The dream and promise of the flying car is more than a century old. Yet we're still not zipping around in them. Our history of audacious attempts shows why building a machine that can fly and drive has proven so difficult.

1 1904 Suresh Digwal/Campfire Jules Verne's Master of the World features the Terror—a boat, car, and aircraft that "dart[s] through space with a speed... superior to that of the largest birds."

2 1917 The Model 11 Autoplane debuts at New York's Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition. No record that it flew exists.

3 1921 The Tampier Roadable biplane lands at the Paris Air Salon and takes a 2-hour, 15-mph drive in the city.

4 1938 Robert A. Heinlein's For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs includes ovoid flying vehicles with wings and helicopter rotors.

5 1947 Henry Dreyfuss's ConvAirCar—a fiberglass-bodied automobile with a wing-and-propeller module attached to the roof—crashes during a test flight. The fatal wreck also kills the car's prospects for production.

6 1953 Leland Bryan of Buick flies his Autoplane, which is powered by a rear propeller while driving and flying. Bryan dies in 1974 when he crashes a version of it at an air show.

7 1973 Henry Smolinski mates a Ford Pinto with a Cessna Skymaster—and dies in a test-flight crash along with pilot Harold Blake.

8 1982 In the dystopian film Blade Runner, oppressive police patrol aloft in vehicles called Spinners.

9 2009 Brad DeCecco PopMech gives a Breakthrough Award to the Maverick, a flying dune buggy that delivers medicine to remote areas.

10 2011 The first flight of the M400X Skycar is scuttled; it's another miscue by inventor Paul Moller, who has been trying to get a car airborne since the 1970s.

11 2012 The Terrafugia Transition "street legal" plane completes its first test flight in upstate New York.

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