Shock of the old: 11 transport fantasies that never got off the ground – from jetpacks to swan-powered paragliders
From Leonardo da Vinci to the engineers of Bell Aerosystems, some of our finest minds have devoted themselves to finding a better form of travel. Still, anyone can have an off day …
T here’s an innocent optimism to transport visionaries. They really thought they could change the world! They absolutely couldn’t! But all respect to them for trying: someone got lucky with the wheel once, didn’t they?
Being a transport visionary must have been more interesting back before technological progress and grotesque wealth allowed billionaires to “disrupt” the boring A-to-B-ness of conventional travel and blast a car into space, just because. Imagine conceiving of human flight back when your only model was birds and some gossip about a guy called Icarus. Or looking at a horse and thinking: “Hmmm, that’s fast, muscular and terrifying; I wonder if I could compel it to take me somewhere, somehow?”
A quick timeline: the first transport other than walking was probably rafts, around 20,000BC. We don’t know when and where exactly wheels appeared first – probably in several places simultaneously – but they were certainly around by the copper age (3,500–2,300BC), when horses were also domesticated (respect to whoever managed that). Most progress after that came in the shape of, erm, slightly better boats until someone invented the funicular railway, drawn by a horse, in late-15th-century Austria. The 17th century brought the first submarine, and the 18th century brought the idea (if not the reality) of a hovercraft at the start, and by the end had given birth to the hot air balloon and steam engine. Things went even wilder in the 19th and 20th centuries, from blimps to hydrofoils, though we still don’t have the jetpacks of our dreams.
