WILL WE BE GADGET-GROGGY?
Sheridan, Mary
Your Money's Worth Will We Be Gadget-Groggy? By MARY SHERIDAN ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS said something when he predicted that America would be gadget-crazy after the war. The first tornado of lush...
...The refrigerator would be in the radio cabinet, and an oven and a broiler would be inside a desk drawer...
...Now a new tornado is sweeping over us...
...The prospect of imperfect human beings moving around in tomorrow's mechanically perfect world looks, at the moment, more fantastic than any of H. G. Wells' shapes-of-things-to-come...
...For one thing, they have escape value...
...Well, one designer has planned a house without a kitchen, and S. S. Block, in the current Science Digest, predicts we face a revolution in eating, with emphasis on frozen foods and dehydrated milk, soup, and gravy, and fruits...
...I've read many of these articles—too many...
...Rosenman can call it nonchalance, but I'd call it nonsense...
...electric clothes driers...
...I'm not at all sure I'd like to live the way the forecasters predict we'll live...
...Less fantastic and of varying degrees of usefulness are the designs for refrigerators with revolving shelves, sterilizing lamps to kill bacteria, and a food-freezing compartment...
...In short, I've been over-sold...
...Don't ask why, that would be too sensible a question...
...air purifying machines attached to the furnace (McCalls says, "It is now thought they will cost very little more than a good refrigerator...
...The makers of frozen food, Mr...
...The first tornado of lush ads describing the miracle cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and radios of tomorrow quieted down when the advertisers realized that promises were cold comfort to the Browns who need refrigerators and the Greens who need washing machines now...
...he says we'll save time and be healthier...
...the meals will be cooked (in ton-size proportions) by famous chefs...
...Wells and more like Victor Moore's wacky labor saving devices in the movie What A Life, made efficient...
...I think Elizabeth Hawes has a point in Why Women Cry when she says women have to spend too much time and energy cooking and "keeping" house, but the answer isn't the extreme postwar dream of mechanical living...
...Mechanically perfect and nutritionally expert though it may be, who wants to live a canned, or frozen, life...
...The four-color ads continued in the Saturday Evening Post advertising world, but the promises became yaguer...
...The mechanical perfection that the forecasters predict is too American for Mr...
...There are some favorable things to be said for their articles...
...No meal planning, no tedious shopping, no baking, no vegetable scrubbing, no pots, no fuss, no joy...
...push-buttons for opening and shutting windows the way we now turn lights on and off...
...In case you haven't been reading the articles, one designer has planned a house without a kitchen...
...I'm weary of their casual irresponsibility toward that little matter of what postwar gadgets may cost and toward that matter of timing...
...My guess is that people will go on liking kitchens and individmif* cooking in spite of all the good and bad gadgets and changes in the years ahead...
...and electronic devices for drawing smoke and dust out of the kitchen...
...I'm surfeited with them...
...Block tells us, will package complete pre-cooked dinners in containers for two, four, and six persons...
...The gadget articles have their funny side too...
...cordless electric irons...
...The food would be kept and cooked in the living room...
...it's easier to think about movable walls equipped with zippers than your own dirty walls nobody wants to wash...
...Block is very cheerful about it all...
...Revolution In Eating...
...Designs For Postwar Living There's not much point, I suppose, in taking the gadget forecasters too heavily...
...Dorothy Rosenman, chairman of the National Committee on Housing, says about this proposal in the Woman's Home Companion, "Nonchalance will have reached the peak when, during a tea party, the hostess casually reaches into the desk drawer to baste a chicken...
...Mrs...
...an electric garbage dispose/ which grinds the garbage and flushes it away...
...The new tornado is blowing less from the direction of the ads, though they huff and puff too, than from the lofty peaks of the forecasters, the men and women writing the hundreds of articles telling us how we'll eat and sleep tomorrow...
...the articles predict, but a lot of them don't predict when...
...hydraulic dishwashers which dry the dishes...
...One minute before you want to dine, you'll pop the frozen food in a special electronic oven, a bell will ring, and there you are...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 39
