Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
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Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#2That kid getting slapped on the face in the film! What did he do?
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#3I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination.
The Roads must roll — they are the arteries of the nation. When they stop, everything stops. Factories idle, food rots, men starve. The nation cannot live without its Roads.
A thousand feet wide, level as a floor, strip after strip moving past in ordered procession. The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster, until the express strip in the center rushed past at a hundred miles an hour.
-- The Roads Must Roll, Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#4I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway.
We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#5I remember reading about this in Devil in the White City.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#6Megalopolis
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#7I love the kid who is hamming it up at the bottom of the frame. I've been a photographer/videographer for my entire professional career and have run into this kid many, many times. Adults exhibit this behavior too but it is usually much more moderated.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#8I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination. The Roads must roll — they are the arteries of the nation. When they stop, everything stops. Factories idle, food rots, men starve. The nation cannot live without its Roads. A thousand feet wide, level as a floor, strip after strip moving past in ordered procession. The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones f…
It was a recurring theme throughout most of Golden Age fiction.
E.g. Clifford D. Simak mentions them as a mode of transportation in The Goblin Reservation, Asimov has them in Robots of Dawn, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty more.
It could be that it was Heinlein who kicked of the trend.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#9That kid getting slapped on the face in the film! What did he do?
Doesn’t matter, he’s dead now.
Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
#10I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway. We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
That’s because the systems are designed to be dropped into a hallway. In modern moving walkways and escalators, the treads and handrail belt return on the underside.
The system used in Paris requires a giant bulb shape to turn around the fence, which is generally a lot harder and more expensive to accommodate.