectly balanced meals delivered in capsule form....

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'll break it up in three parts with the medical stuff in "Health", the food stuff in "Food and Drink" and the clothing stuff here.

[Sundae]

[xoxoxoBruce]

I understand, you were distracted by the hunger pangs.