'North Sea Drainage Project to Increase Area of Europe': Modern Mechanics, the magazine of futures that DIDN'T happen



You might be looking at the plans drawn up by 'eminent English scientists' for the drainage of the North Sea, and thinking that it still looked fairly wet last time you flew over it.



The madcap scheme was dreamed up in the pages of Modern Mechanics magazine - and seemingly nowhere else - in September 1930.



The American magazine dealt in 'wacky' inventions and ideas - many of which never came to pass.



The North Sea Drainage project was predicted to reclaim 100,000 square miles of land for mainland Europe, linking England with the continent. It would have used 80ft tall Dutch-style dykes to wall off the sea

The Submarine Plane - supposedly invented in Denmark, of all places - would have revolutionised travel and warfare. Sadly, it only existed within Modern Mechanics magazine

'The prices are far higher now for Modern Mechanics then when I started collecting them,' says Charles Shopsin of Modern Mechanix, a site dedicated to scanning and immortalising the oddball inventions in Modern Mechanics and similar titles - subtitled 'Yesterday's tomorrows, today'.

'I sometimes wonder if I'm partially responsible for that. There are very few issues remaining that I don't have so I always try to bid on them when they come up.'



This 'tornado buster' would have saved the mid-West by creating upside-down anti-tornadoes to 'hold tornadoes in place'

Another invention from a Thirties engineering periodical: The dimple machine, too, failed to catch on despite Modern Mechanics's predictions

Modern Mechanics' engineering solutions were always on the radical side





Modern Mechanics itself changed title several times, becoming Mechanix Illustrated in the Thirties. The late Twenties and Thirties were the golden period for the magazine's more out-there predictions.



'It was just an exuberant time where mechanization was tremendously exciting and there was an optimism about how technology would solve all of society's problems,' says Shopsin.



'Also it was only around that time that it was possible to cheaply mass produce publications with a lot of photographic images or drawings.'











The plucky airman on the cover was a recurring motif of Modern Mechanics, usually modelling some sort of implausible invention

Modern Mechanics remained at the forefront of scientific discovery for its two-year run. It was later reincarnated as Mechanix Illustrated

Magazines of the period commonly featured rather 'out there' projects: This ambitious American airport would have housed two-storey airliners UNDERGROUND - where there would also have been a US post office and underground railways

'So I think it was the first time it was really possible for a wide audience to see these kind of devices and once they saw them they got hooked. '

The magazine ran a mixture of (then) hi-tech photo stories and predictions of the future - some more accurate than others.



This talking robot terrified exhibition visitors in 1929 - fairly understandably. His makers were coy about how the machine actually worked

This lottery machine looks outlandish, but is actually a fairly accurate forerunner of the ball-rolling machines used to draw lotteries today. It was unveiled in 1930

The magazine became less and less outlandish as audiences became more savvy - finding space eventually for car reviews and woodworking guides.

More and more photo features dominated the various incarnations of Mechanix - which meant there was less room for the more 'speculative' pieces the magazine originally specialised in.



This article, from 1957, celebrated human ingenuity in the pages of Mechanix Illustrated. James Bond's foe Jaws was yet to be unleashed on the world

Shopsin still haunts eBay and garage sales looking for old issues - and similar predictions of the future from other period magazines, all of which are meticulously scanned and hosted on his website.

He warns, however, that we may not be invulnerable ourselves. 'People from the future will look back at US and laugh,' he says. 'All you have to do is have a look through YouTube for some of the ridiculous 'This is what the future looks like' videos from the the Eighties and Nineties from companies like AT&T and Sun Microsystems.

'Some of them manage to seem MORE out of date than things from the Thirties.'













