a novelty choking hazard

Futuristic Air Travel (circa 1900)

two-seater airship illustration, Harry Grant Dart, c.1900Marvellous retro-futuristic image from Paleo-Future:

According to the Library of Congress it was used as the cover for an issue of All Story magazine between 1900 and 1910.

The most revolutionary aspect of this image may be the depiction of a woman at the wheel. Women couldn’t even vote in the United States until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.

I’d never heard of Harry Grant Dart until today; his stuff is jaw-dropping. In 1908, furthermore, he produced a comic strip, The Explorigator, about an airship crewed by little boys — a likely forerunner of Thomas Pynchon’s Chums of Chance. I’ve found several links to a full page sample of the strip, but the page seems no longer to exist. It was there as recently as the creation of the Against The Day wiki, so maybe it will be back.

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