I was looking at old Bulletman (Fawcett comics) issues a while ago, and he has an antigravity helmet. And, as with most comic books, it allows him to fly (start and stop and move through the air somehow) with no discernible power source (that I recall). Can’t be that expensive, as he’s not a rich character. So I got to thinking abut him patenting and licensing the tech (circa late 1940s or early 1950s, given when the comic was published) and of its various uses. Flying cars are an old trope, of course, so I thought about them.
Obviously, safety risks are a big thing, but even assuming everyone just traveled along defined “roadways” 8 feet above ground (so as not to hit pedestrians), you’d have advantages on not sliding on ice and not puncturing tires and not having salt-damaged vehicles and not needing so much road maintenance. But without the exciting factor of flying absolutely anywhere you want without regard to traffic laws or following set paths, it lacks a lot of the excitement power. I’m not familiar with cars being marketed on safety at the time. That led me to wonder how much fuel is actually used by the friction of car on road. Though, really, cars weren’t so marketed on fuel efficiency at the time, either. In the earlier part of the time frame they are still trying to get caught up from WW2-caused shortages.
Totally depends on the source of power for the flying cars. If, like Bulletman, they use anti-gravity, then the gas consumption is zero for motive power, although some might be used to power the battery to run the heater, windshield wipers, radio, etc. And in-city driving may take place on streets. Otherwise, you don’t have a flying car, but a VTOL plane.
Alternatively, by 1950 the buzzword for the Future was atomics. All the rocketships in science fiction were using atomic power by then for motif power (pun deliberate), and atomic cars were widely predicted.
Other possibilities are jet propulsion or rocket propulsion. Rocket engines were tested on cars as early as the 1920s, setting some speed records, but they didn’t deliberately fly unless they hit a bad bump. In fact, the original use of the term “flying car” was indeed a car that hit a bump and “flew” into the side of a building. This was coined probably in the first decade of the 20th century, as soon as cars moved fast enough.
IC engines for planes burn through gas at a huge rate, 5-10 gallons per hour for a small plane. Planes go much faster than cars so they can go much farther on that amount, but studies show that most car trips are under 25 miles, cancelling that advantage.
If you want a glimpse of what the future of flying cars looked like in 1950, the adventures of Jetta: Teen-Aged Sweetheart of the 21st Century are a hoot, ten years before the Jetsons. What’s best, among all the things that are best, is that the high school teens drive the same sort of used beaters that the real world teens drove, even though they were flying cars.
Right. We don’t have the slightest clue about how to build an antigravity machine.
We’d save a lot more gas by having transfer booths (instant teleportation, as in some of Larry Niven’s stories), or Star Trek transporters. Might as well go for those, if we’re talking technology indistinguishable from magic…
Fair enough. Not sure if the masses would make that distinction. And so many terms linger past accuracy/applicability (“glove box”, etc.). But accuracy isn’t a negative.
Thanks.
I’d be a fan, but not applicable to this comic or discussion.
THAT is a topic that I’m sure has been studied quite extensively. Rolling friction losses versus air resistance. They almost certainly go up with different power laws dependent on velocity?
A slightly different take and not meant as a threadshit:
With gas costing 6 cents a gallon, there’s no incentive to buy antigrav cars (I would assume very expensive) until the 1970s when the gas shortages hit, then here comes Star Wars and everyone wants a Luke Skywalker vehicle. Incredible advertising! Product placement deals! I want a Taun Taun! “He bent my Wookie!”
This reminds me of a Harry Turtledove SF story (The Road Not Taken).
A universe where antigravity and FTL travel happen to be easy to discover, so electromagnetism and all the engineering based on it were almost never found. The aliens who have the gravitic technology build an interstellar empire… until they encounter Earth…
I thought about that (though what Google says more like 27 cents a gallon in 1950, moving to 53/57 (two different sources) cents in 1975, and the inflation adjuster actually makes it cheaper in 1975 using 2011 dollars - gas prices didn’t go up nearly as much as wages/inflation in the 1950s, so it was relatively cheaper and cheaper from mid50s until 70s oil crisis, it looks like), which is why I hit the safety aspect, vehicle maintenance aspect, and wondered on pure coolness factor. Obviously, there’s possibly savings to be had on road wear, and thus road maintenance, but that would have to be top-down from the government, rather than advertising direct to consumers.
EDIT: I had never thought of gas being (inflation-adjusted) more expensive in 1950 than in 1970 previously, though of course, it makes perfect sense when you think about just how much the purchasing power of the average American rose during the timeframe.
Three things cost you energy in a conventional gas-powered car:
1: Brakes. Whatever energy you have when you’re moving, you have to get rid of it when you stop. Hybrids can reclaim a significant fraction of it and store it in the batteries (this is the biggest contributor to their greater efficiency), but most gas cars just completely throw it away. This is the most significant factor for stop-and-go city driving.
2: Air resistance. The force of air resistance is proportional to the speed squared, and so at high speeds, it’s much more significant. This is the most significant factor for high (but steady) speed freeway driving.
3: Rolling resistance. This is more complicated than air resistance, but it’s approximately proportional to speed (to the first power). This means that there’s some critical speed such that, below that speed, rolling resistance is dominant, and above that, air resistance is dominant. But that critical speed is very low, such that cars are almost always above it.
Your hypothetical antigravity car is eliminating the rolling resistance, which is the least significant. It might or might not eliminate braking losses, like a hybrid car. It certainly won’t eliminate air resistance. You also have to consider your propulsion, because propulsion systems that don’t rely on solid contact are probably going to be less efficient than ones that do.
I’d make a distinction between “hoping for an entirely new technology” (anti-gravity) and “blatantly ignoring fundamental laws of physics” (teleportation… what about that pesky Conservation of Matter?)
From my long familiarity with antigravity helmets comic books, I’m sure that the antigravity field forms a bubble around Bulletman’s entire body, just as Superman had a bubble around his body to protect held objects from the speed of friction.
Keep in mind that Einstein pointed out that “gravity” is really space warped by a massive object. An anti-gravity device itself would have to warp space to counteract that and, in fact, have to direct it accurately if you want the device to go in the direction that you desire. That’s a tremendous amount of energy. I’m thinking the cost would be immense.
I think the usual approach to this is to postulate that Einstein’s field equations, while correct, are perhaps not complete? Could there be an extra term, not so far observed, that can affect the spacetime metric without requiring enormous energy?