There’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.
Which, I suppose, is why we (well, they) keep trying. Maybe one day someone will hit on a safe, swift system that isn’t deadly, or dependent on fossil fuel or worse, Elon Musk, or requires you to sell your kidneys for a season ticket. With that cheery thought in mind, time to board your “electrophant” (a motorised elephant, invented in the 1940s, somewhat hampered by “a slight design fault … the exhaust fumes emitted from the elephant’s trunk caused the children riding on the back to choke”) for a trundle around history’s scattiest transport concepts.
Leonardo da Vinci’s flying boat, c1490
Disappointingly few contemporary modes of transport – I think none, though I would be thrilled to be corrected – look like vast nightmarish bats, and that’s why Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. His sketchbooks of the late 1480s and 90s are full of bat- and bird-winged flying-machine doodles that look like the product of someone dismembering many bats (he was indeed “an extremely skilled dissector”). None of these machines would have actually flown, because of “physics” and “human physiognomy” and so on, but who cares when they were this cool?
The Man in the Moone, 1638
OK, bishop Francis Godwin’s splendidly strange creation was fictional, but wouldn’t it be amazing if we could travel around pulled by a flock of wild swans (“gansas”, Godwin called them), which turn out to be strong enough to evade the gravitational pull of the Earth and take us to the moon? You know it would. Dream bigger, future visionaries!
Montgolfière, 1783
Since a balloon trip is now something you give your parents for their golden wedding anniversary, it lacks the quixotic, ultimately doomed quality of other out-there transport. Still, imagine the outlandish scene when the Montgolfier brothers put a duck, a cock and a sheep in a basket under a balloon and sent it skywards, observed by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. No wonder their rival Jacques Charles’s version “was attacked by frightened peasants on landing”. Despite that, balloonomania rapidly took hold: huge crowds gathered to view take-offs, sometimes rioting when they didn’t happen. Fun fact: competitive ballooning was an Olympic event at Paris in 1900; one competitor reached Russia, where he was promptly arrested, later claiming: “The Russian officers persecuted me by the opening of so many bottles of French champagne that I was in great distress.” Bring it back for this year!
‘Locomotion’, 1820
Illustrator and satirist George Cruikshank claimed Oliver Twist was his idea, became a later-life fanatical teetotaller and was discovered on his deathbed to have 11 children, not with his wife. None of this is relevant to this excellent caricature of a man in steam-powered boots, and other transport fantasies. The dawn of the steam age was causing as much terror as delight; later, people believed train travel might make your uterus fall out.
Otto Lilienthal and his glider, 1896
Prussian engineer Otto Lilienthal was inspired by birds in creating his terrifying flying machines (his research was published as Bird Flight as a Basis for Aviation) and it shows: some of his designs even incorporated flapping motion. Lilienthal managed a controlled flight of 24 metres (80ft) in his Derwitzer glider before designing this, the anything-but-normal-looking “Normalapparate”. This picture commemorates one of his last flights before the Normalapparate crashed from a height of 15 metres, killing him. There’s something awfully poignant about his dangling legs. Vale, Herr Lilienthal. Leonardo would have approved of you.
Moving pavement, 1900
This breakout moment for moving pavements was “the Street of the Future” showcased at the Paris exhibition of 1900 (a smaller version appeared at the Chicago World Fair in 1893). Its fastest platform went at 6mph (just under 10kph) and on one of the fair’s busiest days, it reportedly transported 70,000 people in an afternoon. I’m not sure why they’re now confined to short distances through airports: I would absolutely venture out and keep the economy going with frivolous purchases if I could be conveyed at 6mph with absolutely no effort on my part.
Brennan’s monorail c1910
Like the jetpack, the monorail screams progress! Future! This, however, just seems to be some lads in a field going nowhere slowly. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Irish-Australian engineer and torpedo inventor Louis Brennan’s invention failed to attract sufficient investment to go anywhere, despite being a viable, functioning mode of transport, tested and admired by Winston Churchill. “Of the two vehicles built, one was sold as scrap, and the other was used as a park shelter.” Oh dear. Bankrupt but undeterred, Brennan tried to make a helicopter, which he did get airborne, momentarily, but was again abandoned by investors.
Gerder’s Motorwheel, 1931
If exploring transport visionaries has taught me anything, it is that since the dawn of wheels, men have wanted to sit inside them, hamster style. There’s a delightfully thorough survey of deranged monowheels here, dating right back to 1869. This “motorwheel” is described in the picture caption as the creation of the driver, a Swiss engineer called Gerder, but he may in fact have been a customer of Davide Gislaghi (or Cislaghi), a Milanese policeman who invented the motoruota. You can see it in action here. Regardless of whether or not he invented it, Monsieur Gerder has the sparkling eye and beatific smile of a man truly content with his absurd life choices, and I salute him for it.
JA Purves’ Dynasphere, 1930
One hamster wheel is simply not enough, so taking the rodent-propulsion impulse to its logical conclusion/dead end, we have … whatever the hell this is. I strongly recommend watching it roll at terrifying speed (30mph) in this short film. Dr Purves, the inventor, also proposed a bus version, excitingly. However, there were “difficulties with steering and braking”; there’s a suggestion the Dynasphere was prone to “gerbiling”, where passengers were spun inside the wheel when accelerating or braking.
MW Hulton’s seashoes, 1962
A classic transport visionary here: impractical outfit; demonstrably daft invention (“sea-shoes and duckfoot propellers”); looks absolutely delighted with himself. Walking on water is another idea that seems to obsess, well, men: it was a Leonardo da Vinci thing – his involved cork skis and paddle poles – and has resurfaced occasionally ever since; the US has 100-plus patents for various versions, starting in 1858. A 2016 version, the FloatSki, was hailed as the “next big fitness trend”, but I haven’t seen many people floatskiing down my local waterways yet.
Bob Courter tests a jetpack, 1964
Now this is the future we were promised. Bell Aerosystems took the whole jetpack thing (don’t call it that, though – it’s a “rocket belt”) relatively far in the 1950s, presenting one to the US army in 1960 and demo-ing it to the public at various events after that, including the 1967 Super Bowl and the 1984 LA Olympics. (A Bell pilot, William Suitor, doubled for Sean Connery when Bond used one in Thunderball.) So why didn’t it catch on? It “only worked in 20-second bursts”, relatably.
• This article was amended on 19 April 2024 to correct the surname of the Montgolfier brothers and their balloon, the Montgolfière. An earlier version had Mongolfier and Mongolfière.
