image: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MANUFACTURERS AND HAGLEY MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

From 1955 to 1956, the National Association of Manufacturers toured the country with an exhibit called Americade. The mobile show's purpose was not to peddle products but to sell something more valuable — that only our free-enterprise system could fully transport us into a lustrous future. Its exhibits forecasted the far-off year 1975, depicting a 1-pound cube of uranium-235 powering the average home for 4,000 years, talking to grandmother on “phone-vision,” and traveling the solar system in a rocket ship soaring into a future that promised “rocket jobs” and “interplanetary flight school.”