General Motors Powerama 1955

In the summer of 1955, General Motors quietly assembled the most expensive spectacle in American industrial history and then charged absolutely nothing for admission, which is either the most generous thing a corporation has ever done or a very sophisticated way to remind you that the company printing your reality could afford to give it away.

The Powerama occupied a million square feet of Chicago waterfront for twenty-six days and cost seven million dollars — roughly eighty-two million in today's money — to demonstrate equipment that most Americans had no personal use for and could not have purchased anyway. The pretext was that GM's non-automotive divisions were about to produce their hundred-millionth diesel horsepower, a milestone so abstract that it required a circus to explain it.

They hired the choreographers from Ringling Bros. and set thirty-five-ton Euclid bulldozers to doing the mambo, because if you're going to announce that you make half of America's electrical power, you should probably do it with bulldozers doing the mambo. A troupe of elephants was brought in to lose a tug-of-war against one of those bulldozers, and the crowd reportedly groaned when the machine won, which tells you everything you need to know about what Americans in 1955 thought progress was going to feel like.

Also on display, as a kind of footnote to the dancing earth-movers, was a fifteen-inch solar-powered car and the public debut of a futuristic diesel passenger train that the railroads would later reject so completely it became a cautionary tale. The Convair XFY-1 Pogo — a Navy prototype that could take off vertically, transition to horizontal flight, and then attempt to land vertically again, which few pilots could do without incident — was parked nearby next to an atomic cannon transporter, in the easy, confident way you arrange furniture.

GM never staged the Powerama again, correctly reasoning that a cotton gin and a shrimp boat are harder to refresh annually than a concept car with tailfins. The whole production vanished from the cultural record with the thoroughness that only genuinely staggering things manage to achieve, leaving behind nothing but the photograph evidence that somewhere in 1955, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a company that made Buicks also made bulldozers square-dance, and everyone agreed this was a reasonable use of eighty-two million dollars.