Cars of the future were tipped to be guided by radio.
What was yesterdays' view of tomorrow?
In The Glass Canoe, a David Ireland novel set pretty well entirely within an Australian pub, a bloke named ''Alky Jack'' roars a whole lot of apparent rubbish about computers: ''One day they'll … even be in charge of your car so you can't drive through a red light or crash into someone or change lanes if there's a car alongside you.''
The Glass Canoe was written in 1976 when a Holden Kingswood HX was considered pretty nifty and the first Apple hadn't dropped from the tree. Yet Alky Jack clearly had a better idea about what was coming than most futurists. Sober or otherwise.
Predictions about the next big thing in cars are almost as old as cars themselves.
Take Illustrated World, April 1917: ''The aeroautocraft of the future will roll on the road, cleave through the water, fly through the air. Its owner will start from his garage or hangar, travel streets or roads at will, cross streams or lakes that lie in his path, rise in the air and fly over a hill, a valley, or woods, to another road, all at his pleasure.''
And how will such a vehicle be powered? Hydro power, delivered wirelessly.
Modern Mechanix predicted in 1932 that cars would be guided by radio and would beep loudly if you turned into the wrong road. The same magazine, soon after, said the car of the future would be greatly fortified, ''so strong that no ordinary collision could best it''.
The better-known Popular Science told us, in July 1946, that ''rocket propellants, cased in special jet housings under the hood'', would provide spectacularly efficient emergency brakes. On an icy highway, a vehicle with these brakes would stop in a fifth of the distance of a normal car.
Four years later, special brakes seemed less important to Popular Science editors because, within 50 years, the average family would use their teardrop-shaped car (powered by denatured alcohol) only for short journeys. Most trips would be taken in the family helicopter, stored on the roof of the house.
Science Digest, in April 1958, presented what is perhaps yesterday's most pervading image of tomorrow, aside from the flying car:
''When you drive on to a superhighway, you'll reach over to your dashboard and push the button marked 'Electronic Drive'. Selecting your lane, you'll settle back to enjoy the ride as your car adjusts itself to the prescribed speed. You may prefer to read or carry on a conversation with your passengers - or even catch up on your office work.''
Ten years later, Mechanix Illustrated presented a treatise on how we'd be getting about in 2008. It said private cars would be banned in most city centres, with ''moving sidewalks and electratrams'' providing the transport. Between cities, you guessed it: you'd be leaning back and reading the paper ''on a flat TV screen over the car's dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.''
Your car would touch 150mph (240km/h) in the city's suburbs, then hit ''250mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road [while] the traffic computer … keeps vehicles at least 50 yards apart''.
Nearby would be the ''launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets blast off for other continents''. Other popular vacation destinations would include undersea resorts and ''hotel satellites''.
There'd be plenty of time for holidays, too (and for reading daft predictions by people who don't have a clue), because the average working day would be a mere four hours.
NB: You too can waste hours going through the wonderful archive of old technical magazines at blog.modernmechanix.com.