The Future Is Now (1955)

Dwight Weist: Self - Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : From a pilot atomic power plant in the desert, the lights go on. Nuclear energy goes to work. Not destroying, but serving, mankind.

• Narrator : Some scientists consider the sun a much more important potential source of power than the atom. They envision the day when electric power from the sun, solar energy they call it, will light cities, power radio and television transmitters, drive factory wheels and turn deserts into lush, green fertility.

• Narrator : [opening lines]  Radiation. High fission. Fusion. Pile. Radioactivity. Neutron. Gamma Rays. Solar power. Transistor. Automation. A new language has come into currency. To the public, it is a language of the future. To the scientist, a language of the present. This, then, is a report on our present future.

• Narrator : In the electronics age, the development of giant computers, electronic brains, has been a key development. These incredibly complex machines are the mechanized geniuses of the 20th Century. They store information. Their memory is infallible. This ability has started a second industrial revolution. Automation - a highly controversial automatic factory.

• Narrator : Without electronic control systems, no nation could defend itself in modern war. Here is a new and striking example. The Hughes Aircraft Company Falcon - a guided missile with a brain capable of outwitting any enemy bomber.

• Narrator : A major electronics development has been television - for science, as well as, entertainment. Through TV, Los Alamos atomic scientists, a fifth of a mile away, control a critical assembly of fissionable materials.

• Narrator : For entertainment television, magnetic video tape promises great things. Most people are familiar with sound recording on tape. This device records pictures on tape, in full, compatible color or in black and white, as well as, the program sound. The magnetic tape is half an inch wide. It runs at 20 feet a second. A program can be recorded and played back at any time, immediately, if desired, without any laboratory processing.

• Narrator : Someday, when Papa photographs Junior, he may use this small TV camera and electronic photography. His full color or black and white picture will be recorded on a home video tape recorder. You play them back *immediately*, without any processing or development, to his television set.

• Narrator : What do you wear to answer the phone? What difference does it make? None, today! But, tomorrow, if videophone comes, as well it might, then the world has found itself another problem.

• Narrator : In another field, music can now be produced entirely by electronics. No known instruments are involved. Coded information is punched out. An electronic music synthesizer does the rest. This is music with a strictly electronic beat.

• Narrator : This is a transistor. It is the tiny bombshell of the electronics revolution. What it does, simply stated, is to replace vacuum tubes in many applications. It is an essential of modern electronic circuitry. It has many advantages - small size, for one. Permitting miniaturization. Making big things - smaller. Things like: pocket radios, wrist watch radios, and a coming attraction, portable, battery powered television sets.

• Narrator : Science has continued to improve electric light. Remarkable advances have come from the laboratories. A possibility for tomorrow is the house with cordless lamps. We know if you hold fluorescent tubes over a radio wave generator, they light up. How about a generator in the basement, lighting all the lamps in the house through unseen, unfelt radiations.

• Narrator : And what of the kitchen of tomorrow? There are many interpretations. This is one. Push buttons open and close refrigerator doors. No stooping. Work surfaces can be brought up to a comfortable level. And no stretching. A wave of the hand brings cabinets gliding down for easy access. Another wave will send them gliding up again. An ice maker delivers cubes, crushed ice, or ice water, singly or in combination. Menus and recipes are projected on color slides on a large screen.

• Narrator : There are other interesting possibilities ahead. Preserving food by gamma rays, instead of refrigeration. Cooking meals in 60 seconds by radio frequency. Washing dishes with ultra sonic waves.

• Narrator : Improved foodstuff may be cooked in the kitchen of tomorrow. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, at botanist enters the gamma ray field. He cuts down radiation emanating from a central source by remote control. His radiation counter tells him it is now safe to enter.

• Narrator : In this field corn and other plants are grown under controlled radiation conditions. Corn is irradiated, studied. Atomic corn cross-pollinated with clean corn and the results analyzed. The aim is to develop a bigger, heartier, disease-free strain. It is an important project in the Atoms For Peace program.

• Narrator : In the final analysis, however, the key to the future is not an apparatus, a machine, or an electronic tube, but the brain power of man. Nothing will ever replace creative intelligence.

• [last lines] 

  Narrator : The mind strains to peer beyond today's horizons for a glimpse of the wonders of tomorrow.