A Transmission from the Dawn of the Space Era
✦ Tomorrow, Delivered Today ✦
Modern Marvels for the Atomic-Age Home — Each One Dealer-Demonstrated & Fully Warranteed
Model A-1 · “The Domestic Dynamo”
Why wait for the power company? Your very own household reactor hums away in the rumpus room, delivering 10,000 cheerful watts — enough for the toaster, the television, and Mother’s new rotating lounge.
Only $1,995 or $49/mo. for 48 easy months
“The Whizzer” · Commuter Deluxe
Park the sedan forever! The Whizzer lifts straight up from your own driveway and cruises at a genteel 85 miles per hour. Fits one commuter, one briefcase, and one very smug grin.
Only $4,495 flight lessons included, naturally
A Full Dinner in Three Tiny Tablets
One tablet for the entrée, one for the vegetables, one for dessert — a complete square meal with no pots, no pans, no dishes. Kitchen sold separately. You won’t need it.
Only $3.98 per family pack of thirty dinners
Robot Butler · Never Sleeps, Never Sighs
He mixes a perfect martini, remembers every birthday, and politely declines to discuss his feelings. The Valet-Tron 5000 is butlery’s final word — a gentlebeing of gleaming chrome.
Only $7,995 cummerbund in coral or teal
From a Humble Machine Shop to the Very Edge of Tomorrow
Founder Hiram Q. Astrodyne sells his prized jukebox collection, rents a machine shop in Dayton, and files the patent for “a domestic contrivance of atomic character.” His mother is proud. His banker is terrified.
The first Home Atomic Generator rolls off the line and powers the entire Astrodyne Christmas party — tree lights, cocktail blender, and a rather ambitious electric yule log — without so much as a flicker.
When a certain beeping sphere crosses the October sky, Hiram merely smiles: “Good heavens, we’d better hurry.” Within the year, Astrodyne’s Civic Satellite Service is relaying weather, baseball scores, and cheerful greetings to twelve states.
Fourteen million visitors queue beneath the Astrodyne pavilion’s chrome dome to watch the Valet-Tron 5000 pour a flawless highball. The line, we are told, is visible from orbit.
Our lunar showroom network opens with complimentary Tang and an unbeatable view. Every Whizzer gyrocopter sold on the Sea of Tranquility includes free crater insurance.
Supperette Meal Pills grace every pantry in the free world. The last unwashed casserole dish is placed reverently in the Smithsonian, beside the telegram and the butter churn.
Jetpacks at dawn, saxophones on Mars, and a robot in every rumpus room. We cannot reveal details — the future, after all, is our trade secret — but rest assured: it is chrome-plated, and it is wonderful.
Vol. XVI · No. 284 · Price Five Cents · “All the News That’s Fit to Beam”
NEWS FROM TOMORROW — Tuesday, October 21, 1962 — Astrodyne City, U.S.A.
WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS — Applause rippled through the Hall of Servo-Mechanisms yesterday as the Valet-Tron 5000 dispensed its forty-thousandth consecutive flawless highball, the ice cubes described by onlookers as “suspiciously perfect.”
“It remembered how I take mine,” wept Mrs. Dolores Fenn of Cedar Rapids, who had visited the pavilion but once, in June. “It remembered.”
Company engineers attribute the feat to the unit’s patented Memory Drum, a brass cylinder said to contain the beverage preferences of every living American, plus several thousand Canadians “just to be neighborly.”
DAYTON — A three-year Astrodyne Institute study confirms what Whizzer owners have long smugly suspected: the average gyrocopter commuter now arrives at work a full forty minutes before the average motorist has located a parking space.
Researchers followed 400 commuters across four counties. The gyro copter group reported “serenity,” “panoramic vistas,” and “a pleasing sense of superiority.” The automobile group reported “the mall was full again.”
ASTRODYNE CITY — After fourteen months of deliberation and one fainting incident, the Supperette Flavor Council has approved its 1963 palette, headlined by a revolutionary new shade tastemakers are calling “Bold Beige.”
“It says ‘turkey,’ but with confidence,” declared Council chairwoman Mrs. Hedda Marzipan, unveiling the tablet to gasps. Also approved: Pot Roast Taupe, Gravy Ecru, and — in a nod to the younger set — Hula Hoop Berry.
The Council rejected, for the ninth consecutive year, the flavor “spinach,” citing morale.
CAPE ASTRODYNE — Sixteen thousand hopeful dealers have entered the drawing for the first Astrodyne franchise on the lunar surface, a prize package including the showroom, a hydraulic flag, and — per the contest’s fine print — “the Moon itself, more or less.”
Legal scholars note the claim is “audacious but not technically impossible,” which the company’s attorneys describe as the nicest thing anyone has ever said about them.
A Constellation of Convenience — Consult the Chart, Then Consult Your Nearest Astrodyne Professional
Fig. 7 — The Firmament of Service, as surveyed by the Astrodyne Observatory, 1962.