The Experimental City

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow.

You are about to take a journey out of this world

into the world of the Future.

Forget the world around you.

Forget the people around you.

You are entering

- When I grew up, in the Minneapolis Paper,

there was the cartoon series called "Our New Age"

by Athelstan Spilhaus.

And every week it would be

on a different aspect of the future.

On Sunday morning you'd read it and you could dream.

What became important was the idea

that every invention had been perceived

as outside the realm of reality at some point in history.

And they all became real.

Two, one.

- You were going to be on the moon.

You were going to be flying cars.

This was what was supposed to happen.

And this idea of doing an Experimental City –

it must be real, it's in the newspaper.

- Really the essence of the Experimental City

is to try to build complete new controlled-size cities

with new technologies, in the open lands

of the United States. Looking toward 25 years from now.

- I think Spilhaus wanted to believe

that you could do this on a scale

which would allow results to be utilized worldwide.

Not the idea that it would scare the dickens

out of whole regions of Minnesota

and become public enemy number one.

Well, is it working right?

Doesn't seem to me that light's winking,

isn't it supposed to wink?

Yeah that's about right, isn't it?

If I put it, if I put it down like this...

- Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished colleagues,

I'm going to talk about experimental cities.

And at the outset...

- Athel and I met after he came down to

the University of Texas

to work on the accretion of an underwater city.

That grew out of his Experimental City project.

They would take, it was like a chicken wire or something

as simple as a chicken wire

and form rooms and houses and buildings.

And then they'd shoot an electric current through it.

It was almost like a coral calcification

that would form around these electrified wires

and actually build buildings.

He definitely felt it would work.

It's not like, you know

some crazy off-the-wall spaceship kind of thing.

I made, maybe the mistake one day of saying

"Athel someone has to record your life."

I just kept saying Athel somebody has to do this,

this has to be put on paper.

And finally he said, "alright, then you do it."

Chapter one.

Is it recording?

Yes.

Now what do you want me to do

just when we come to something that...

- If something stirs you up with a story

then go ahead and tell it.

Okay?

- I told you I don't look backwards.

Why are you writing it down

when the damn thing is getting it?

- I was more pleased and flattered than I can say

about being invited to introduce

Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, until I saw his biography

when I realized: how do you introduce the speaker

who has done everything?

He's a mighty intellect.

A student of our times, a futurist.

And I can assure you is a most unusual person.

He evidences a kind of Rabelaisian brilliance.

Are you offended by being called

a 20th century Da Vinci?

I don't like the "a" – "the."

I always get an answer, I'll say that.

- Dr. Spilhaus is a native of South Africa

and obtained his masters from MIT.

- Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1936, 37.

- Now that's '35. I was 24 years old.

I invented a thing called a "comfortometer."

And God did I get kidding about that –

a thing that tells you if you're comfortable or not.

You start with observation,

observation leads to understanding.

Understanding leads to prediction

and after prediction, control.

An engineer should not merely sit back

and predict the inevitable result

of carrying on present practices.

He should design the future.

- And even now scientists and planners

are shaping the lives of our children

who will live in the 21st century.

- Now if what I say seem like dreams to some of you,

I remind you that you and I have had dreams

and seen them rapidly become reality.

In fact, dreams are indeed the stuff

that practical progress is made on.

- His life became a whirlwind of activity and adventure.

Never was he still for a moment.

- It's gonna make a hell of a movie script.

Can you imagine?

I wonder who they'll have do you.

He was a showman, I mean he was

in the middle of everything there for a while.

He liked to be head of the committee.

- Dr. Spilhaus, I want to thank you, sir

for coming to Science in Action to tell us

of your committee's work in this field.

- A moment ago you said that we Americans

often seem proud of wasting so much

and I'm afraid this is very true.

Often we even seem to measure our economic success

and prosperity by the number of manufactured things

that we throw away.

This kind of thinking is dangerously close to insanity.

- Inefficiency did not suit Athel at all.

Yes that's very true.

Another way of putting it is, the way I would put it

is that waste is just a resource

that we don't yet know how to use.

- He was busy doing something at all times,

brain was being engaged. Inventing, tinkering, in control.

Sorting out the world and making it function better.

And if he couldn't, he'd get quite irascible.

- Now I have gained the impression that the future

perhaps of our entire nation might be dependent

on the way we look at this waste problem.

Well I believe that this is profoundly true, Earl,

I think we should get away from waste

and I think waste can become a serious danger.

We seem to have been sort of chicken

in the United States about our efforts

to attack this massive problem.

We know how to do things better

in the control of pollution.

But we have no opportunity to experiment.

We knew from our waste studies that there were excellent

new technologies for the reuse of waste.

But you can't introduce them into the old cities.

Who's going to float a bond issue for an entirely untried

brilliant new technology?

For without exception, our cities are hopelessly bound

by tradition, restrictive legislation

and their unplanned, unhealthy growth.

It's time to look at alternatives.

I've sounded rather pessimistic so far

and I don't want to leave this impression with you,

the picture is not all black.

I'm an incurable optimist about science

because I've read the history of it.

Sometimes if we look hard enough at a problem scientifically

we can find an answer even to seemingly impossible things.

And I thought about having a little city

and trying waste management things in that city.

We will try to build a noiseless, fumeless city

where you can take the same technology

that has caused the smoke and the grime

and the polluted rivers

and use this technology to clean it up.

Then I thought, but heavens this applies to mass transit,

it applies to most everything you do in a city.

Why aren't we able to do these things?

It's too experimental.

That was the beginning of the idea.

We must be prepared to step boldly out

and experiment with new and radical ideas

for improved urban living.

We must utilize the most advanced methods

of building construction,

the ultimate in transportation, in communications,

in waste removal, and in city management.

And the place to try them is an Experimental City.

Alright, chapter two.

When I began to study the Experimental City,

there had been lots of writing about pollution

but the issue hadn't reached any serious levels yet.

Radical ideas, however, have difficulty gaining acceptance

and what I was proposing was a completely new concept.

Fortunately I didn't have to sell the idea.

Otto Silha of the Minneapolis newspapers did it for me.

That's S-I-L-H-A, isn't it?

- Yeah, Silha was the Publisher of the Minneapolis Tribune.

I was a friend of Otto Silha's

and had worked with him in Republican politics.

He was a progressive kind of a guy

and interested in ideas that might improve things.

And in our culture at that time,

newspapers were one of the leading institutions –

not only to report the news but to influence civic activity

and bring to the attention of people