CITIES OF THE FUTURE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3379, 20 June 1927, Page 2

CITIES OF THE FUTURE.

MR EDISON’S FORECAST

“Future civilisation will be immensely affected by air-travel,” says Mr Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, in an article in the “Weekly Despatch.” “Sooner or later we shall get the helicopter—the flying machine which will go straight up and down at any desired speed when necessary, as well as forward.

“It does not require any very vivid imagination,” says Mr Edison, “to help us realise that when the helicopter comes into bein~ roofs of large buildings in our cities immediately will become very valuable parts of such structures as may be located in those city districts to which people flying by air will seek quick access? “Certain new varieties of disaster will then develop, but it is useless to foretell these now. We shall know all about them when they come. But they will not keep us out of the air transport machines. These will mean speed, and that humanity which gathers in the cities of the future especially will demand speed. “I have no doubt that before long it will be necessary to prohibit very tall buildings in those sections of our cities which already are overcrowded. When all the people in these huge structures start to flow out into the street at approximately the same moment, or within half an hour or an hour, try to get to the entrances of those buildings so that they may begin the day’s business, there must be puch overcrowding of the streets nearby as must stop traffic, and cost every individual involved some part of his time. “Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the one thing lie cannot afford to lose. The danger of the skyscraper is that in the end, if there is no check upon it, it may cost time instead of saving it. It will do exactly that if streets are left as they are and if skyscrapers are multiplied. “One of the things that surprise mo in this consideration of skyscrapers is that so little utilisation is made of roofs. This. I think, will change; aerial navigation may he the thing which directly will call all our attention to the roofs. “Noise will be one of the things which will increase as city congestion grows, and. of course, it is bound to grow for some time to come. If the problem of making streets which can handle the incoming and outgoing streams of people from the vast structures which we are now building is worked out —and it must he if we really look into the future —we shall have much more noise in days to come than we have to-day.

“Omnibuses will without doubt supplant tramway cars almost everywhere, because they are more flexible in traffic. They will make less noise than tramway cars with steel wheels running upon steel rails. But noise probably will not decrease to any great extent. Ido not think it hurts us. It decreases the acuteness of our hearing, but in cities we do not need hearing as acute as that which tho savage must have in the forest where every dropping branch and crackling twig may be significant.

“Nature, in making hearing less acute as outside noises increase, knows what she is doing. lam deaf, having been so since my boyhood. lam deafer now than I used to he. Tho noise of a city does not trouble mo at all. On Broadway I can be as undisturbed as tho average man can be in the deepest recesses of the most silent forest. That has been and is an advantage to me. It saves me from many interruptions and much nerve strain. My nerves are quite steady. I have known people to say, ‘Edison has not any nerves,’ I have just as many and as delicate nerves as anybody else, but they are not constantly disturbed by noises That helps. My deafness has been an advantage to me.

“And I am only a few laps ahead of tho average city man in being deaf. ‘Becoming accustomed to noise,’ is, in reality, becoming deaf. It really will not matter to the city dweller of the future whether he lives in tho noisiest or the most silent part of the city. lie will be sufficiently deafened by Nature so that the noisiest places will not be disagreeable to him. Nature has always done such things for all its creatures. That is what is called ‘adaptation to environment.’

“Lastly, there is the probability that sooner or later in our citv of the future we shall have to meet the problems of municipal management in a scientific way. It is a, matter very largely of mental mechanics. We really know all about it now, but do not apply the knowledge we possess. If the city of the future is to ho a place worth living in we must apply every scrap of knowledge we can get. considering each essential problem in its individual aspects first and then taking it in its relations to others. “Some years ago, in Germany. I was impressed with the fact that politics are entirely eliminated from city management. It came rather as a shock to me. as an American accustomed to the partisan bitterness of our political campaigns, to find advertisement in the German newspapers for men who could prove their qualifications to act as mayors of cities and towns happening at the moment to need such officials.

“Then, too, the highly-trained mayor, educated as a specialist in municipal management and utterly cut off from all political influences, would see to it that his city had that kind of police force—a scientifically selected, scientifically trained, scientifically managed body of men knowing and accomplishing task's for which they were employed. Over a year ago it occurred to mo, while I was thinking of these problems, that civilisation consists of a lot of people in one place-—plus a policeman. But that policeman must he a. scientific product, not a hit or miss affair.

“Humanity cannot bo standardised, but it can lie controlled; if it can be controlled it can 1-e trained. It is trained as a matter of fart. Society trains its criminals to be criminals by allowing conditions to arise which give them opportunities to get more money by crime than they could possibly get otherwise and in a shorter time, with less work.

“Big business meets problems quite as difficult as that of managing police forces every day, and meets them competently. It meets them scientifically, and (hat is the reason why it solves them almost without disturbance. When cities go at the problem of their management as intelligently as big business goes after (he problems of its management, most of those problems automatically will vanish.”