May 16, 2006
German Science Readers II
For the historically-minded, the great joy of the pre-1940 German science reader is the vintage science. Immunization, electrification, city planning, and radio compete with hard physics and chemistry for the editor's favor. If you're lucky, you get illustrations like this:
Hey, is that Ferngeschossbahn really a propeller-driven monorail?
Why, yes it is.
That rocks.
No, but seriously, I had a book like this as a child. It claimed to be a look at what the world would be like in the near future, and included cities enclosed in transparent spheres floating along through the stratosphere as the sun went down. That was one of my favorite books for a long time. It never occurred to me to wonder why anyone would go through all the trouble to live inside a floating transparent sphere.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 21, 2006 10:10 PM