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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Emma Beddington, picture selection by Sarah Gilbert

Shock of the old: 11 transport fantasies that never got off the ground – from jetpacks to swan-powered paragliders

Inventor JA Purves takes a friend for a whirl in his Dynasphere, 1930.
Inventor JA Purves takes a friend for a whirl in his Dynasphere, 1930. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

There’s an innocent optimism to transport visionaries. They really thought they could change the world! They absolutely couldn’t! But all respect to them for trying: someone got lucky with the wheel once, didn’t they?

Being a transport visionary must have been more interesting back before technological progress and grotesque wealth allowed billionaires to “disrupt” the boring A-to-B-ness of conventional travel and blast a car into space, just because. Imagine conceiving of human flight back when your only model was birds and some gossip about a guy called Icarus. Or looking at a horse and thinking: “Hmmm, that’s fast, muscular and terrifying; I wonder if I could compel it to take me somewhere, somehow?”

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