The 21st century has arrived, and yet so many of the technologies people take for granted today look remarkably similar to visions that were sketched out on paper decades ago. That is not a coincidence.
The years between 1958 and 1963 represent what many historians consider the Golden Age of American Futurism. Bookended by the founding of NASA on one end and the final episode of The Jetsons on the other, this brief window produced some of the most audacious and imaginative techno-utopian thinking the country had ever seen.
Scientists, engineers, and dreamers alike competed to out-imagine one another, and the results were spectacular.
Nowhere was this more vividly on display than in the Sunday funnies, where a comic strip called Closer Than We Think ran from 1958 to 1963 and captured the era’s boundless appetite for what tomorrow might hold.
Jetpacks, meal pills, flying cars, robotic servants: the strip had it all, rendered in stunning detail by Arthur Radebaugh, a Detroit-based commercial artist whose reputation had been built largely on his work with the automotive industry.
Week after week, Radebaugh brought these visions to life with a visual polish that made even the most outlandish predictions feel not just plausible, but inevitable.
For an entire generation of Baby Boomers growing up in postwar America, his illustrations helped define what the future was supposed to look like, and the expectations he shaped have proven surprisingly difficult to shake.
Solar Cars
Solar Cars
Cars have come a long way in fuel efficiency over the past fifty years.
But the sun-powered sedan remains conspicuously absent, despite being promised by no less than a vice president at Chrysler. We’re still waiting on that one.
Glass Domed Houses
Glass Domed Houses
People in the 1950s and 60s had a peculiar obsession with shielding their homes from the natural world.
So peculiar, in fact, that this vision of suburban paradise involved encasing an entire neighborhood under an enormous glass dome. Rain? Wind? Not in here.
Oversized Crops
Oversized Crops
Nobody thought to explain how you’d actually eat a corn cob the size of a school bus in this 1962 comic strip.
The logistics remain unsolved to this day. On the bright side, just think about the absolutely colossal bowl of popcorn it could produce.
Warehouse Robots
Warehouse Robots
Anyone who has peeked inside a modern Amazon fulfillment center knows that the robotic warehouse is basically already here.
The only disappointment is that today’s real-life robo-helpers look considerably less charming than the ones illustrated in Closer Than We Think.
Automated Classrooms
Automated Classrooms
As Baby Boomers flooded American schools in the 1950s, educators scrambled for solutions to the overcrowding crisis.
Their computer-filled vision of the future included push-button desks designed to automate learning and keep a closer eye on students at all times.
Walking Vehicles
Walking Vehicles
These towering walking machines were envisioned as a practical way to evacuate people from cities during some unspecified catastrophe.
The comic panel never clarified what disaster had struck, but judging by the illustration, things were not going well for anyone involved.
Flying Carpet Car
Flying Carpet Car
The future was always going to be full of hovering, flying vehicles.
This particular “flying carpet car” raises one glaring question that its designers apparently never got around to answering: how exactly do you stop it? There is not a brake in sight.
Jetpack Mail Delivery
Jetpack Mail Delivery
The postal worker of tomorrow was going to soar through the skies on his very own jetpack, delivering mail with speed and style.
It’s a shame nobody in the 1950s saw electronic mail coming, or the whole concept might have been grounded a little sooner.
Highway to Russia
Highway to Russia
A road connecting the United States to Russia sounds outlandish, but the idea has been floating around longer than most people realize.
By the time this 1959 edition of Closer Than We Think imagined it, the concept was already decades old and still stubbornly unbuilt.
Space Mayflowers
Space Mayflowers
Why bother saving the Earth when you can simply pack everything up and leave?
The August 16, 1959 edition of Closer Than We Think envisioned giant Space Mayflowers ferrying bold colonists to distant planets once humanity had thoroughly finished depleting this one.
Wristwatch TV
Wristwatch TV
The debate over whether smartwatches and wearable technology are truly the Next Big Thing continues to rage on.
But one thing is certain: people have been dreaming about a television strapped to their wrist for a very, very long time now.
One World Job Market
One World Job Market
The videophone loomed large in the future imagined by Closer Than We Think, appearing everywhere from living rooms to job interviews.
In this illustration, a man in Philadelphia conducts a remote interview with a potential employer in Buenos Aires, which honestly sounds less futuristic and more like a standard Tuesday in 2026.
The Self-Driving Car
The Self-Driving Car
The autonomous car of tomorrow would free its passengers to relax, socialize, and even play cards during the commute.
Of course, the 2026 version of this scenario would look a little different, with every single passenger buried face-first in a smartphone instead.
Electronic Home Library
Electronic Home Library
The media library of the future promised to be rich and endlessly varied. Something still feels slightly off about this 1959 vision though.
Whether it’s the film canisters lining the walls, the glasses-free 3D television Dad is watching, or Mom reading a book flat on the ceiling in what may be the least comfortable reading position ever devised.
Weather Control
Weather Control
Midcentury futurists had a deep and abiding obsession with mastering the weather.
Some of it tied back to Cold War military strategy, but most of it seemed to reflect a broader desire to finally conquer the one force that humankind had never quite managed to bend to its will.
Electronic Christmas Cards
Electronic Christmas Cards
A holiday greeting transmitted by facsimile and bounced off the moon from Boston all the way to Honolulu?
Remarkably futuristic. The fact that it still arrived on paper, however, somewhat undercuts the whole spectacular vision.
Wall-to-Wall TV
Wall-to-Wall TV
Giant wall-spanning television sets remain frustratingly out of reach for most households.
Truly global television is an even more distant dream, tangled up in a labyrinthine web of international licensing agreements that makes watching a foreign show legally feel like filing your taxes.
Robot Butlers
Robot Butlers
This robot butler may lack the warmth and personality of Rosey from The Jetsons, but it appears perfectly capable of handling household duties.
Including, apparently, watching your entire family sleep through the night with its built-in “All-Seeing TV Eyes.” Sweet dreams.
Tranquilizer Warfare
Tranquilizer Warfare
During the Cold War, both American and Soviet researchers explored drug-based methods for subduing hostile populations without firing a single shot.
Looking at the cheerful expressions on these “happy victims” and “psycho-gassed diplomats,” it is genuinely hard to tell if this was meant to be a warning or an advertisement.
Electric Car
Electric Car
The fully electric car has finally started breaking into the mainstream after a remarkably long wait.
This early vision of the concept pictured a sleek electric runabout, perfectly sized for quick trips to the market and blissfully free of anything so inconvenient as a gas station.
Computerized Desk for the Home
Computerized Desk for the Home
The school overcrowding problem plaguing Baby Boomer classrooms was going to be solved once and for all with this home computing desk.
Keep the kids at home, plug them in, and let the machine handle the rest. Problem solved, presumably.
Cash Registers That Understand Speech
Cash Registers That Understand Speech
The self-checkout machines now occupying every major supermarket are, by almost universal agreement, a tremendous nuisance.
But imagine the cathartic possibilities of a version that could actually understand you when you told it exactly what you thought of it.
The Snow Melting Machine
The Snow Melting Machine
Anyone who has survived a Minnesota winter knows that snow removal is no small matter.
That said, deploying what amounts to a road-mounted flamethrower seems like a solution with some significant drawbacks, particularly for any living creatures that happened to be caught beneath the snowpack at the time.
The All-Watching Police Force
The All-Watching Police Force
Police Department The authorities have a very close eye on things in this vision of a future police dispatch center.
Cameras everywhere, every movement tracked, every corner covered. Serve, protect, and observe absolutely everything without exception.
Bloodless Surgery
Bloodless Surgery
The medicine of the future was going to be entirely painless, with no incisions and no knives required.
Some forms of minimally invasive surgery have indeed made this a partial reality. Chemotherapy, however, remains a grueling exception that no amount of futurist optimism has managed to soften.
Factory Farms
Factory Farms
There was a time when the term “factory farm” carried no particular negative connotation. Hard to imagine now.
In the cheerful world of Closer Than We Think, a giant tomato being injected with a mystery substance by a man in a white lab coat was simply the exciting future of food production.
Follow-the-Sun House
Follow-the-Sun House
This rotating house of the future was designed to track the sun throughout the day and harvest its energy continuously.
The concept is admirable in theory, though one has to wonder whether the mechanical energy required to physically rotate an entire house might quietly defeat the whole purpose.
Fat Plants and Meat Beets
Fat Plants and Meat Beets
Alternative protein sources were already a serious topic of conversation in the 1950s and 60s.
As the growing middle class consumed ever more meat, futurists envisioned bizarre protein-dense plants and laboratory-crafted meat substitutes as the only sensible path forward for feeding the world.
24-Hour Daylight
24-Hour Daylight
The appeal of round-the-clock artificial daylight is not immediately obvious, and frankly it sounds more like a premise for a psychological horror story than a feature of the good life.
Nevertheless, Closer Than We Think assured readers it was coming and that they would enjoy it, presumably whether they wanted to or not.
Space Hospitals
Space Hospitals
People in the 1950s and 60s appear to have genuinely believed that space travel would become routine enough that the sick and injured would simply rocket up to orbital medical facilities for treatment.
It was an optimistic vision of both healthcare and aerospace that neither industry has quite managed to deliver on.
Robot Railroading
Robot Railroading
Driverless technology was not limited to automobiles in this vision of the future. The trains of tomorrow were fully automated as well, guided by machines from departure to arrival.
The porters, however, remained resolutely human, still walking the aisles in the flesh.
Quick-Change Car Colors
Quick-Change Car Colors
What better symbol of postwar futuristic excess than the ability to repaint your car every single morning with an electromagnetic color gun, simply because the mood strikes you?
In this fast-moving world of perpetual fashion cycles, the real question is whether you can afford not to.
(Photo credit: Illustrated by Arthur Radebaugh via Close Than We Think / Matt Novak via paleofuture.com).