From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read the series and explore all our 150th anniversary coverage here.
In 1953, dozens of teens at Brooklyn High School for Automotive Trades took one of the first-ever realistic driving simulators out for a spin. The Drivotrainer was no Gran Turismo, but it offered road video and a bumper car-style driver’s seat with a steering wheel, clutch, brake, mirrors, speedometer, and even a hood ornament.
When Popular Science covered the Drivotrainer’s Brooklyn, NY debut in May 1953, teen driving accident rates in the US were skyrocketing, blamed largely on an increase in automobile access and lack of adequate training. For the 15–24 age group, motor vehicle death rates had surged over the prior decade, more than doubling by 1956 to nearly 43 per 100,000. But it was too costly for schools to provide enough dual-control training cars and instructors to meet the increased driver-education demand. Since flight simulators, which were first introduced as early as 1910, helped prepare pilots for real-world flying, traffic safety experts hoped that driving simulators would yield similar results for young drivers and reverse the troubling car-crash trend.
For the unlikely developer of Drivotrainer, Connecticut-based Aetna Casualty and Surety Company (now owned by CVS), driver education and accident prevention was good not only for its bottom line but also for its reputation. Aetna had been investing in driving-simulation technology as far back as 1935, when it introduced its Reactometer to measure driver response time. The Reactometer was followed by the Steerometer and then the Driverometer, an arcade-style machine that offered motion pictures to simulate driving conditions.
In May 1951, Popular Science featured Aetna’s next…
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