Books like Imagining Tomorrow by Joseph J. Corn

This comprehensive survey explores the evolving relationship between science and technology throughout human history.

Alvin Toffler forecasts the rapid flood of environmental change in the next thirty years and explores how individuals and societies must adapt, plan, and psychologically adjust to endure the upheavals of modern civilization.

Europe’s rise as a global technological power followed a slow, cumulative advance that blended medieval innovations with influences from China, India, and the Islamic world, as shown by Frances Gies in Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel.

Arthur C. Clarke surveys speculative futures, revisiting 1959‑1961 essays on space exploration, sea mining, asteroid utilization, and humanity’s possible evolution, and updating them to reflect the scientific progress made since the original 1962 publication.

Enormous skyscrapers will house residents and workers who happily go "for weeks" without setting foot on the ground. Streamlined, "hurricane-proof" houses will pivot on their foundations like weather vanes. The family car will turn into an airplane so easily that "a woman can do it in five minutes." Our wars will be fought by robots. And our living room furniture - waterproof, of course - will clean up with a squirt from the garden hose. In Yesterday's Tomorrows Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan explore the future as Americans earlier in this century expected it to happen. Filled with vivid color images and lively text, the book is an eloquent testimony to the confidence - and, at times, the naive faith - Americans have had in science and technology. The future that emerges here, the authors conclude, is one in which technology changes, but society and politics usually do not. The authors draw on a wide variety of sources - popular-science magazines, science fiction, world fair exhibits, films, advertisements, and plans for things only dreamed of. From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future.